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CELEBRATING LINKS ACROSS SPECIES AMID A NIGHTMARE OF WAR  
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Rebecca Gordon
April 30, 2024
TomDispatch
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_ Did you know that Gaza — well, Palestine — even has a national
bird? The Palestine sunbird is a gorgeous creature, crowned in
iridescent green and blue. “This bird is a symbol of freedom and
movement, it can fly anywhere." _

Birds over Jerash by Omar Chatriwala is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
2.0 / Flickr,

 

He’s a funny little chap: a sharp dresser with a sleek grey jacket,
a white waistcoat, red shorts, and a small grey crest for a hat. With
his shiny black eyes and stubby black beak, he’s quite the looker.
Like the chihuahua of the bird world, the tufted titmouse
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idea he’s tiny. He swaggers right up to the feeder, shouldering
bigger birds out of the way.

A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known a tufted titmouse from
a downy woodpecker
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those, too, along with red-bellied woodpeckers
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really should have been named for their bright orange mohawks). This
spring I decided to get to know my feathered neighbors with whom I’m
sharing an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So I turned up last
Saturday for a Birding 101
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where I learned, among other things, how to make binoculars work
effectively while still wearing glasses.

At Birding 101, I met around 15 birders (and proto-birders like me)
whose ages skewed towards my (ancient!) end of the scale. Not all were
old, however, or white; we were a motley bunch. Among us was a man my
age with such acute and educated hearing that he (like many birders)
identified species by call as we walked. I asked him if, when he hears
a bird he knows, he also sees it in his mind.

“It’s funny you should ask,” he responded. “I once spent
almost a year in a hospital, being treated for cancer. I lost every
sense but my hearing and got used to listening instead of looking. So,
yes, I see them when I hear them.”

HUMAN-BIRD CONNECTIONS

I’m not expecting to convince everyone who reads this to grab a pair
of binoculars and start scanning the treetops, but it’s worth
thinking a bit about those tiny dinosaurs
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their connections to us human beings. They have a surprising range of
abilities, from using tools
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complicated puzzles [[link removed]] to
exhibiting variations in regional cultures. My bird-listening friend
was telling me about how the song sparrows in Maine begin their trills
with the same four notes as the ones here in Cape Cod, but what
follows is completely different, as if they’re speaking another
dialect. Some birds cooperate with humans
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hunting with us. Others, like Alex
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parrot, have learned to decode words in our language, recognize shapes
and colors, and even count as high as six. (If you’d like to know
more, take a look at _The Bird Way_
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Jennifer Ackerman.)

We owe a lot to birds. Many of us eat them, or at least their eggs. In
fact, the more I know about chickens, in particular, the harder it
becomes to countenance the way they’re “farmed” in this country,
whether for their meat or their eggs. Most chickens destined for
dinner plates are raised by farmers
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to big chicken brands like Tyson or super-stores like Walmart and
Costco. They live surrounded by their own feces and, as the _New York
Times’s_ Nicholas Kristof has written
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over the last half-century, they’ve been bred to grow extremely fast
and unnaturally large (more than four times as big
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the average broiler in 1957):

“The chickens grow enormous breasts, because that’s the meat
consumers want, so the birds’ legs sometimes splay or collapse. Some
topple onto their backs and then can’t get up. Others spend so much
time on their bellies that they sometimes suffer angry, bloody rashes
called ammonia burns; these are a poultry version of bed sores.”

Those factory farms threaten not only chickens but many mammals,
including humans, because they provide an incubation site
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bird flus that can cross the species barrier.

BIRDING IN GAZA

Many of us, myself included a few times a year, do eat birds, but an
extraordinary number of people all over the world are also beguiled
and delighted by them in their wild state. People deeper into bird
culture than I am make a distinction between _birdwatchers_ —
anyone who pays a bit of attention to birds and can perhaps identify a
few local species like the handsome rock dove
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— and _birders_, people who devote time (and often money) to the
practice, who may travel to see particular birds, and who most likely
maintain a birding life list of every species they’ve spotted.

Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters,
now in their late forties, started photographing birds
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their backyard almost a decade ago. They began posting their pictures
on social media [[link removed]],
eventually visiting marshlands and other sites of vibrant bird
activity in the Gaza Strip. They’re not trained biologists, but
their work documenting the birds of Gaza was crucial to the
publication of that territory’s first bird checklist
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2023.

If it weren’t for the Israeli occupation — and now the full-scale
war that has killed more than 34,000 people, 72% of them women and
children, and damaged or destroyed
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of all housing — Gaza would be ideal for birding. Like much of the
Middle East, the territory lies under one of the world’s great
flyways for millions of migrating birds. Its Mediterranean coast
attracts shorebirds. Wadi Gaza, a river-fed ravine and floodplain that
snakes its way across the middle of Gaza, is home to more than 100
bird species
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as well as rare amphibians and other riparian creatures. In other
words, that strip of land is a birder’s paradise.

Or it would be a paradise, except that, as the _Daily
Beast_ reported
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year ago (long before the current war began):

“Being a bird-watcher in Gaza means facing endless restrictions.
Israel controls Gaza’s territorial waters, airspace, and the
movement of people and goods, except at the border with Egypt. Most
Palestinians who grew up in Gaza since the closure imposed in 2007,
when Hamas seized control from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority,
have never left the 25-by-7-mile strip.”

Gazan birders encounter other barriers, as well. Even if they can
afford to buy binoculars or cameras with telephoto lenses, the Israeli
government views such equipment as having “dual use” potential
(that is, possibly serving military as well as civilian purposes) and
so makes those items very difficult to acquire. It took the
Sirdahs, for example, five months of wrangling and various permission
documents simply to get their birding equipment into Gaza.

Getting equipment in was hard enough, but getting out of Gaza, for any
reason, has become nearly impossible for its Palestinian residents.
Along with most of its 2.3 million inhabitants, the sisters simply
couldn’t leave the territory, even before the present nightmare, to
attend birding conferences, visit exhibitions of their photography, or
receive awards for their work. They were imprisoned on a strip of land
that’s about the size of the island in Massachusetts where I’ve
been watching birds lately. When I try to imagine life in Gaza today,
I sometimes think about what it would be like to shove a couple of
million people into this tiny place, chase them with bombs and
missiles from one end of it to the other, and then start all over
again, as Israel seems to be about to do
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the southern Gazan city of Rafah with its million-plus refugees.

WIPING OUT KNOWLEDGE, AND KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

The Sirdahs collaborated on their bird checklist project with Abdel
Fattah Rabou, a much-honored professor of environmental studies at the
Islamic University of Gaza. Rabou himself has devoted many years to
the study and conservation of birds and other wildlife in Gaza. The
Islamic University of Gaza was one of the first institutional targets
of the current war. It was bombed by the Israeli Defense Forces
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October 11, 2023. Since then, according to the Israeli
newspaper _Haaretz_
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project of wiping out Gaza’s extensive repositories of knowledge and
sites of learning has essentially been completed:

“The destruction of Gaza’s universities began with the bombing of
the Islamic University in the first week of the war and continued with
airstrikes on Al-Azhar University on November 4. Since then, all of
Gaza’s academic institutions have been destroyed, as well as many
schools, libraries, archives, and other educational institutions.”

Indeed, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights has
observed
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“with more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may
be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to
comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action
known as ‘scholasticide,’” U.N. experts report:

“After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261
teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and
over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured — with
numbers growing each day. At least 60 percent of educational
facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or
destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education.
Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also
been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza,
containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining
university in Gaza, was demolished by the Israeli military on 17
January 2024.”

