Meet Me in Gaza

by Louisa B. Waugh

  At least half the Tulip staff are foreigners – Russian and East European women who met their husbands when they (the men) were studying at Russian and East European universities. There are several thousand long-term foreign residents living inside Gaza, most of them women married to Gazans. I get my hair cut by a lithe Russian blonde called Vera, who hails from a city called Kalashnikovo and is a dab hand with short hair. Vera has been in Gaza for six years now; she lives with her husband and children in the sprawling Beach Camp (another of the refugee camps), which begins practically next door to the al-Deira Hotel, but is a different world altogether. Once they marry and settle here, foreign spouses are obliged to apply for Palestinian ID cards and, as far as the Israeli authorities are concerned, they effectively become Gazans. The subsequent travel restrictions make it difficult for them to leave Gaza but, ironically, often even harder to return. Catherine hasn’t left Gaza for five years now and Mo has not set foot outside the Strip for almost a decade. He cannot secure a permit from the Israelis and she won’t go without him.

  Catherine asks about my holiday. I tell her the news from the world outside, then ask what she’s been up to these last six weeks. She gives me the Gaza shrug.

  ‘You know what? While you were away, I don’t think I even left the building … you’ve seen our flat upstairs, on the thirteenth floor. It’s quiet, and we’ve got a nice view of the sea. I know it sounds a bit sad, but I don’t go outside for weeks at a time. I haven’t even been to the beach since about 1996.’

  I stare at her and shake my head. ‘You know what, you need to get out more!’

  Catherine tilts her head back and chortles. ‘C’mon, Lou – where is there to go?’

  Catherine lives within a fragment of an already restricted space, a bit like confining yourself to one wing of an open prison. Most of the Gazans I know get out more than she does, but many people seem to have interior maps that restrict their lives even within the claustrophobic confines of the Strip. When I asked one of my friends recently if she liked the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, she said, ‘I have never been there. I am from al-Rimal, where you live. The rest of Gaza is a dump.’ She had never been to the camps or swum in the sea. She wasn’t interested.

  There are people who criss-cross the Strip, like my colleague Shadi. But the majority seem to stay within their neighbourhoods because of ties to families, or clans – and because there is nowhere new to go. As part of his work, Shadi monitors the traffic going in and out of Gaza, human and otherwise. He estimates that 2 per cent of Gazans are permitted to travel outside the Strip on any kind of regular basis. Tens of thousands of Gazan teenagers and those in their twenties, even their thirties, have never seen a day outside this Strip. Many pace or rage in silence, like caged animals; the pressure builds and explodes, at home or out on the streets. Men beat their wives, their children and each other (one afternoon I saw a man on the street pull off his heeled boot and use it to batter a young girl about the head and when I screamed at him to stop he screamed back at me, ‘She’s my daughter!’). Others take to alcohol – some brew their own hooch here – or drugs, like hash, or Tramadol, self-medicate themselves into lethargy, and start to slowly rot.

  Meanwhile, as we wait to hear news about the tahdiya between Hamas and Israel, civilians, young and old, are being summoned to Hamas police stations as their political connections and allegiances are probed by this increasingly paranoid regime. I can see, and feel, the direct repercussions on the streets, where people are slightly more guarded about what they say and more nervous about hosting mixed parties with dancing and alcohol. These changes are subtle, like a fluctuation of one or two degrees in the air temperature, but isn’t that always how it starts? My local friends tell me that more moderate members of Hamas are struggling to keep the movement’s political militants at bay because the regime is isolated, and no match for Israel’s military might, and because they cannot do anything about lifting the siege. So instead, Hamas is beefing up its local military presence. Military training camps have opened up and down the Strip – including one on a piece of wasteland opposite the bottom of my street, next to Gaza’s Al-Azhar University where lines of masked men practise target shooting every afternoon, within range of thousands of coming-and-going students. With these added internal pressures, there is even less space for ordinary Gazans to breathe. Sometimes when I step outside my door, I can feel the tensions crackling round these streets.

