A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  Meanwhile Amira had been coping with six children under twelve and she remembered the 1992–94 years as one long nightmare. Then, partly as a result of the Second Intifada in 2000, economic conditions rapidly worsened throughout the OPT and, as Israel continued to expand its settlements, Arafat’s support dwindled. Factional violence on the Strip increased when the PLO failed to persuade Hamas to join its ranks and pick the fruits of the overt (Madrid) and covert (Oslo) peace processes.

  During this period of internecine bloodiness informers proliferated and in 1994 Amira’s brother Riham was executed by al-Majd, a special intelligence unit set up by Sheikh Yassin to detect and punish collaborators. The family was never given proof of Riham’s guilt but Sari said there was no reason to doubt it. Sheikh Yassin, being a wise and just man, made sure that all al-Majd recruits were well-trained and responsible. A Palestinian informer’s shame stains his whole clan but almost always his immediate family is helped by ISIs and on the very day of Riham’s killing his widow and seven children were ‘adopted’ by three ISIs.

  On the West Bank I twice heard informers being shot close to my pad and I listened to a few debates with Internationals about the ethics of such executions. Happily no one ever sought my opinion. Under Israeli military rule collaborators are responsible for incalculable suffering, property loss, injury and death. One can’t condone these executions but neither could I bring myself to condemn them where the alternative of life imprisonment is impractical. Every society abhors informers. I vividly remember, in the 1940s, two grey-haired maiden ladies moving from a distant county to my home town in rural Ireland and being identified, in whispers, as the relatives of an informer recruited some twenty years earlier by the Black-and-Tans. An aura of horror surrounded these unfortunate sisters of a man who had betrayed his own – for money!

  The news from Syria was unsettling many Gazans and my friends felt concerned about Khaled Meshaal, Yassin’s successor and a long-time exile from the OPT, for years based in Damascus as head of Hamas’ Political Bureau. Sari then told me about the extraordinary events of October 1997, when Mr Netanyahu, in his first term as Prime Minister, ordered Meshaal’s assassination during his residency in Amman, Jordan. Meshaal was already seen as one of Hamas’ most talented young leaders. It’s not nice to bomb or shell the resident of a friendly state, so two Mossad agents, bearing stolen Canadian passports, chose to spray poison on their target. When caught in the act they were arrested and Meshaal was rushed to hospital. As he lay there, his recovery uncertain, an angry King Hussein did a deal with Netanyahu. In exchange for an effective antidote, and the release of Sheikh Yassin and several other prisoners, Mossad’s dudes would be freed. Soon after, Sheikh Yassin visited his friend, Meshaal, in hospital and found both the King and Arafat there to greet him. Then he was helicoptered to a Strip vibrating with cheers and enveloped in banners. These celebrated ‘the Sheikh of the Intifada’ – pictured beside Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ most efficient bomb-maker, known as ‘The Engineer’, who had been assassinated in January 1996. Sari later showed me the spot where Ayyash switched on his mobile and died. He had been given it by a collaborator.

  For Hamas the Israelis’ inexorable assassination campaign had been far more damaging, politically, than Cast Lead – or so Sari reckoned. Between 2002 and 2004 the IDF ‘took out’ most of their senior leaders – and any of their family and friends who chanced to be with them when the missile struck. In July 2002 a one-ton bomb dropped on Salah Shehade’s Gaza home killed the target and fourteen of his relatives. Nine months later Ibrahim al-Maqadmeh was eliminated and five months after that Ismail Abu Shanab. His successor, Mohammed Deif, survived a shelling but was permanently maimed. The following year, in March and April, Sheikh Yassin and his second-in-command, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, were the targets. Ahmed Yassin was paraplegic, confined by a childhood accident to a wheelchair, and the missile struck early one morning as he was being pushed home from his neighbourhood mosque.

