A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  Shatti is an asphyxiation of more than 80,000 very poor people confined within an area allotted to 23,000 in 1949 (and even then space was short). Because Cast Lead left so many homeless (again!), thousands must now endure the worst living conditions I have ever seen. People shelter below and behind jagged lengths of corrugated iron, shreds of carpet, ragged curtain fragments, sheets of cardboard nailed to half-burnt door panels, battered plastic trays inscribed ‘Adam Hotel’. In most such shanty-towns, sections of motor vehicles are conspicuous but in blockaded Gaza every ounce of metal must be recycled. Spatially this camp forms an integral part of Gaza City but it has its own distinctive aura – and not only because of sewage problems. Incongruous CCTV cameras are mounted high on gable walls at several alleyway junctions, seeming to mock the destitution all around. Quite a few of the Israeli assassins’ ‘high-value targets’ live in Shatti where the Strip’s grim contest (Informers v. The Rest) is at its most stressful. Only in this camp was I asked (once) to show my passport, by a burly, black-uniformed, black-bearded security officer who scowled at me and told Hanaa she must do a détour – foreigners are forbidden to enter certain alleyways.

  It was exactly four years since the ‘Five Day War’, Hamas’ easy though bloody defeat of Fatah’s uncoordinated forces – armed and funded but not well-trained by the CIA. During Shatti’s brief bursts of fighting a rocket-propelled grenade penetrated Ismail Haniyeh’s modest breeze-block house, injuring no one. The damage was soon repaired and Hanaa proudly pointed out that the Prime Minister’s family home has not since been ‘improved’. The message was: Hamas leaders don’t get rich quick. Fatah of course say otherwise, in voices trembling with rage.

  Within this maze of alleyways we had to concentrate on not dislodging people’s laundry. The Palestinians are sticklers for personal cleanliness, however repellent their environs, and even in Shatti water is somehow found to wash garments and space is found to dry them. But they must be guarded; here village standards of honesty cannot be expected to survive.

  As a solo foreigner, I was quite a novelty; the various international organisations who have been ‘studying camp conditions’ for the past half-century (rarely taking action to alter them) usually travel in groups with local handlers. Therefore cheerful excited children followed us in droves, rushing forward where there was space to stare up at me intently before – ‘What is your name?’ Throughout Gaza’s camps the general level of juvenile high spirits and friendliness is remarkable. However, on the fringes of any such crowd one sees the others – some maimed, some crudely scarred, some physically sound with all the pain in their eyes.

  Hanaa and her family of sixteen lived in three small stifling ground-floor rooms all clean and tidy. (Granted, tidiness in not a challenge when possessions are so few.) They cooked on a gas ring in a lean-to and shared a lavatory with three other families.

  When we arrived Hanaa’s first-born, aged fifty-eight, was trying to sooth a whimpering three-year-old with earache; this boy was his fifteenth child, the fifth by his second wife. Cast Lead had taken his two oldest sons and a daughter-in-law. He believed those three died because the IDF delayed negotiations with a Red Crescent ambulance. That morning the beach-going party had left him in charge of a vast pot of rice (Shatti’s ‘New Man’) and now four pairs of hands quickly prepared an equally vast salad and luncheon was served in traditional style – the menfolk and the guest eating first.

  Afterwards, while fruit shopping with the children, I noticed how much lower prices were here than in Rimal. Beside the greengrocer’s stall, on a comparatively wide laneway, stood a very fine horse enjoying a nosebag. The care lavished on many Gazan horses delighted and surprised me. Obviously hours of regular grooming were lavished on this glossy scion of some noble Bedouin line. His cart was not quite empty of its vegetable load and one of my companions hastily collected wilted sprigs of parsley from crevices.

  As we drank tea, Hanaa asked me to visit friends of hers who had been grievously affected by Cast Lead. In 1949 the Elmadhoun family didn’t need to register with UNRWA; from Jaffa they had brought enough cash to start a small business and eventually to buy a ramshackle but roomy house in the Old City. A foreign visitor would cheer them up.

