I. Introduction

Shortly before midnight on July 22nd, 2002 I heard an unusually loud roar from an aircraft flying low above the skies of Gaza City. Because the sound of Israeli warplanes is commonplace in the area, I didn`t feel particularly alarmed and went to sleep as usual. I was awakened less than a half hour later by a call on my cell phone: An F-16 fighter jet had just dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in one of Gaza City`s poorest and most crowded neighborhoods, about 15 minutes from where I lived.

Ambulances, fire fighters and the press were already on the scene. Salah Shehadeh, leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, was dead. So were 14 others, we learned later on, most of them women and children. Later that morning, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would proclaim this event “one of [Israel`s] greatest successes.” I wandered through the wreckage of the bombing the following afternoon, practically numb to what I was seeing, what struck me most was that I could have been almost anywhere in the Occupied Territories: Jenin, Ramallah, Khan Yunis, Rafah… The familiarity of the destruction was, for me, the most disturbing thing because it had begun to symbolize the success of a much greater goal: the fragmentation of Palestinian nationhood into ruined, localized identities. As the popularity of Hamas continues to rise and the media blindly heraldthe coming “disengagement” from Gaza, I remember the freshly painted graffiti on a wall near the site of the blastedaway building that hot July day. “This is the Israeli Peace,” it declared.

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