Meet Me in Gaza

by Louisa B. Waugh

  Abu Baha is smiling, relishing his own story. I’m smiling too. I feel like I have waited a long time to hear this story, and want to savour every detail.

  ‘My mother was called Basma,’ he continues. ‘Her name means “Smile”. At home we saw her smiling face, of course; but whenever she went outside my mother covered her face with a mask of gold, and she wore silver beads on her headscarf and down the front of her black dress. When I was very young we had blacks working with us, you know – men who had travelled with my father from the north of Africa. They lived with us as shepherds.’

  The stories that I’ve heard about Gaza’s Bedouin are knitting together, becoming clearer and closer. I sit back against the cushions, eyes wide open, and really listen.

  ‘When I was 5 years old, I went to the local school. There were fifteen of us in one classroom, all of us boys. My father wanted me to go to school because the only thing that he read was the Holy Qur’an. Three years afterwards, I moved to the big school in Beersheba, 35 kilometres [22 miles] away. It was 1947. Our teachers at the school were Palestinians and we Bedouin boys boarded at the school. We learned all the subjects, and at night we dreamed of being genius enough to go and study in Jerusalem!

  ‘My first year at Beersheba was when the troubles started between us [Palestinians] and the Jews. I remember that when we finished school for the summer [in June 1948], we didn’t know how to get home safely. In the end, a local Palestinian official arranged for us to travel home under a British guard. We reached home safely under the guard, but that summer there were more problems between us and the Jews. My father brought weapons for our camp to defend ourselves against them. But their weapons were better than ours.’

  The Zionists began to expel Palestinians from their homes even before the end of the British Mandate. At dawn on 9 April 1948, members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang (Jewish militias) entered the village of Deir Yassin. The Jewish mob flung hand grenades into the villagers’ homes and shot indiscriminately, killing between 100 and 240 Palestinians, including entire families. A number of the village women were raped, then murdered, by them.

  Just over a month later, on 15 May, the British Mandate ended and the state of Israel was born. The Jewish community erupted into celebrations; hundreds of thousands danced, cheered and kissed each other in the streets. By now, almost a quarter of a million Palestinians had been driven from their homes. After the end of the British Mandate, the Zionist campaign intensified; more Palestinian villages were attacked, occupied and destroyed, their inhabitants massacred. The Zionists swept across northern Palestine. Then, bolstered by their successes, they began to move south towards the Negev desert, where the Bedouin lived and herded their animals.

  One afternoon in September 1948, the Bedouin of Wadi al-Baha had just finished cutting the wheat and barley and were harvesting their maize when they saw tanks approaching from the north-west. They were Israeli tanks. The Bedouin had already built a defensive trench around their camp and also around the stone house that Abu Baha’s father had built for his family the year before and that they called the Villa.

  ‘My father was not in the camp that day, he was away working.’ Abu Baha is still smiling, but the tone of his voice has just changed, as though he’s mentally sifting through something painful. ‘The Israelis lined up all the men from our ashira against the wall of the Villa. “We will come back here tomorrow and if any of you are still here we will kill you all,” they said. And I saw them kill a man that day: Sheikh Abdullah was just an old blind man riding past on his donkey and they shot and killed him. We saw them do it, and we had heard about the massacre at Deir Yassin, so we were all very frightened.

  ‘When my father finally returned home, it was dusk. He sat down with the other men and they began to discuss where we should escape to, because we had to leave that very night. Some of the men said they were taking their families to Beersheba and others said that they were going to Gaza. My father decided that we would go to Gaza as well. So we packed up everything onto our camels, including my 10-day-old baby brother. We rode to Gaza that night and I always remember that it was a full moon.’

  Abu Baha recalls the moonlit journey to Gaza by camel. ‘We ate sabar (prickly pears) to sustain us and I remember that, on the way, we heard Palestinians calling out that Jews were waiting to ambush us in the next valley. So we took another road and we entered Gaza east of al-Bureij camp. Most of the Palestinians arrived in northern Gaza, but we entered from the east and we set up our tents there.’ In 1947 the District of Gaza, as it was then known, had between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants. By December 1948, the population had swelled by 200,000. Gaza was filled with camps of white refugee tents. Altogether, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes during the Nakba, or ‘Catastrophe,’ many still clutching the keys to their homes. At least 530 Palestinian villages had been destroyed.

