Outside, Nita asked, ‘What’s the English word for a place like that?’
I thought hard. Villa, mansion, fort, palace, manor, castle – nothing fitted. Then the word came. ‘It’s a folly,’ I said. ‘Much bigger than average but undoubtedly of that genre.’ One doesn’t expect such excesses in Gaza but I’m told similar follies shelter Fatah nabobs on the hills around Ramallah.
Nita joked that she was training herself to be a tourist guide in the unimaginable post-blockade future. She had planned a relaxed end to our day, on a Central Strip poultry farm where all the F-16’s victims had been feathered.
Another private taxi took us past al-Zawaida village through an unpeopled landscape close to a section of the buffer zone where many have been killed or wounded. Then stands of palms and fruit trees marked a scattering of small houses, all to some extent damaged when an F-16 bombed the al-Hayeks’ poultry farm. That was at 11.30 pm on 5 March and our driver, as usual, speculated. Had the IDF wanted to avoid human casualties while destroying an important enterprise? It was important for the sustenance of the surrounding population and everyone knew economic warfare was an integral part of the Zionist campaign. Or had they meant to kill people in their beds and got the poultry by mistake?
This was one of those moments when suddenly the sheer improbability of the whole tragedy overwhelmed me. We were talking about the airforce of a government armed and supported by the US, the UK and all their allies. Yet had Israelis chosen to kill the al-Hayek family no one outside Gaza (or no one who is listened to) would have heard of their deaths. Or, if they did hear, they would have made no more than a token protest. Improbable, yes – yet a reality not only accepted by ‘the international community’ but made possible by those governments.
There is little traffic hereabouts and our taxi’s sound brought Hani to welcome us: a genial fifty-year-old, tall and elegant – the sort of elegance that has to do with bearing rather than clothing. He showed us the bomb crater, twenty metres from the house; 120 pairs of birds had been killed, including precious representatives of three rare breeds (his wife’s hobby). ‘Morning after’ photographs proved how hard the seven al-Hayeks had worked to clear up the devastation. There were five children, aged twenty-one to eight, the youngest girls.
Hani remarked, ‘Having three strong boys helped.’ Then we joined his wife and daughters – all stoning apricots – in a palm-thatched summerhouse amidst a fabulous cacti collection, some blooming exotically. They varied from thimble-size to an unlovely giant recently officially recognised as a record breaker (I forget by whom). Hani gazed down at this prodigy the way mothers gaze down at their first-born, reminding me that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. All around distinguished-looking hens wandered and pecked (the vanguard of the replacement stock) and a few turkeys gobbled in the adjacent olive grove. This orderly oasis of silence and comparative greenness felt deceptively tranquil and remote – absurd adjectives in the Gazan context.
Here was another refugee family unregistered with UNRWA. Hani’s citrus-farming parents had left Jaffa with enough cash to start a business and eventually buy a house in Jabalya town. By the mid-’80s Gazan resistance to the Occupation was simmering towards the First Intifada and making urban life increasingly unpleasant. Hani and his bride decided to buy these few dunums and, assisted by three brothers, they built a six-roomed, two-storey house with an outside staircase and a flat roof. Gradually they established a modestly successful free-range poultry farm and an olive and cacti nursery – partly obliterated by the bomb but already Hani had replanted. All the children were born in Gaza City and ISI-educated, not because the family inclined towards Islamism but because such schools were the best available and, if carefully chosen, did not proselytise (as they are all alleged to do, by people and institutions who should know better).
While the 11-year-old daughter brewed coffee, her plump blue-eyed mother plied us with stoned apricots and sadly explained that she cultivated rare plants as well as rare breeds and now all were gone and not as easily replaced as Hani’s olives and cacti. But she spoke resignedly, not cursing the IDF as I would have done. According to Hani, her shrewdness and competence had made possible the success of the family enterprise. And immediately after the bombing her sense of humour had held the children together. Those girls were attractive to look at and fun to be with but not yet back to normal. As we were drinking our coffee both went wide-eyed with fear on hearing a short burst of artillery fire from the nearby border. Before the attack on their own home they had ignored such IDF intrusions.