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  I like the Old City with its remnant of a fifteenth-century covered souk (mostly demolished by British bombs in 1917), and its potters who conserve ancient techniques, and its Hammam al-Sumara which was renovated (mark you!) by a Mamluk governor in 1320 and still uses wood-fired boilers. The sixteenth-century al-Omari mosque – closed to infidels – is said to be built on the site of a temple to the Philistine god Dagon. The church of St Porphyrius was always locked so I couldn’t see the tomb of this fifth-century Bishop of Gaza – reputedly a valiant defender of Christianity in the Holy Land which probably means he was another Byzantine bad egg. In 1967 the IDF looted this church for the benefit of Jerusalem’s museums and the Strip’s tiny Greek Orthodox community can’t afford to repair the damage done by repeated Israeli attacks. In 2006, in reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s anti-Islam remarks, the exterior was defaced by angry Muslims ignorant of Christendom’s East/West split.

  Whether in a vehicle or on foot one has to move slowly through the narrow streets around Palestine Square. Crosscurrents of shoppers, hawkers and porters flow this way and that between hundreds of small, tunnel-dependent stalls and bigger lock-up stores. Many Rimal residents distrust this noisy, smelly, multi-coloured scene; they feel safer on the quiet streets of ‘developed’ Gaza where it’s hard to believe that the Strip is one of our planet’s most densely populated areas.

  Hanaa’s Arabic scribble in my notebook helped me to locate the Elmadhoun home on a short squalid street of tall, early nineteenth-century houses, outwardly neglected. The ground floor, where Ya’qub had continued the business started by his father, was now let to two Jabalya camp families rendered homeless by Cast Lead. The blockade had killed the business. Upstairs, seventeen Elmadhouns (including grandparents) occupied two floors, the long high-ceilinged rooms shabby but comfortably furnished. The building’s wide, flat roof was a bonus, a safe play area for the eleven children (five girls, six boys). Before the electricity, water and other crises, the Elmadhouns ran a normal middle-class household complete with a two-oven gas cooker and a giant fridge. Not any more: unlike my Rimal friends they could not afford a generator or complicated water-purifying technology – or gas cylinders, when long border closures inflated prices.

  In January 2009 two daughters, then aged ten and twelve, were playing on the roof when the shell came. The ten-year-old died instantly; her two older brothers, having rushed up, momentarily mistook her twisted body for a big doll discarded by the parapet. Her sister, Rana, lost both legs from the groin and will always be confined to a wheelchair. Two shrapnel-torn young cousins have recovered – at least physically. One of them, now aged ten, dreads leaving her home, has to be forced to go to school and when in the classroom can’t concentrate.

  Soon after my arrival Rana’s mother persuaded her to join us, then pushed her through a high double door from the adjacent bedroom. The mechanism in her electric wheelchair (a Swedish donation) had long since failed and might or might not be replaced. At once I realised that my visit wasn’t helping: Hanaa had got it wrong. Rana greeted me sulkily, clearly seeing herself as some sort of grist for a predatory foreigner’s mill. My not wanting a photograph of myself with Rana and myself with the family surprised everyone. I wondered then if Hamas had been using this tragedy in their legitimate campaign to publicise the criminality of Cast Lead.

  Samira sat beside her legless daughter – a youthful-looking forty-year-old, despite everything, with a wide pale face, blunt features and the sort of eyebrows some women have to pay for, in time and money. She smiled a lot, Rana not at all. She had miscarried after the shelling but soon conceived again and as we talked Ya’qub dutifully dandled the baby who demanded constant attention. A three-year-old sprawled on the sofa beside them, helping to enterta
in her little brother, whose impulse to crawl was being frustrated: Ya’qub believed crawling delayed walking. He spoke more English than his eighteen-and nineteen-year-old UNRWA-schooled sons. A US-born Israeli business associate had given him impromptu lessons in the good old Oslo days when the construction industry flourished. He had, it emerged, worked briefly for Atef’s father.

  When Samira began to pour fruit juices other children appeared from various directions, each equipped with a mobile phone for use during conversational interstices. This incessant fiddling would grate on me, if I lived in such a household. Presumably most parents know nothing of the possible health risks – anyway Gazans are occupied by more immediate concerns.