  In January 1996, when the first post-Oslo elections happened, the imprisoned Sheikh Yassin wrote regularly to his followers, advising them to take part in the voting. For some years he had been considering a prolonged truce during which Hamas, converted into a non-violent political party, could work to dismantle Oslo from within. In 2000 he sought a ten- or fifteen-year truce in exchange for a genuinely independent Palestinian state in the OPT (as distinct from the crippled creature born of Oslo). Again, not long before his death he looked ahead to the IDF’s 2005 ‘withdrawal’ and suggested power-sharing with Fatah on the Strip. A leader so persistently focused on ‘peace with justice’ could only be a serious embarrassment to governments having a very different agenda. The Bush administration openly approved of the murder of Hamas’ top layer.

  Unlike the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Black September, whose deadly militancy kept the Palestinian cause in the world’s headlines during the 1970s, Hamas has never advocated or defended attacks on third party countries or their nationals within Palestine. No such scruples inhibit Israel from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists or any other third parties deemed undesirable. By now senior Mossad and IDF officers feel free to boast in media interviews that Israel has made assassination ‘internationally acceptable’. Their reasoning seems to be that a crime committed often enough is somehow drained of criminality.

  * * *

  When I first met Gaza’s International Solidarity Movement (ISM) team they were still in a state of shock and none mentioned their murdered comrade, Vittorio Arrigoni (‘Vik’), of whom I had heard much over the past few years from mutual friends. Born in 1975 in a small town near Lake Como, he was a freelance journalist, an uncompromising pacifist, a fervent binationalist and defiantly brave – ever ready to take risks in defence of Gaza’s farmers and fishermen. He had spent the 2005 Christmas season in Ben-Gurion airport’s lock-up and been several times beaten and wounded by the IDF though they knew he was permanently on medication for a chronic heart condition. The Jerusalem Post repeatedly denounced him as ‘an enemy of all Jews’.

  Every week Vik rang his mother, then mayor of Bulciago, and on 12 April she rejoiced to hear that after an 18-month absence he was planning a holiday. At once rumour blamed his apparent kidnapping on a hitherto unknown Salafist gang calling themselves Tawhid-wa-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). They were said to be guaranteeing his release within thirty hours (by 5.00 pm on Friday) if Hamas freed the Salafist Sheikh Abu Walid al-Maqdas and his two sons (detained a month previously). A brief YouTube video showed Vik bruised, bloodied and blindfolded. Early on the Friday morning police searchers found his body hanging in a derelict house in northern Gaza.

  Hamas then allowed the circulation of misleading information, to spare Vik’s family. This fabrication was believed by many – including me, until an ‘insider’ friend reported the facts. Vik, ignoring sound advice, had gone to that house voluntarily and been murdered by a Jordanian who, as the police approached, killed himself to avoid arrest. This essentially unIslamic action (suicide bombers are martyrs) prompted much speculation about the real motive for Vik’s murder and the identity of those behind it. Of course there were mutterings about Mossad. Could this well-publicised crime, coming only eleven days after the West Bank assassination of the film director Juliano Mer-Khamis, have been calculated to unnerve the foreign supporters of Freedom Flotilla II, due to sail to Gaza in July? A few of my Fatah friends insinuatingly recalled that Vik’s blog had more than once openly criticised Hamas – e.g., ‘Since winning the election they have deeply limited human rights by trying to impose hardline Islam.’ Responding to those friends, I deplored this ill-considered judgment; one can’t reasonably blame Hamas for Salafist influences percolating through on the Strip.

  In August 2009, during the Rafah mosque siege, a Syrian imam proclaimed Gaza to be an Islamist caliphate. Hamas had long been patiently negotiating with this fanatic, seeking to lead or push him towards moderation. Therefore the five policemen who entered the mosque
, hoping to end the siege peacefully, were unarmed. They died beside the imam when he blew himself up and in the chaos that followed Hamas killed twenty-four of the ‘caliphate’s’ adherents. The subsequent discovery in the mosque of hundreds of suicide vests, packed with Israeli explosives, generated another swarm of speculations.

  Vik had long since been granted honorary Palestinian citizenship and Gaza’s Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, telephoned condolences to Vik’s mother. During mourning ceremonies in Gaza City Dr Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas’ co-founder and elder statesman, condemned ‘this awful crime against our friends’ and during similar ceremonies on the West Bank Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas addressed the crowds. It would have pleased Vik to see this spontaneous surge of grief uniting so many Palestinians. Meanwhile a Salafist minority, tiny but shrill, continued to jeer at Italy as ‘an infidel state’ and to accuse Vik of having spread corruption by encouraging men and women to meet in public as independent individuals.

