Pierre Dupont-Taravel: “In Gaza, there is nothing ordinary, nothing like elsewhere. It’s an above-ground territory.”

Published on October 10, 2024 at 2:11 p.m. / Modified on October 10, 2024 at 2:39 p.m.

Frequent travelers are like that. They depict in great detail a landscape at the end of the world, like the lagoon of Bora Bora or the steppe of Mongolia, but often ignore the remarkable sites near them. Take Pierre Dupont-Taravel, who lives in Bellegarde in Ain, near Switzerland, and has traveled to more than 100 countries. We find him at the Place des Nations in Geneva and he asks ingenuously what this large chair is in front of the UN which is missing half a leg.

Amazing. At the same time, he tells us in detail about an arrival in 1991 in the Gaza Strip via the Erez checkpoint. First Intifada. Ten thousand Israeli soldiers are still deployed there and 8,000 settlers occupy a piece of land clinging to the coast in the south. Curfew from 8 p.m., concrete cubes arranged in chicanes and portcullises, bristling watchtowers then further away the Jabaliya refugee camp, “matrix of the Intifada”, where the “war of stones” of Palestinian youth was born . Then the first suburbs of Gaza City appear. On an arch, we can read “Welcome to Gaza”, black humor from the IDF. “Feeling like you’ve gone from one era to another. On one side, the beautiful Israeli houses, the flowery arrangements, on the other the trashed roads, the rubbish, the rows of vacant lots, the collapsed buildings,” describes Pierre Dupont-Taravel. He has just published Le Roman de Gaza, fiction which, as they say, “smacks of experience”.

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