Meet Me in Gaza

by Louisa B. Waugh

  ‘Come to my home and we will prepare fresh crab for you,’ he says. I’ve never lived in a place where people invite you to dinner so much.

  He lives in Beach Camp, just down the street from the al-Deira Hotel, where most of the Gaza City fishing families live. These days, Beach Camp is a sprawling concrete jungle. Suboh, his wife and their three sons share two rooms between them. His neighbours include the Gazan prime minister, Ismael Haniyeh, who still lives in his family home in Beach Camp, though Haniyeh’s place is cordoned off to casual visitors these days. Suboh tells me about the ugly tensions between Hamas and Fatah supporters, how neighbours refuse to speak to each other because of political allegiances that are now splitting the close-knit camp into factions.

  As the sun begins its slow, molten descent towards the sea, the crew kick back. Suboh and I fall silent too. We sit back and watch the light shift; the Mediterranean is calm, infused with streaks of silver, then burnished pink, orange and gold. The sky is ablaze, the soft air almost cool by now. It has been a long, stressful day and we still have a couple of hours’ sailing back to Gaza port. But the men have made their money and they’ll be back out at sea tomorrow at dawn.

  I offer Suboh a cigarette. He accepts it with a small nod of thanks.

  ‘You know, this is the first time I have ever been fishing,’ I say.

  He makes a small noise from the back of his throat; it sounds like a dry chuckle.

  ‘This is my life,’ he says, watching the waves.

  sea creatures

  While the fishermen fight their corner out at sea, Gazans on dry land have invaded the beaches. On these long midsummer evenings, the only breeze to be found is a ruffle of warm air down at the seashore. Makeshift cafés have sprung up along the main stretch of Gaza City beach, serving coffees and fresh juices from early afternoon until late at night. Every table is busy with families. Many other families just bring their own chairs which they set down at the lapping sea edge, to watch their children swim, and catch the lights winking from Gazan fishing vessels in the late evenings, like stars suspended just above the waves. There are camel and donkey rides for hire, and at one end of the beach two ancient carousels creak as men spin them slowly round by hand and the small children sitting in the carved wooden seats squeal and shriek with high-pitched joy. Half a dozen makeshift lifeguard towers with lookout balconies are stationed along the beach too, where young men pose in the afternoons and play cards and smoke all night.

  Other men have set up stalls selling fresh corn-on-the-cob – boiled or grilled – and hot wedges of fluffy sweet potato they bake in small portable tin stoves, then wrap in twists of paper, selling each wedge for a shekel. But the most delightful sights of all are the donkey carts that trundle along the sand, laden with buckets, spades and such an abundance of brightly coloured balloons that the whole spectacle looks as though it might just rise into the warm air thermals, donkey and all, and drift away across the shining sea. I spend many evenings down on the beach with my friends and their families, though Saida’s family tend to stay at home even on these long, sticky evenings. But one evening she calls to invite me to a beach picnic at the weekend.

  ‘Habibti, you remember Mata’m Haifa (Haifa Restaurant) – outside the city? We are going there for our picnic. It is more quiet than the city beach. Ummi (my mother) and Maha are coming too, and some friends. We will have fun, maybe even swim.’

  Mata’m Haifa is perched above the sea, two or three miles outside Gaza City, on the southern coastal road. At Saturday lunchtime, a posse of twenty-five of us descend on the clear stretch of beach below the restaurant. I know many, but not all the women, who have brought their children with them, but not their husbands.

  The women quickly shed their jilbabs, but leave the rest of their clothes, including hijabs, in place. After a splendid picnic, we lie around smoking narghile under palm-leaf umbrellas until the sun begins to cool a little. Then, in the late afternoon, most of us run into the sea fully clothed, and as we hit the waves it feels like a vast, warm bath. Saida holds my hand at first, frowning and nervous. Like most Gazan women, she cannot swim. But her sister Maha just flings herself backwards into the water, shrieking with delight. I take a swim, then float on my back for a while as the tide washes me gently back and forth. We spend hours playing in the sea with the kids, splashing and laughing. Even Hind takes a paddle.