By then two of the sons had joined us, also attractive personalities, and intelligent, but with poor job prospects. However, because they were prepared to live frugally and work hard Hani believed the farm could support them all – unless the IDF struck again. This was a family united by the challenges of Gazan life and sufficiently aware of its own relative good fortune to be content.
Before we left, the boys showed us their home’s interior damage. It had been solidly constructed, using good quality materials, but now dangerous cracks gaped in several walls and ceilings. The minimum repairs estimate, using family labour, came to US$6,000 – for Gazans a formidable sum.
I promised to visit again, when unconstrained by Nita’s timetable, and our farewell gifts were bags of apricots and glorious bouquets of irises. Then Mrs al-Hayek urged us to call on Izbat, a bereaved friend who needed support, and Hani drove us to the main road, in a minivan redolent of poultry, and waited to see us safely aboard the serveece that would take us to Izbat’s village.
From the junction we walked between a long line of blank grey ‘purdah’ walls and a cultivated space where several men, tending a guava crop, paused to stare at us. Around a corner, youths kicking a football also paused to stare and shouted something hostile. Nita looked uneasy. ‘It’s because you’re uncovered,’ she muttered. ‘This area has gone a bit Salafist – know what I mean? I shouldn’t have brought you here without a hijab.’
I laughed. ‘So much for your plan to end our day on a relaxed note!’
‘Don’t laugh!’ said Nita. ‘Maybe they think you mock them!’ She called a greeting then, cleverly asking for Izbat’s house. His son was one of four Islamic Jihad volunteers recently killed on their training ground by an F-16 missile. The youths, still scowling but no longer jeering, indicated a nearby door. They moved closer to watch as Izbat, after some delay, admitted us to a large yard with the now familiar combination of hens scratching under olive trees. He waved us towards chairs and a little table, without shaking hands or looking at us directly. His dazzling white galabiya seemed to add to his height and gravity.
This twenty-eight-year-old martyr had been an only son, the eldest of seven children. Five of his sisters were married, leaving the youngest to comfort her mother who had, said Izbat, undergone a personality change, didn’t want to meet even close friends, stayed in the bedroom and had lost her appetite. Later Nita told me the full story. This was a Fatah family, loyal in a necessarily subdued way to President Abbas. The son’s open membership of Islamic Jihad caused his parents and sisters much distress and anxiety. A year ago his mother had begged his father to scheme, to contrive to have him jailed by Hamas – then he couldn’t be active on training grounds and go marching around in broad daylight carrying rocket launchers. But Izbat knew nobody in Hamas who might have arranged such a thing.
The ‘martyr’s memorial’ was missing. Izbat said his wife would have found it offensive. He spoke always in a low voice, looking down at his worry-beads, not letting his expression show any emotion. Then abruptly he made a dismissive gesture and began to talk of times past. He had been born in 1956, of parents terrorised out of their village near Beersheva, and he could remember pleasant features of the Egyptian occupation. His joiner father was never out of work and the children enjoyed listening to dance bands playing on the beach. Even under the Israelis, until the Second Intifada, Gazans were much better off than now. The blockade was inflicting the worst suff
ering on Palestinians since the Crusades. It was meant to ‘cleanse’ the Strip, leaving it empty for settlers and a new Israeli naval port. For the first time Izbat smiled as he said (I could see it coming) – ‘But we won’t go!’
As though to celebrate this declaration the sunset flared – an immense expanse of redness spread to the zenith, momentarily the whole world glowed and Izbat’s galabiya was tinted pink. ‘It’s a good omen!’ I exclaimed. Nita however had a more prosaic reaction. ‘It’s late! We can’t walk past those heroes outside – I’ll ring a taxi.’
Izbat intervened: we mustn’t be so extravagant. His neighbour’s two adult sons would gladly escort us to the main road. A good plan, I thought, but Nita insisted on a taxi: until then, I hadn’t realised how much she feared the Salafist influence.
Reviewing our day, I was again puzzled by the Palestinians’ apparent lack of anger and bitterness and impressed by their resilience – the quiet determination to start again, not to be daunted or demoralised. Nita commented, ‘It all goes together. People are angry and bitter but won’t let outsiders see it. That would be not dignified. The anger makes the resilience. The resilience tells the Zionists “You can’t win”. In the end it will be stronger than suicide bombers and rockets.’