I wanted to know whether Professor Rabou was among those 95
university faculty
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so far in the Gaza war, so I did what those of us with Internet access
do these days: I googled him and found his Facebook page
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living _and_ still posting, most recently about the desperate
conditions — illness, pollution, sewage rash — experienced by
refugees in temporary shelter centers near him. A few days earlier,
he’d uploaded a more personal photograph: a plastic bag of white
stuff, inscribed with blue Arabic lettering. “The first drop of
rain,” he wrote, “Alhamdulillah [thank God], the first bag of
flour enters my house in months as a help.”

The Sirdah twins, too, still remain alive, and they continue to post
on their Instagram account [[link removed]].

Along with scholasticide, Gaza is living through an ecocide, a vastly
sped-up version of the one our species seems hell-bent on spreading
across the planet. As the _Guardian _reports
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Gaza has lost almost half its tree cover and farmland, with much of
the latter “reduced to packed earth.” And the news only gets
worse: “[S]oil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions
and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted
by smoke and particulate matter.” Gaza has become, and could remain
for years to come, essentially unlivable. And yet millions of people
must try to live there. At what point, one wonders, do the
“-cides” — scholastic-, eco-, and the rest — add up to
genocide?

BIRDS OF GAZA

Gaza’s wild birds aren’t the only birds in Gaza. Caged songbirds
can evidently still be bought in markets
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some of Rafah’s desperate inhabitants seek them out, hoping their
music will mask the sounds of war. Voice of America recounts
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evacuee from northern Gaza who, halfway through her journey south,
realized that she’d left her birds behind. She returned to rescue
her caged avian friends, displaying a deep and tender affection for
her winged companions. However, Professor Rabou is less sanguine about
the practice. “As a people under occupation,” he says, “we
shouldn’t put birds in cages.”

“Birds of Gaza [[link removed]]” also happens to be
the name of an international art project created to remember the
individual children killed in the war. The premise is simple: children
around the world choose a specific child who has died and draw, paint,
or fabricate a bird in his or her honor. Participants can choose from,
God help us, a database of over 6,500 children who have died in Gaza
since last October, then upload photos of their creations to the Birds
of Gaza website. From Great Britain to South Africa to Japan, children
have been doing just that.

Did you know that Gaza — well, Palestine — even has a national
bird? The Palestine sunbird
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gorgeous creature, crowned in iridescent green and blue, and sporting
a curved beak perfect for extracting nectar from plants. The West Bank
Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar designed a postage stamp
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the sunbird. “This bird is a symbol of freedom and movement,” he
says. “It can fly anywhere.”

BIRDING FOR A BETTER WORLD

Back in the United States, the Feminist Bird Club
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America and Europe) is committed to making birding accessible to
everyone, especially people who may not have had safe access to the
outdoors in the past. “There is no reason why we can’t celebrate
birds and support our most cherished
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justice at the same time,” they say. “For us, it’s not
either/or.” Last year they published _Birding for a Better World_
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a book about how people can genuinely connect with beings — avian
and human — whose lives are very different from theirs. They sponsor
a monthly virtual Birders for Palestine
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hour, in which participants can learn what they can do to support the
people of Palestine, including their birders.

As I watch a scrum of brilliant yellow goldfinches scrabbling for a
perch on the bird feeder in my yard, knowing that, on this beautiful
little island, I’m about as safe as a person can be, I think about
the horrors going on half a world away, paid for, at least in part,
with my taxes. Indeed, Congress just approved
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more dollars in direct military aid for Israel, even as the State
Department released its 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights
Practices. As the _Jerusalem Post _reports
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section on Israel, the report documents “more than a dozen types of
human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture,
arbitrary detention, conflict-related sexual violence or punishment,
and the punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a
relative.”

Somehow, it’s cheering to imagine that, in spite of everything,
there are still a few people birding in a devastated Gaza.

_Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
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taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University
of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be
an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming
Torture
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and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
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_Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in October 2001 as an informal
listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global
media to a select group of friends and colleagues. In November 2002,
it gained its name and, as a project of the Nation Institute (now the
Type Media Center), became a web-based publication aimed at providing
“a regular antidote to the mainstream media.”_

* Gaza
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* birds
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* Nature
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* Palestine
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