  Afterwards, most of us loll around in the still-warm shallows, weary, salty and happy. I lounge between Saida and Hind. Saida scoops up handfuls of wet sand and gazes out to sea. She’s wearing soaked cut-off jeans and a baseball cap instead of her hijab. I watch her, wondering where she is right now. She catches my eye and smiles.

  ‘How is your friend?’ She says it in English, so that her mother won’t understand.

  I smile back. ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘What about his wife?’ She holds my gaze.

  ‘He says the marriage is over, his wife lives in the States now …’

  ‘You believe him?’

  ‘I think so.’

  She nods, then touches the inside of my arm.

  ‘Be careful, habibti.’

  I nod back, still smiling. He is a foreigner I met a couple of months ago, an older man with a silver-washed mane of thick hair. I call him Sakhar, after the grizzled male lion in the bare-boned Gaza zoo.

  Hind nudges me, wanting to be included in our conversation. She pats her big belly. ‘Leeza, I am fat,’ she says.

  There’s no denying she is a big lady. I give a sympathetic nod and Hind pats my belly.

  ‘You were quite fat when you first came here, Leeza,’ she says cheerfully. ‘You look much better now. What exercise have you been doing?’

  She looks so innocent, I am suddenly convinced that she has understood everything we’ve just said. Saida begins to giggle. I start laughing, then Hind, and the three of us lie back in the shallows until we’re all gasping for breath. I love them both so much.

  As the sun begins to set, Hind leaves us to prepare herself for the Maghrib prayers, which are recited between sunset and dusk. In just a couple of weeks it will be September, and Ramadan will begin.

  ‘Habibti, you remember last time you and I came here together?’ says Saida.

  ‘Those sonic booms?’ I nod.

  She nods too, then shakes her head.

  Saida and I came to Mata’m Haifa for lunch a couple of months ago, just before the tahdiya. But we had to eat our meal in a rush and leave because the Israelis started detonating sonic booms that threatened to blow out the restaurant windows.42

  I don’t know what to say because I don’t want to spoil our wonderful day. We sit in silence, watching the sea, drinking in its rippling vastness. I know why people loiter on the beaches in Gaza – it is because this is the only view without some kind of barrier, the only wide open space to be savoured, the only tangible sense of freedom that there is here.

  Behind us, the other women are making mint tea and I can smell apple-flavoured smoke from the shisha pipes.

  I hear Saida sigh, a gentle sound of evening contentment.

  ‘You know today is special, habibti,’ she says. ‘Because today I love Gaza.’

  The manager of Mata’m Haifa is a grizzled fella with a face full of moles. Known for his rancorous moods. However, he is also a talented chef, especially when it comes to homemade pizza. Which makes his restaurant very popular.

  A week before Ramadan, I’m back at Mata’m Haifa, this time with Niveen and the Smoothie. The restaurant is busy, but the beach below is deserted, and we ask the manager if we can have a table right down on the sand. It would be such a treat to sit there and watch the sunset while we eat. He seems to be in a good mood this evening and says that’s no problem at all. A waiter lays a table for us, takes our order and leaves us on the tranquil beach. As we sit, the Smoothie winks at me and I wink straight back at him. We are both in a good mood too.

  Niveen is smiling, but she’s jittery this evening, lighting one cigarette after a
nother. I haven’t seen her for quite a few weeks. She says she has a lot on her mind.

  ‘My daughter, Sarah – you know she’s studying in Cairo; but now she has applied to do her Masters in Canada,’ she says, ‘and if she goes there, then I will not see her for a very long time. And my son, he needs to see his sister.’

  In the next week or so, Niveen has a telephone interview with a British educational trust that may agree to fund her to resume the PhD she had to abandon when her husband died five years ago. If they do, she will try to leave Gaza and take her children with her to the UK.

  ‘Imagine – I could be in London next year, finishing my PhD!’ she says, her voice quite breathless. ‘If my son and daughter could be there with me, I would be the luckiest mother in the world …’

  ‘How will you get out?’ I ask.

  ‘I have some professional contacts; I will try to leave by Erez. If not, habibti, then it will be the tunnels for me!’

  The three of us chortle.