* * *
Nita did not accompany me to Tunnelopolis, an area of topographical turmoil where foreigners are not popular and a Foreign Affairs escort was deemed appropriate.
‘Why,’ people ask, ‘does Israel allow all the tunnelling?’ Of course some tunnels are bombed, killing quite a few Gazans, but the network is never attacked on a scale seriously affecting the flow of goods. One theory is that without such a well-organised ‘informal economy’ the extremity of Gazan suffering, as recorded by UNRWA and other agencies, would compel Israel’s allies to take action against the blockade. Therefore tunnels suit Israel. But this theory doesn’t fit with a rumour that took off in 2010. Allegedly, the Egyptian authorities and US government engineers had begun to construct a solid steel barrier, ten kilometres long and 25 metres deep; beneath that, not even the most daring Gazan could tunnel. But if the tunnels suit Israel, why would the US invest so much on a counter-tunnel measure? A suggested answer: profits from the informal economy, run by Hamas and its associates, have become one of the government’s major sources of income and anything that ‘sustains terrorism’ must go, regardless of the Israeli viewpoint.
Many people reminded me that June 2011 marked the fifth anniversary of the full blockade of Gaza, a process begun after the 2005 withdrawal. Until June 2006, 4,000 ‘approved products’ were allowed into the Strip. Then the nineteen-year-old corporal, Gilad Schalit, was captured, and two of his mates were killed, in a raid – through a 600-metre tunnel – on Kerem Shalom military base. In retaliation, Israel reduced the number of ‘approved products’ to 73. And the IDF, driven berserk by their inability to rescue Schalit, bombed several bridges and Hamas government offices and, at Gaza’s only power station, destroyed transformers for which no replacements could be imported. This was/is sustained, comprehensive collective punishment on an unprecedented scale. Imagine the global reaction if the RAF, in retaliation for the killing of two British soldiers and the capture of a third, had bombed Sinn Fein offices in West Belfast and Derry and the bridges and power supply of South Armagh.
Given a ‘mixed’ community, the British government, even if so inclined, was not free to behave thus. Gaza is singularly unmixed. During the Oslo era, Israel severed the Strip from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. As Amira Hass wrote in the London Review of Books (26 February 2009), this isolated Gaza ‘from its population, its education and health services, from jobs in Israel and from family members and friends’. Then came the withdrawal of the settlers, leaving the Strip open to uncontrolled collective punishment, and giving the coup de grâce to the two-state solution, already undermined by ever-expanding West Bank settlements. Yet in 2012, the two-state solution is still being earnestly promoted in the Highest Places: the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, the EU Commission, the duplicitous Tony Blair-led Quartet – promoted by people who are either culpably ignorant of ‘the facts on the ground’ or too lily-livered to face them. Facing them would mean challenging Israel’s right to exist in its present phoney incarnation as a ‘democratic Jewish state’ – doubly phoney because the 20 per cent of its citizens who are Palestinian do not enjoy those equal rights granted to citizens of genuine democracies. Meanwhile a contemptible fiction is being maintained – that Israel’s ‘security’ requires the relentless repression of Palestinians until the ‘peace process’ hatches a peace agreement. In reality there is no peace process and never has been. (I am deliberately repeating myself.) The Zionists have always wanted all of Palestine; a ‘just peace’ doesn’t interest them. The elaborate ‘peace process’ pantomimes, staged over the decades by Israelis and their allies, masquerading as peace seekers, perfectly suited the Zionist purpose. Off-stage, government-sponsored settlers are being allowed ample time to seize more and more Palestinian land unhindered by the ‘international community’.