  When Israel and Egypt agreed a ceasefire in January 1949, they drew up the Armistice Line designating the new borders between Palestine, Egypt and Israel. Gaza changed shape, both demographically and physically. Its population had almost trebled, yet its land mass had shrunk by a third. It became a Strip.

  A woman enters the lounge, carrying a tray of glasses. Abu Baha introduces her as his wife, Firyal. She sits beside him, her hands neatly folded in her lap. Meantime he is still in full flow.

  ‘When we arrived in Gaza, we lived in our tent for a few months. But my father was bringing weapons to the Palestinian fighters and there was some trouble. We had to leave Gaza. We moved to the Sinai and for the next few years we lived in different Bedouin settlements. But there was also trouble between the Israelis and the Egyptians. Finally, in 1952, my father said, “Khalas, we are going back to Gaza.”’

  Abu Baha was 13 years old when his family returned to Gaza. I ask him what Gaza City looked like in 1952.

  ‘Ah, so different! Just a few of the old districts like Zeitoun, where we lived, in the old quarter of the city. You could see all the way from the Saraya57 to the Mediterranean Sea. There were just small roads with many sand dunes and little clusters of houses. We rented a house and a small piece of land. We lived on our land most of the time, even though we had the stone house, because a Bedouin always feels like he is a captive in the city. We planted vegetables and we had fruit trees. In those days all our vegetables came from Gaza, and we grew so many big sweet oranges that we sold them all over the world.’

  Four years later, in 1956, Israel invaded Gaza. Abu Baha was 17, old enough to remember the event quite clearly, but he says little about this brief first Israeli invasion.

  ‘When the Israelis came into Gaza, we fled through the orange groves to escape them. I remember they stole my father’s car. But they didn’t stay in Gaza very long. After just a few months they left.’

  In November 1956 the Israeli military rounded up Palestinians, men and boys, in the city of Rafah, herded them into a local school and killed around 111 in one bloody day that elderly men and women from in and around Rafah have never forgotten.58 But Abu Baha says nothing about this. Even in a place as small as Gaza, people have extraordinarily different versions of the same history.

  At the end of the 1950s, Abu Baha graduated from high school and left Gaza to study geography at Alexandria University. Afterwards he returned to the Strip to teach.

  ‘I was a geography teacher there for three years, and –’ he gives me a sudden playful look, his small eyes twinkling – ‘I married one of my students!’

  Firyal and Abu Baha married in 1964. Afterwards he was offered a teaching post in Doha. They moved to the Gulf and lived there for almost thirty years.

  When Israel ceded some administrative control of Gaza (though not the Jewish settlements inside Gaza) to the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Gazans living outside began to return to the Strip – including Abu Baha, his wife and their children. He tells me that, on his return, one of the first things he did was to revisit his birthplace, the Wadi of Pleasure, which now lies inside th
e state of Israel.

  Leaning forward in my seat, I ask Abu Baha what it was like, returning to his birthplace. I can see that he has anticipated the question.

  ‘I will show you,’ he says, rising to his feet.

  In the hallway of his uncluttered home, half a dozen sepia photographs are mounted on the walls, each in a heavy gold frame. They are treasured old photographs of parents, families and large Bedouin gatherings. The women are wearing ornate headdresses fringed with small coins. In the middle is a photo of a man standing in wide, open countryside. Just a fringe of trees in the background and a flat mound of stones beside him, an empty space that looks as though it was once filled. Abu Baha stands to one side of the picture.

  ‘That was Wadi al-Baha,’ he says, ‘the remains of it. I didn’t stay long. Because there was nothing, nothing but these stones. You see them?’

  I nod.

  ‘That was the house my father built, the Villa.’

  We stand in silence together, gazing into the photograph.

  ‘Is it still painful, looking at it after all these years?’ I ask him quietly.

  When he doesn’t answer, I turn to look at him. Abu Baha nods, still smiling.

  ‘You know, I keep it here for my children, and their children, to see. So we never forget where we really come from.’