  I tell Catherine that, while back in the UK, I had a telephone conversation with the BBC journalist Alan Johnston, Hamas’s former hostage. We didn’t talk for long. But what stuck with me afterwards was his comment about how remarkable it is that Gaza still actually manages to function as a society, given the almost-unbelievable pressures on ordinary people. And this is from a man who spent his last four months here imprisoned in a basement.

  rocket talk

  Abdul never left Gaza either. He lived in Beit Hanoun, on the ragged northern edge of the town, in an apartment in a grimy tenement building where his mother keeps the heavy curtains closed. Thanks to its proximity to Erez – and Israel – Beit Hanoun is one of the most battered places in Gaza, a dreary town that no one else wants to visit.

  Abdul attended the Beit Hanoun Agricultural Secondary School, just down the road from his home. After school he sometimes used to hang out and play football in the school yard, like most 13-year-old boys do. On 21 August 2007 Abdul and two of his friends, Fadi and Ahmad, were in the yard after school. They kicked the ball around for a while, then scampered over the low fence dividing the yard from a scrubby field with a small copse of buckled trees at the back. Abdul was small for his age, and wiry, good at climbing trees. At 5.45 PM that afternoon, while the three boys were climbing round the twisted branches and trunks, an Israeli officer pressed a button that launched a surface-to-surface missile at them.

  Abdul’s mother, Sabah, is draped in black when we meet at her home. She sits beside a lamp which casts her half in shadow, half in light.

  ‘He was a good boy,’ she says of her dead son, but her thread of a voice is so fine I have to lean forward to catch her words. A photograph of Abdul hangs on the wall above her, framed in gold, next to an identical framed photograph of his elder brother, who was killed by the Israeli military the previous year in circumstances I know nothing about.

  Sabah sees me squinting up at the two framed photographs in the half-light and bows her head. She didn’t witness either of her sons’ deaths, but has the bearing of a woman emptied by grief. Abdul was dismembered by the Israeli missile and died in the field among the trees. Fadi died as he reached the local hospital. The third boy, Ahmad, was injured by shrapnel, but lived. The Centre where I work gathers data on everyone killed in Palestine by Israeli or Palestinian forces and I am helping to collate information on children who have been killed by the Israelis inside Gaza over the last twelve months.36

  I am in Sabah’s home with Samir, the local community worker with the searing gaze and silver-streaked hair who recently took me to meet the Swailams. When we have finished drinking the coffee served to us by Sabah’s young daughter, Samir says he will show me the spot where Abdul was killed. As we rise to our feet, Sabah extends her hands towards me and for a moment she and I stand in silence together, our fingers clasped. I thank her for her time, tell her I am very sorry about both her sons and we say goodbye.

  I follow Samir out of the tenement and down the dirty street. We walk side by side. Samir looks straight ahead, silent. A donkey cart trundles towards us. The beasts’ hooves are overgrown as calluses and the man riding the cart has a barrel of a belly. As they rattle past, he gives the donkey a surly whack with a hefty stick. But apart from them, the street is quiet; the local children are at school. I am not used to this near-silence inside Gaza; it makes me jittery.

  At the end of the dirty street, I follow Samir through a gap in a crumbling stone wall, into a scrubby field with a handful of trees at the back. We walk towards the trees. As we approach, I
see that a few of them are budding small white blossoms. The long, oblong building of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural Secondary School is to our left, just over a low fence. Samir stops and squats down beside a scoop in the ground at the edge of the trees, where the impact of the Israeli missile still marks the spot like a shallow grave. I squat down beside him, trying to make sense of what happened. Families from around Beit Hanoun have told me, and my colleagues, that they believe their children are targeted by the Israeli military to pressurise them into confronting the fighters launching rockets towards Israel.

  ‘Why do you think the Israelis killed the boys?’ I ask Samir.

  ‘Come.’

  He stands up and walks away from the trees towards a ragged path that slices through the field to the school. I follow just behind him. When he stops, I look round but see nothing until Samir points out a rusty contraption lying on the ground among the grass and weeds near the side of the path. Neither big nor small, it looks like a stepladder with just one large rung in the middle. I squat down to touch it but Samir puts his arm out, blocking me, just like he did inside the Swailams’ house.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ he says. ‘It is a rocket launcher.’