When Hamas took over the Strip in June 2007 the blockade was tightened again and eighteen months later Cast Lead brought about the almost total collapse of the private sector. In the 2006–2010 period Gaza lost at least 95 per cent of its industrial enterprises (3,759) through border closures or bombing. Between 100,000 and 120,000 workers were left without work. On 19 July 2007 John Ging (then Director of UNRWA in Gaza and a compatriot of whom I can be proud) was quoted in The New York Times: ‘If present closures continue, we anticipate that Gaza will become nearly a totally aid-dependent society, a society robbed of the possibility of self-sufficiency and the dignity of work.’ Given 65 per cent (approximately) unemployment, it is unsurprising that dependency on food aid has gone up from 30 per cent in 2001 to at least 75 per cent (and increasing daily) in 2011. A UN report stated in November 2009: ‘The evidence shows that the population is being sustained at the most basic or minimum humanitarian standard.’
Farming, too, has collapsed. One doesn’t need to look up the statistics; travelling from village to village the evidence is heartbreakingly visible. Some 35 per cent of the Strip’s most fertile land has been put out of bounds by the IDF; 305 wells and 5,000 acres of farmland were destroyed by Cast Lead; widespread soil and water contamination is frustrating most of the gallant replanting efforts. The tree losses, on those 5,000 acres and around bombed homes, are linked to a recent perceptible decline in children’s health and have been precisely recorded by Gaza’s Union of Agricultural Work Committees: 140,965 olive trees, 136,217 citrus trees, 22,745 fruit trees, 10,365 date palms and 8,922 other trees (figures obtained by Sara Roy in January 2010).
Tunnelopolis is not conducive to the collection of reliable statistics … Some say there are a thousand tunnels which, given the area involved, seems very unlikely. Others refer vaguely to ‘hundreds’. I was told, ‘We’ve dug 400 but we’re using only about 200.’ The rest, apparently, were bombed or – more usually – collapsed of natural causes. It’s obviously absurd to label them ‘illegal’ – an adjective more properly applied to the open-air imprisonment of 1.6 million Gazans for whose survival those tunnels are essential. Yet some commentators have given them gangland connotations. Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, in Hamas, write of the withdrawal:
This made it simpler for Palestinian factions to smuggle in weapons from Egypt, using tunnels bored through the loose sandy soil underneath the border by criminal clans with decades of experience transporting weapons, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and people. By 2010 Hamas enjoyed control over hundreds of these tunnels, using them to bypass Israel’s policy of sealing off Gaza.
Naturally arms come through, plus raw materials for home-made rockets. But on the West Bank and the Strip and in East Jerusalem (let’s repeat this) Palestinians are every day being repressed with weaponry supplied by the US and other members of the UN Security Council. All who have witnessed the IDF in action know th
at the indigenous population is being held down by force – with help, since Oslo, from foreign-funded Palestinian collaborators. No wonder militant ‘factions’ consider themselves entitled to acquire weapons, through tunnels or by sea or anyhow else, from Iran or anyone else, for use against an occupying army. It is tragic, for all concerned, that they lack a responsible leadership able to restrain them from attacking Israeli civilians within Israel.
Pro-Palestinians often argue that international law allows the people of the Occupied Territories to take up arms against the IDF but by now I’m weary of the ‘international law’ concept. It has been consistently flouted by Israel since that state’s creation. Laws lacking any means of enforcement are ‘Humbug!’ (This is being written on Christmas Day and I’ve just been rereading A Christmas Carol.) I prefer to argue that natural justice is on the side of any people whose land has been stolen by armed robbers, or invaded by powerful alliances using specious excuses (‘spreading democracy’) to install puppet governments in strategically interesting regions.
In December 2010, on my last evening in Jerusalem, I talked with my Israeli friend Ben. Sagely he observed, ‘By now the Zionists have convention on their side. People see the IDF as a regular army, weaponised by the world’s leading democracy. They don’t doubt its credentials. They forget regular armies can’t make up the rules as they go along. I enjoy reminding them that everyone has a moral right to use force to get back their land. Afghans are entitled to kill NATO troops and Iraqis to kill Americans or whoever. People’s shocked confusion can be funny. Even if they hate the Occupation, a national army is fixed in their mind as something somehow respectable. Peasants who pop out of caves to kill them must be bad. It’s the “Peace Now” syndrome – liberals with their guts drawn, dodging the full Israeli reality. In our Holy Land human rights groups try to make non-violent resistance the flavour of the decade – OK, very nice, except the IDF stay with violence.’
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