  Epilogue

  I left Gaza at the end of October 2010. Months later, at the beginning of the following spring, the Arab world erupted. From Tunisia to Yemen people poured through streets and into city squares clamouring for change. Within months stale repressive old dictatorships across the region seemed fragile, doomed even, as their own people took up against them. When the Egyptian President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office, the new government of Egypt committed itself to increasing Gazans’ freedom of movement in and out of the Strip via the southern crossing at Rafah. And young people in Gaza poured into the streets too, shouting for their own revolution.

  But the Arab Spring didn’t come to Gaza. When I asked my Gazan friends why, their answers were all remarkably similar. The youth demonstrations had been quickly, violently quashed by Hamas, and many demonstrators beaten and cowed. ‘Egypt is a big country, but we are very small and Hamas is too strong for us,’ one of them emailed me. ‘Now we are living under two occupations: Hamas and Israel.’

  At the end of October 2012, I came back to Gaza again because I still missed my friends and old colleagues and wanted to see how they were faring. It was a brief visit of just two weeks. But it was enough time to see Saida, now married and holding her first baby, and to see Shadi, who gave me his usual effusive welcome. Shadi and his family have decided to stay in Gaza after all. ‘We belong here, this place is part of us’, he said, with his crooked, happy-sad smile.

  My friends and colleagues were the same wonderful people, but Gaza looked so different, on the surface at least. I was taken aback by the smooth new tarmac roads stretching across the Strip, and the swathe of brightly lit new hotels, restaurants, cafés and supermarkets around the centre of Gaza City, including the gleaming new five-star ArcMed Al Mashtal Hotel (which had stood unfinished for years), with its sumptuous landscaped swimming pool.

  Where has all this new money come from, I asked my friends. They told me about the 800 new local millionaires (most of whom own tunnels down in Rafah), and about the opportunities open to people with strong Hamas connections – while the gap between the minority rich and majority poor has become a gaping chasm, as the Israeli siege drags on. Then they described the rise of Hamas: how the movement has consolidated its power by tolerating no dissent, using Israel’s continuing siege and Western international sanctions to justify its increasingly repressive regime. One of my friends calls this Hamas’s ‘policy of self-absolution’.

  Having secured its political supremacy in Gaza, Hamas is now quite literally a force to be reckoned with. During my visit, violence between Israel and Hamas ratcheted up once again. When I left, on 12 November, I had a feeling in my stomach that something bad was going to happen. Twenty-four hours later, Israel assassinated the Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari and began its latest military assault on Gaza.

  Western sanctions against Hamas have served no purpose and have utterly failed to protect civilians inside Gaza. Hamas may respond to international dialogue, as the movement now seeks further international legitimacy. The continued isolation of Hamas by Western governments, however, will only strengthen the militants within the movement, not those who are prepared to seek change through dialogue. But these horrifying escalations of violence between Hamas and Israel, where the overwhelming majority of people killed are always Gazans, will continue for as long as Israel maintains its military occupation of Palestine, including its siege of Gaza, which is now in its seventh year.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a huge debt of thanks to my colleagues and friends inside Gaza. First, a massive and heartfelt shukran to Raji Sourani and his team of indomitable human rights defenders in Gaza City, who continue to hold Israeli and Palestinian perpetrators of human rights abuses to account, whilst living under siege themselves. It was a privilege to work with you. Special thanks to Khalil, Hamdi, Mona, Jehan, Reem, and of course Salah!

  A million thanks to my wonderful community of friends across Gaza, for their laughter, generosity and support: to Zekra and her family – who literally made me one of their own; to Khalil, Zahia and their family; to Tamer, Safah, Aitemad, the sublimely talented Soumaya El Sousi, Adham, Mohammed El Majdelawi, Dr Mona, Assma, Said Al Madhoun, Manwah and her family up in Beit Hanoun; and to Faiza and her parents, her sister Saida and their neighbours (especially J’meah) down in Rafah. Thanks to Donna for inviting me out to sea. Thanks to Saber Al Zaneen, who taught me about true resistance, and to his family. Thanks also to Miriam and Mohammed who always make me feel welcome, and to Sabri, for his wise instruction. Thank you to all the staff at café Mazaj, to Samir at the Al Deira hotel, to Mohammed the taxi driver for laughter and cigarettes, to Fathers Alexius and Andreas for their grace, and to Tariq Mukhimer, Louise, Darah and Sarah M.