  * * *

  On 14 June the ISM team invited me to a commemorative five-a-side indoor soccer tournament at the Rafah community centre where Vik had spent so much time coaching boys who for lack of space could never play normal soccer. This centre, in a cleverly converted factory, is another example of Gazan energy, ingenuity and fortitude. It will take a very long time to blockade these people into demoralisation.

  At sunset, in a vast first-floor chamber, we joined a dozen men around a banquet-long table overlooked by tall showcases crowded with trophies won during the past half-century: cups, bowls, urns and trays, all engraved and embellished. The only other woman present was a fiery young Anglo-Egyptian ISM-er, famous for subduing Israeli naval officers. Handshaking became incessant as sporting (and other) notables continued to arrive from all over Gaza. Many men eagerly enquired about my compatriot, Caoimhe Butterly, a great friend of Vik’s, whose courage as a paramedic working throughout Cast Lead won’t soon be forgotten. Everyone received a T-shirt depicting Vik above an Arabic inscription and below the crossed flags of Italy and Palestine. The notables spoke emotionally and at length – until suddenly a piercing whistle signalled the start of the tournament.

  In a hangar-like hall, tiered seating for 1,000 rose on one side above a chalk-marked soccer pitch (also marked for netball and volleyball). I found myself in the front row beside Mohammed, born in Rafah camp in 1973. He had graduated in Italy but ‘at the start of the Second Intifada I wanted to be with my family’. He was proud of his wife who, having tasted freedom in Italy, refused to wear the hijab or jilbab. ‘She’s maybe the only Gazan woman so brave in these times! Though not brave enough to wear a swimsuit.’

  On my other side sat Khalil, with whom I had already talked several times at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). A small, slight, middle-aged man, he was pale and fine-featured and abstractedly cold in manner – perhaps a cover-up for the sorrow and frustration felt by all such workers throughout the OPT unless they are simply ‘in it for the money’ (which can happen). The PCHR is a rare and precious source of reliable information about contentious events on the Strip. Unreliable information comes by the truckload.

  This tournament consisted of four 30-minute matches and the hundreds of youthful spectators were loudly partisan in a cheerful way. The not-so-young players wore soft shoes and quite often had to pause when the chalk dust aggravated their smokers’ coughs. Kicks now and then rebounded from the walls, one just missing my head, but in general there was something soothingly ritualistic about the slow pace and gracefully controlled movements.

  Then I became aware that Mohammed was worriedly reading text messages. When I looked at him questioningly he explained. His fifty-eight-year-old mother was on dialysis and in dire need of a drug at present unavailable. That afternoon the doctor had warned, ‘She may die within 48 hours.’ Now a text had told him of a relevant drugs consignment being held in Ramallah because the donor (or some PA bureaucrats?) didn’t want Hamas to benefit from it. There was nothing to be done, though a mother lay dying. Gaza truly is a prison, not metaphorically but in reality. Had some tragedy befallen my family, requiring my immediate departure, I could not have left the Strip before 2 July.

  Mohammed showed me pictures of his son, now aged eight. During Cast Lead the child thought their shrapnel-victim neighbours had been killed by flying glass and decided to build himself a house without windows.

  The muezzin’s evening summons interrupted the second game. All shoes came off and, though there could be no washing, both teams formed a line led in prayer by the referee. Mohammed commented, ‘It’s not that all are so religious, this is just the custom and the culture.’ He glanced at Khalil who nodded his agreement. Yet again I heard the argument that ‘the Middle East problem’ does not have religion at its root though it so well suits the ‘international community’ (code for the US and its allies) to harp on about Islamic terrorism. Echoing many other Palestinians, Mohammed urged me always to use ‘Zionist’ rather than ‘Jewish’ in relation to Israel’s multiple crimes. In Bologna he had shared a student flat with a Jew who became and remains a close friend. He recalled Palestine’s pre-Zionist harmony and affirmed, ‘We can live together again and we will! Some time in the future, in spite of everything!’ Again he glanced at Khalil who nodded – then added, with quiet vehemence, ‘Support BDS!’ referring to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

  Between the second and third rounds all eight teams posed for photographs – with me as the reluctant centrepiece. Minutes into the fourth round the electricity went off, to no one’s surprise. There were disappointed groans but no angry shouts. Matches flared here and there in the blackness and a few ISM torches enabled us to find our way out to the starlit car park. The tournament would be completed on the morrow. ‘Gazans are adaptable,’ observed Mohammed. ‘It’s how we have to be.’