  I whip my hand back to my side.

  ‘The fighters were firing rockets next to the school?’

  ‘It is an old rocket launcher, it is not being used any more. But the two boys who died were playing very close to it when they were hit.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I was here just after the attack, I filmed everything. I have the video if you want to see it.’

  ‘OK.’

  When we stand up, I search Samir’s face for a reaction and he stares back at me with an expression I cannot read. Though my throat is dry, I light up a cigarette and realise that my hands are trembling.

  My Gazan friends do not shy away from rocket talk. We have had many evenings in the al-Deira Hotel discussing the pros and cons of Gazan militants firing rockets at Israel. The al-Deira is a haven where we don’t see Hamas operatives – not in uniform anyway – and people seem to talk quite freely here.

  I’m quite black and white about the rockets: I think they are provocative and do nothing but give Gaza a bad – or worse – name. And Gazan civilians, especially those in the flashpoint border areas, pay a horrific price for what local militants do. At the beginning of February this year, a teacher at another Beit Hanoun school was killed while walking across his crowded school yard to begin morning classes. The Israeli military had spied Gazan fighters nearby; they launched a missile, missed the fighters and blew the teacher to pieces in front of his students.37 But in spite of such horrific cases, my local friends – including those whose families live in and around the border areas – are more ambivalent about the rockets. They stress that it is a myth the Israelis merely ‘respond’ to Gazan rocket fire. The Israeli military fire missiles, and bombs, into Gaza at will, claiming this is in defence of their ‘national security’ as though this is a one-sided privilege.

  ‘The rockets are a message to Israel that they can’t just stamp over us,’ argues one of my friends. ‘It is ugly, but it’s resistance. We have this tahdiya now because Israel has been forced to negotiate with Hamas – because Hamas resists the Israeli occupation.’

  The tahdiya has just been confirmed: it will begin at dawn on 19 June. But no one inside Gaza is holding their breath. They have, literally, been here before.

  ‘My family lives in Shaja’iya, right up by the border,’ another friend tells me. ‘I’ve seen fighters by the local school yard: they use it for cover. I have to tell you, I really have mixed feelings about it. I wish they didn’t use the schools, but people here don’t confront them because without the rockets Israel will just do what it wants with us. The rockets are a warning to Israel that we will not lie down.’

  ‘And the children who get killed …?’

  ‘Louisa,’ she says, ‘do you really believe that if Gazan fighters stop firing rockets, then so will Israel?’

  Just a day or two before the tahdiya is scheduled to begin, Samir walks into my office at the Centre.

  ‘Marhaba. I have the video for you.’ He brandishes a USB stick.

  ‘Marhaba, Samir. Would you like a coffee?’

  He shakes his grey head, says he doesn’t have time to drink coffee. I take the USB stick from him and upload the video onto my computer. Samir scribbles something on a scrap of paper lying on my desk.

  ‘The film is very short,’ he says. ‘This is my number. Call me if you want to visit Beit Hanoun again; I know everyone there.’ With a brief nod, he walks out again.

  I press Play, sit back in my chair and reach for my cigarettes. The film opens with a grainy shot of the ground. The cameraman, Samir, is running; I can hear him panting as the camera jerks up and down. Then I see people running in and out of that scrubby field in Beit Hanoun, screaming at each other. An ambulance screeches as a man sprints towards the camera, a dark bundle in his arms, howling at people to get out of his way. Just behind him is another man, his eyes wild with terror, and in his arms this second man is brandishing a leg – a child’s leg that has been torn from the child’s body. As he runs, the man raises the leg up until he is holding it against his chest. Now that he’s almost level with the camera, I see the terror speared inside his eyes, and then I know that he is the father of one of the boys whose body has just been ripped apart because never before have I seen such wild animal terror in anybody’s eyes. The camera speeds over the road, though a gap in the wall, and races across the scrubby field, zigzagging towards the buckle trees at the back, zooming between yellow earth and blue sky. And when it comes to a stop, the body of Abdul lies crumpled in the scoop in the ground, his belly imploded, like a small dead bird.

  shortly before six in the morning

  I wake just as darkness is retreating and dawn begins to finger the long lace folds of my bedroom curtains. Nestled warm and soft in my bed, I know that, whatever time it is, I don’t have to get up for a while yet, can just lie here drifting in my sea of sleep. The neighbourhood is quiet; even the belligerent cockerel down the street is still dreaming. I roll over, grunt, then remember – the tahdiya begins at six this morning.