  Thank you to all the individuals and families in Gaza who shared their often very painful stories with me. Many thanks to Andrea and Kathy, for their vital practical assistance. Over in the West Bank, thank you Raja, for guiding me to Palestine in the first place and being my good friend the whole time I was there. Thank you to Ashraf, Anne of Paris, Samer for my first Arabic words, Stuart Shepherd – and thank you Mesky, for being such an inspiring, joyful and kind friend.

  Closer to home, I want to thank Bev Cohen and Lawrence Joffe for their wonderful editing expertise, my literary agent David Grossman for his wisdom and unfailing support, my publisher Lynn Gaspard, and my brilliant motley crew of friends: Rahul, Geraint, Gica, Jan, Nick Thorpe, Stephen, Heather, Adam Salmon, Tuesday, Peter, Myriam and Rhemie, Katie, Jo and Kyna, Siri, Pat, Rania and Chris, Mike Stewart, Helen, Carol and Sue B. Thanks to Karin for a summer in her perfect ‘casita’. Extra special thanks to the ‘A team’, including Lorna Miller, Trish, Ruth, Anja, Cath and Amy Duncan, who each typed for me when my fingers literally failed. And thanks indeed to Ma and Richard for their love, support, and many desperately needed glasses of red wine.

  Notes

  1. After Hamas’s takeover, Israel stated that it would allow only basic humanitarian supplies into Gaza. A list of ‘duel use’ items, including fertilisers and steel pipes, were banned on the pretext that they could be used in manufacturing weapons. Construction materials were also banned, plus tinned fruit, mineral water and numerous other items. At one point the list included pasta. Israel only published an itemised list of the banned goods in June 2010.

  2. For those who want to know more, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was set up in the late 1970s, inspired by its namesake in Egypt. PIJ operated out of Gaza until 1987, when it was exiled to Lebanon. Its HQ is now in Damascus, but its forces’ operations are in the West Bank and Gaza. PIJ has carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Israe
l, often targeting Israeli civilians.

  3. Abu means ‘father of’, so Abu Ali means ‘father of Ali’. Umm Ali means ‘mother of Ali’.

  4. The Gaza Strip needs around 240 megawatts (MW) of electricity per day, in winter, to maintain normal services. Functioning at full capacity, the Gaza power plant supplies 103 MW of electricity, supplying almost 700,000 people, nearly half the local population. The rest comes from Israel (100 MW) and from Egypt (17 MW). See pchrgaza.org

  5. Fatah was founded in 1959 by diaspora Palestinian refugees, including Yasser Arafat, with the aim of liberating Palestine from Israeli occupation. The name Fatah is the reverse acronym of ‘Palestine National Liberation Movement’ in Arabic. ‘Fatah’ is also used in religious discourse to signify the early expansion of Islam, referring to the seventh-century Hudaybiyyah Treaty between Mecca and Medina, when many people converted to Islam, strengthening the new religion.

  6. http://198.62.75.1/www1/ofm/mad/discussion/127discuss.html

  7. Hamas was founded in Gaza in December 1987 by, among others, a nearly blind quadriplegic called Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Israel tacitly supported Hamas at first, hoping it would undermine Fatah. But Yassin et al. rejected all negotiations with Israel and developed Hamas’s military capabilities to carry out operations against Israel: ‘Anything that would give the Israelis sleepless nights’ (Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas, New York: Nation Books, 2007, p. 22). When Yassin was assassinated by Israel in March 2004, this only galvanised Hamas and in January 2006, the movement won the Palestinian national elections, ousting Fatah. During the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007, many, but not all, Fatah activists fled to the West Bank.

  8. Al-Qassam is named after Izzedine al-Qassam, born in 1882 in Jabla, originally a Phoenician settlement on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. A Shari’a judge, he later created a militant movement of jihadi cells that attacked Jewish settlements, to prevent Jews immigrating to Palestine. Al-Qassam was killed in northern Palestine on 20 November 1935, during a battle with British police, and hailed as a Palestinian shahid, or ‘martyr’.