  According to her father, Rana was doing well at school, would probably get a degree (or two) from the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) and wished to become a university lecturer. Her two older brothers lacked such ambitions and couldn’t find jobs. They were available every day to carry her down and up the long, narrow, unlit stairway. Her twelve-year-old sister pushed her to and from school along war-roughened streets. Both those young men were cultivating beards and looked quite severely damaged, emotionally. They lounged on another sofa, beneath a much enlarged photograph of their ‘martyr’ sister, her chubby face framed in Koranic quotations. Unusually, a few words had been translated into English by the dead child’s Swedish teacher – ‘they wish for that which may cause you to perish’. During my short visit the youths referred repeatedly to Israel’s advanced military technology (‘they sell it to America!’) which proved that an attack on an open roof, where four children were playing, could only be deliberate … Who could blame them if they yearned to become militants? The beards were suggestive and I sensed their parents’ fear of this contingency.

  As Ya’qub escorted me to a taxi route near the Gold Market he spoke of Cast Lead’s long-term consequences: children blind, deaf, burn-scarred – young men paralysed – mothers maimed – homeless families with no possibility of replacing bombed dwellings – enfeebled grandparents left to succour disturbed orphans – orchards bulldozed, wells maliciously poisoned. Statistics can blur all this. So many killed, so many injured, the deaths usually fewer than the injuries. Too often we tend to focus on the heartbreaking finality of death, the desolation of the bereaved, and not to think enough about the injured and those who love them, the lives thwarted and distorted because ‘wars’ are no longer fought by warriors. Modern weaponry, callously deployed, makes nonsense of the concept of ‘professional armies’ fighting ‘just wars’.

  Four

  The Strip provided only one frisson of fear. I was on my way home from visiting a village family whose eldest son, Yousef, had recently been ‘eliminated’ while training with a Qassam unit, the armed wing of Hamas. The young man’s father insisted on showing us (Nita and me) the orchard death-site, a hole five feet deep and ten feet in circumference, surrounded by charred lemon trees and overlooked by three-storey houses with shattered windows. Little bits of cordite were scattered far and wide; I was given one as a souvenir.

  Nita, being in a hurry to get home, left me at a busy junction on the outskirts of Khan Younis, where communal taxis parked under an improvised tin roof. As I sat behind the driver’s seat in an empty minibus, awaiting fellow passengers, I noticed the busy traffic dwindling to a trickle. Then two figures appeared on the far side of the wide road, walking some fifteen yards apart, carrying rockets over their shoulders. Two others followed, carrying tripods. Each wore black slacks, black long-sleeved shirts, black ski-masks with narrow eye-slits. My first reaction was to chuckle; they looked too like stereotypical ‘terrorists’ to be taken seriously on a sunny afternoon among ordinary people going about their ordinary business – women dragging bulging sacks, a youth driving a horse-cart loaded with jerrycans, small boys kicking a deflated football, two old men hauling a handcart of broken concrete blocks. As eight other jihadis appeared in the distance – carrying AK-47s, also walking yards apart – their leader slowly crossed the road to stand in the shade beside my minibus, so close that I could smell his vice (nicotine) and by reaching through the open window could have touched his rocket. He stood very still, staring straight ahead as his comrades walked towards Gaza City, keeping to the far verge. They moved with military precision but oddly – as though on their own, not in a public place. By then both the motor and pedestrian traffic had almost stopped. Was my neighbour aware of an International’s presence? I didn’t turn my head but swivelled my eyes and noted that the rocket looked very home-made, no more than six feet long with wobbly tail-fins. Then came my scary moment. I remembered that drones target rocket-launchers – quite often and sometimes accurately. Yousef had been carrying a launcher when ‘eliminated’ and now I was within cuddling distance of another. But that moment, though chilling, was brief. The statistics reassure: not many Internationals become collateral damage.

  Ten minutes later my companion moved off to form the rearguard. Normally, during that time, the taxi would have been filling up; now, as the jihadi crossed the road, passengers crowded in, having been waiting at a discreet distance. I wondered, are these young men deliberately provoking the enemy or is this the ‘It can’t happen to me’ syndrome? Even if personally indifferent to death, it seemed callously irresponsible to risk exposing others to attack for the sake of proving they’re still armed and ready for action – though action is no longer being officially encouraged.