  The Smoothie also intends to leave Gaza. He is being harassed by Hamas, who have summoned him to his local police station for regular interrogations about his work, his political views and who he mixes with. He is a youth worker, says he has nothing to hide and is contemptuous of their attempts to bully him.

  ‘I’m going back to Sweden,’ he says, ‘not staying here and putting up with this shit.’

  The Smoothie used to live in Sweden. After his Swedish wife was killed in a car crash, he says he went half-mad and had to return home to Gaza for a while, to heal himself. But now he wants to go back to Sweden. Gaza is no place for a free-thinking poet like him, he says. He has several children here in Gaza now. But I’ve no doubt he will make it out and take his kids with him. Some people always manage their situations and the Smoothie has the sheer chutzpah to carry it off. It’s going to be much harder for Niveen, I think. She is independent and free-thinking too, but also really fearful of whatever lies ahead. She’s torn between loving Gaza and being quite desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of her life here.

  Both of their situations depend a lot on whether this tahdiya lasts, and cracks are already appearing in the calm. Fighters have launched a few rockets and mortars towards Israel – rumours are circulating that businessmen who own tunnels down in Rafah are paying them to do so because they don’t want the border crossings opening and spoiling their monopoly on business. Hamas is arresting fighters from various militant groups, including the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which Hamas claims is violating the tahdiya in order to undermine its rule. It is an ugly scene: Gaza under Israeli siege, and now turning in on itself, politically self-destructing from pressures inside and out. No wonder so many people are talking of escape.

  A few days ago, a foreign radio journalist called me. ‘I will see you in Gaza soon,’ he said, ‘when the tahdiya breaks down and things go back to normal down there.’

  Our pizzas arrive, along with bowls of fresh Greek salad. The food is tasty, especially out here on the warm beach with its winsome evening breeze. We eat slowly, then linger for a long time afterwards, smoking as we watch the slow setting of the sun. Eventually, stiff from sitting so long, we decide to take a stroll across the beach, groaning as we get up because we’re all stuffed full of good pizza.

  I go barefoot, trailing just behind Niveen and the Smoothie. I have spent a lot of time on the beach over the summer. The sea flows through so much of life here, freeing but also imprisoning Gaza, almost like another wall. Imagine, I think to myself, if this sea was open for fishermen and sailors, if there was political reconciliation and if the crossing down at Rafah was really open as an international border. Imagine what Gaza could be …

  I press my feet into the still-warm sand. Suddenly the entire beach appears to be quivering as though it has just come alive. Niveen, the Smoothie and I all stop at the same moment, then crouch in the dusk, gazing at a carpet of tiny white crabs making their slow sideways dance towards the retreating waves.

  Ramadan for Christians

  The Islamic calendar is lunar, so every month begins in sequence with the new moon, and each Ramadan starts about eleven days earlier than the previous year.

  On the first night of September, a silver sliver of new moon is cradled in the sky above Gaza. I go to sleep early and am startled awake by what sounds like a drum being beaten. I totter onto my bedroom balcony, which looks out over the street, to see who the culprits are. Two men are pushing a bicycle down the street, a large drum resting on the saddle, shouting and bashing the drum. Their job is to wake people in time for Suhoor, the meal just before dawn, when fasting begins.

  Last year I spent Ramadan over in the West Bank. In Ramallah, restaurants heaved every evening with people breaking their fast; the city centre streets bulged with temporary street markets; even some of the bars were open at night, and serving beer. But in Gaza, Ramadan looks and feels like a threadbare affair. During the day, the streets are nearly deserted – the weather is still very hot and humid. People do come out at night, but the crowds seem subdued in the under-lit streets. The exception is the lamp-lit al-Deira Hotel, which at night sparkles like a jewel in the dust, as the waiters preside over the lavish daily Iftar evening breakfast buffet. But the vast majority of Gazans cannot afford to sample its decadent fare. Most break their fast at their own kitchen table.

  At the beginning of Ramadan in Gaza, I briefly wonder whether to try fasting, just to join in with my colleagues. I ask Ustaz Mounir what he thinks. We’re still having our twice-weekly lessons, still fiercely debating but still listening to each other.