  Tahdiya means ‘period of calm’. There have been many tahdiyas in Gaza – like punctuation marks between the storms of wars and occupations that have battered this land over the centuries. When Julius Caesar’s carousing and hard-bitten military general, Mark Antony, married Cleopatra, the vengeful, venal queen of the Egyptian Ptolemies, circa 37 BC, he bequeathed her a whole swathe of land including Gaza as a wedding gift, and from her bloodstained hands the territory of Gaza was swiftly passed on to that insatiable brute, Emperor Herod. The English historian Gerald Butt describes the Roman Empire’s greatest triumph as ‘the bringing of peace, helping to create a second great Hellenistic age in which men could travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other without hindrance.’38 But over in Judea, the Romans were culling the Jerusalem Jews. In the year AD 135, soldiers of Emperor Hadrian butchered half a million Jews during the Bar Kochba revolt, leaving the pitiful survivors to starve or to rot slowly from their putrefying wounds. Hadrian – whose wall once marked the limit of Roman Britain – renamed the entire territory of Judea as ‘Palaestina’, after the Jews’ ancient enemy, the Philistines. Jews were transported down to Gaza to be sold in the busy slave markets for handsome profits.

  In Gaza the Roman era was a boon, a golden time when the city and its surrounds flourished alongside its burgeoning land and sea trades. At the end of the fourth century, Palestine became part of the Eastern Roman Empire – Byzantium – and the Eastern Orthodox Christians swept into Gaza. Two hundred years later, while the Prophet Muhammad was receiving revelations from God, the Persians swept through Palestine and briefly invaded Gaza. As Zoroastrians – worshippers of the creator, Ahura Mazda – the Persians despised the Christians. They ravaged Gaza’s churches before they, in turn, were cast out by the Roman emperor, Her
aclius, who briefly returned Palestine to Byzantine rule.

  And so Gaza was tossed from one empire to the next, like a small gold coin, as invasions, occupations, tahdiyas, power struggles and the inevitable eruption of some new bloodthirsty empire followed on from each other, like concentric circles of history.

  When I reach for my little clock on the bedside table, it says 5.50 AM. The tahdiya starts in ten minutes. Will it last? Right now I don’t care, I just want to go back to sleep. As I put the alarm clock back on the bedside table, I hear a deep, now familiar, boom strike the earth. Then another and another – until all I can hear is the pounding of bombs. The Israelis must be striking northern Gaza. I wonder if the Gazans are at it as well.39 Now the bombing is louder and more furious – waves of strikes. I think of farmers like the Swailams, and families in Beit Hanoun, and the knot in my guts contracts, the pinch making me wince. I can’t sleep through this bloody racket, so I just turn over and lie on my back, thinking not of England, just this mirthless drama playing out around me. Sometimes Gaza feels like a theatre where all of us – Israelis, Palestinians, expat journalists and human rights workers – have our ascribed roles in an unending script that the rest of the world is bored of watching.

  When the bombing stops, I check my alarm clock again: 6.00 AM exactly. But I might as well get up and have a coffee now.

  PART THREE

  There’s a small secret. If you know it, then it is possible to carry on. In order to live in Gaza, you must create your own secret world […] which contains you and those like you; those who carry small dreams

  Soumaya Susi, Gaza poet

  pleasure at the weekend

  That first morning of the tahdiya, I arrive at the Centre early for work. I don’t know what to expect, but there are press releases and reports for me to edit, and correspondence to write, and somehow things feel almost the same as the day before. But of course they are not the same; if anything, my colleagues are a little subdued this morning; as though everyone is waiting to see whether this tahdiya is real or just imagined. But it holds all day. That night, the skies are clear and the dawn is quiet.