  We soon overtook the unit, still walking yards apart along the verge. A long-bearded young man in the front passenger seat spoke English and I decided to be tactless. ‘Are they al-Qassam?’ I asked in a bright curious-tourist voice. ‘We don’t know them,’ came the curt reply. When I put the same question to Deeb he prevaricated – ‘They were going to some training ground’ – which didn’t tell me who ‘they’ were.

  Moh, one of my unconstrained student friends, was prepared to speculate. They might of course have been al-Qassam. Or they could’ve been an al-Quds unit from Islamic Jihad’s armed wing. Or a Saladin Brigade unit from the Popular Resistance Committee’s armed wing. Or maybe a unit from the al-Ahrar Brigade, an armed wing without a body.

  Acidly I remarked that if Gaza grew fewer wings it might not fly into such sterile grief. Yousef’s mother had told me of his boast on 19 March – around noon, warplanes had fired two missiles in an attempt to kill him and three of his comrades. The next attempt succeeded. His father said, ‘He always wanted to be a martyr.’

  Moh thought it inevitable that quite a few young men were keen to prove that Gazans could and would continue attacking Israel, even when Prime Minister Haniyeh was in conciliatory mood. Supposing Moh had it right, the long-term implications are disquieting. If a small armed group could do its own thing wherever and whenever it chose, who was governing Gaza? Was the relative calm of June 2011 more apparent than real?

  Another friend, a middle-aged Cast-Lead victim who made light of being one-legged, said, ‘Really, nobody is governing. Hamas tried but the whole world is against them. Remember they’re terrorists! Part of trying to control is letting those groups show their strength.’ As Nizar saw it, if Hamas were recognised as the legitimate government it would be different, many more Gazans would respect their authority. He continued, ‘Those you saw, I can guess who they are. I know what they’re like. They are not mad Salafist dogs, they’re young Palestinians wanting respect. They don’t feel they have it when everyone says their fairly elected government is terrorist, criminal – can’t have any tax money or normal funding. For self-esteem they need to go marching around with guns saying “We’re not terrorists or criminals! We’re Palestinians fighting the Occupation, never giving up!” Yousef, whose family you visited, he was that sort. They don’t care if they can’t do much damage in Israel, if their rockets’ real victims are their neighbours. For them it’s the ritual that matters. Taking action, being daring, two fingers to the IDF and death’s OK if it comes. Martyrs get more respect than anyone else around.’

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* *

  A few days later, en route to Abassan village, Nita insisted on our visiting some of the Samouni family survivors. Their fate ranks as the most barbarous of Cast Lead’s many atrocities and her plan made me vaguely uncomfortable; this crime scene has become a macabre parody of a tourist attraction, a ‘must’ for foreign politicians, human rights teams, NGO delegations and journalists. But then, as we sat with three survivors, I sensed that our visit was being appreciated. Perhaps it helped them to know that their sufferings have not been forgotten.

  Zaytoun is a semi-rural district of Gaza City, quite close to the sea. From the main road we followed a sandy, tank-ravaged track past the shelled remains of mini-industries surrounded by bomb craters and hillocks of rubble sprouting that tall yellow weed. A substantial new villa – startling amidst the drab desolation, painted orange and brick-red with white trimming – was not yet lived in. It stood on the site of the mass-slaughter. Three short rows of olive saplings had been planted nearby: the samoud gesture, seen so often where IDF tanks or bulldozers have savaged ancient groves. Fifty yards further on, at the base of a high thorny hedge, four pale skinny little boys sat beside a tray of the cheapest possible sweets. Who were their customers? There was no one else in sight. An opening in the hedge gave access to the small yard of a three-storey house missing half its roof and one gable end. Nita called a greeting and Mohammed appeared, a tall man in his mid-thirties needing a crutch and with bags under his eyes. Ahmed followed, a very tall, painfully thin nineteen-year-old whose paralysed right arm could possibly be fixed elsewhere – but not in Gaza. Then came twelve-year-old Hassan who put a tea-kettle on the Primus stove before rolling up a trouser-leg to show me his shrapnel-scarred thigh. We sat on the ubiquitous white plastic garden chairs under a sturdy vine, gnarled but fertile, trained to provide ample shade between hedge and house. All around lay shattered gable-end stones, shards of roof-tiles and twisted sheets of corrugated iron.