  ‘It would be interesting for you to try fasting,’ he says. ‘But you know, Louisa, many people in Gaza are fasting for the wrong reason – just so they can tell everyone they are fasting like good Muslims. Khalas! The question we have to ask each other is not whether we are fasting during Ramadan – but what will we do after Ramadan?’

  And that puts me straight. Nobody at work expects me to fast anyway – just to be discreet and to keep my office door closed if I eat or drink anything during the day.

  In Gaza almost everyone conforms to the thirty-day Ramadan fast … bar a handful of rebels. And the local Christians, of course.

  I’m curious about the Christian community here in Gaza and how they are faring under Hamas. In September 2007, a few months before I first arrived here, a young Gazan Christian was abducted by unknown assailants and murdered. He was the owner of Gaza’s only Christian bookshop, and his death – his punctured corpse was dumped in a back street in the old quarter – ignited Christian fears that Hamas extremists were targeting their local community. The killer or killers were never found, but the murder seems to have been a horrific one-off.

  The first Christian I met in Gaza was our receptionist at the Centre, Rawiya, a placid woman with a long uncovered mane of thick hair and deep-set brown eyes. We greeted each other every morning, sometimes chatted, and one morning she asked me if I was Christian. I gave her the simple answer – that I was brought up as a Christian – and we had a brief chat about the local Orthodox church of St Porphyry, which she sometimes attends.

  One afternoon during the first week of Ramadan, Rawiya comes into my office and shuts the door behind her.

  ‘We are celebrating a Christian engagement tomorrow night, at one of the hotels,’ she says. ‘Do you want to come and join us?’

  ‘Yes I do!’

  ‘Welcome – it will be a good party,’ she says, with a wink.

  Rawiya, her husband, Adil, and their two daughters pick me up at my place at seven in the evening. The engagement party is being held at the Commodore Hotel, on the same seafront street as the al-Deira. I know everyone will be all dolled up – Palestinian engagements and weddings are usually big, showy affairs – so I wear my smartest outfit and my only pair of decent shoes. Rawiya looks elegant in a sparkling dress and her husband has donned a sharp suit. Adil has a neat brown moustache and a merry glint in his eyes. He asks if I have brought anything
to drink. When I tell him I have a bottle of red wine in my handbag, he rubs his hands with glee.

  The Commodore is busy. We join the throng clambering up the wide, carpeted stairs, past windows of delicately stained glass, from better days when tourists, including Israelis, stayed in these hotels. Tonight’s party is being held in the upstairs function hall. Muslim engagement parties are traditionally celebrated by women and men separately, with just the groom attending the women’s party. But as we enter the function hall, I’m confronted by the sight of at least 300 women and men sitting at long tables side by side, and not a hijab in sight. I cannot quite believe I’m still in Gaza.

  I turn to Rawiya: ‘Wow! – This really is something else!’

  ‘Welcome to our world, habibti,’ she says.

  There is also a dance floor, and a stage at the front, where two empty white thrones await the lucky couple.

  We sit down, Rawiya on my right side. On my left is a middle aged man I’ve never met before. His name is Adham and he’s also amused at my amazement. I ask him what things are like for local Christians now, and he gives me the Gaza shrug.

  ‘Do we look scared?’ he twinkles.

  ‘No, you don’t, to be honest. Not at all.’

  ‘We have parties like this all year,’ he says. ‘Our community is very strong, we enjoy celebrating together. But you know, I only go to church for weddings, feasts and deaths!’

  ‘What are things like between your church and the local mosque?’

  He chuckles and takes a sip of what looks like wine from his glass.

  ‘Our church, the Greek Orthodox Church, is the most conservative in the Middle East, you know, and we Gazans are the most conservative Christians in Palestine. We reflect our society, just like the local Muslims. I would say my views are pretty close to theirs.’

  On the table in front of us, small plates of hummus and other dips are congealing in the heat beside baskets of bread. Adil, sitting across the table from me, quietly takes a bottle of whisky from inside his jacket and unscrews the cap. I pass him my bottle of wine. He pours three drinks, then tucks the bottles under his chair.