  As we drove out of the darkened town, candles were flitting like glow-worms through homes lucky enough to have them. Khalil remarked, in his precise, slightly squeaky voice, ‘Isn’t it sad to think how Gaza seemed in 1660. Travellers compared its cultural life and economic importance to Paris.’

  I didn’t feel it necessary to reply; he seemed to be talking almost to himself.

  Three

  Vik’s closest Gazan friend was Mohammed al-Zaim, a tall, handsome, elegant intellectual who for some weeks had been helping Tom, a volunteer from the United States. Tom was making a video about a Gazan family and Mohammed suggested I accompany what the Israelis describe as ‘that propaganda network’ – the ISM video-makers. (Once back home, ISM-ers try to educate their neighbours about what is really going on in Gaza.)

  In 1948 Naser’s newly married grandparents had fled from their home near Beersheva and squatted outside the village of Juhor al-Dik, close to what was to become the Erez border crossing. For many years the grandfather laboured in Jaffa, gradually saving enough to buy a patch of land and build a two-storey house measuring 100 square metres. After Israel’s seizure of Gaza Naser’s father had married, found work in a settlers’ factory, lived frugally and by 2001 had acquired three cows, a small flock of sheep and goats and a shed full of hens. All were killed during the Second Intifada when the IDF dumped some of the carcasses in the family’s two wells.

  From the end of a motor track Mohammed, Tom and I followed Naser along a pathlet between unweeded fields of peppers, squash, some leafy green vegetable and a dunum of ominously dehydrated maize. Naser’s house stands alone, only 400 metres from the border. When the IDF shelled it on 13 July 2010 Naser was living there with his widowed mother, his wife Ghada and their five children. Ghada, sitting outside the door with her two-year-old son, was killed instantly and two visiting relatives were badly injured.

  Despite major structural damage, UNRWA couldn’t help because the house had not been totally destroyed. While repairing it as best they could, the family moved into the village where Ghada was buried. Two nights later Naser woke to find o
nly the two-year-old remaining in the children’s bed. As he was rushing out of his one-room shack a neighbour arrived – the missing four had been found in the cemetery, crouching around their mother’s grave shouting ‘Wake up!’ Next morning Naser took the children back to their damaged home, two miles away, where his younger brothers were camping while rebuilding.

  In February 2011 Naser remarried – his perceived duty, to provide the children with a step-mother (and no doubt several half-siblings). The original fatal shell had been fired from a tank on a nearby hillock. At 9.15 pm on 28 April 2011, after dark, six more shells were fired from the same place, four finding their target and leaving it uninhabitable. Six adults and the children were then living there. Shrapnel severely wounded ten-year-old Alaa Adin’s head and abdomen; he spent seven weeks in hospital. Shrapnel also penetrated the chest and abdomen of five-year-old Misa, who needed a month in hospital. Naser’s brothers suffered face and leg injuries. An ambulance arrived within thirty minutes, after unusually rapid coordination between the International Red Cross (ICRC) and the IDF. Otherwise Alaa Adin might have died, as so many do when coordination is delayed. (Ambulances rushing to the rescue without coordination are often attacked by the IDF – the vehicle destroyed, the paramedics killed or wounded.)

  Approaching the thrice-shelled house, we could see a donkey, a cow and a handsome pony tethered near a stack of hay bales (ersatz hay, more weeds than grass). On the only chair in the roofless hallway sat Naser’s sixty-five-year-old mother – hunched forward, leaning on a stick, her face expressionless, seeming not to register our presence. Naser explained that she refused to leave her home again and slept under the remaining fragment of roof, at the back of the hallway.