A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  Yara, red-eyed, looked at me reproachfully and said, ‘Foreigners don’t understand it can be so much harder for women in business families though they’ve more money. Also they’ve more marriage problems, as goods for bargaining.’

  Father had made it plain that if Yara resisted she could not go on living with her parents, nor could she live alone, that would be impossible, so there was no alternative to remarriage. He had come to a decision. She should be grateful that such a suitable man was prepared to overlook things.

  ‘But he’s bluffing!’ I said. ‘When you make it plain you’re determined to stay single, living at home, earning for yourself, doing your own thing – he’s helpless! He can’t put you out on the street!’

  Tears trickled again. ‘He can torture me,’ Yara half-whispered. ‘Remember you wondered about psychological violence? Our men know how to do it!’

  That silenced me for moments. Then I asked, ‘What are your options? Emigration if you could get out? And surely you could now, through Rafah? You have skills and training to earn your own living, rent a flat somewhere and be yourself.’

  Yara gazed sadly down at her hands. ‘Do I have a self, the way you mean? There’s the Canadian option. My favourite brother, the one like me, got away to Canada in ’05. He married what he calls an Anglo-Canadian. She converted to Islam and says she’s OK about children growing up Muslim – no more than two children and she’ll never live in a Muslim country. That seems a fair compromise. I guess she’s not believing in Islam but pretending to make Omar happy!’

  I wanted to say, ‘Isn’t your feminism coming unstuck? Why should the woman be doing the pretending on such a crucial matter to make the man happy?’ However, given Yara’s fragile state that would not have been kind. Instead I asked, ‘What does Omar advise?’

  ‘I Skyped him twice this week and he says I should settle in Canada, it’s easy with my qualifications. He’s not able to imagine how I’d feel never seeing my sons again. What do you advise?’

  With three children in the equation, I dared not put a finger on the scales. Undoubtedly life in Canada, with a congenial brother in situ to provide support, would be best for Yara. But was the taxi-driver right? On the other hand, could a mother so tantalisingly inaccessible do enough for her sons to justify wrecking her own life? We talked on for another hour, inconclusively, and I remembered a passage in Ghada Karmi’s remarkable autobiography, In Search of Fatima. The author, born in Palestine but reared and educated in England, had in many ways been ‘Westernised’ by the age of nineteen. Yet as a young woman she couldn’t oppose her father’s decision that she should become a doctor.

  … I knew with resignation that, as an Arab daughter, I had no choice but to obey … Defying my father in the context of our traditional Arab family was something I could not have contemplated. Despite all my intellectual pretensions to having adopted a liberal, non-authoritarian European paradigm, when it came to confronting my father or opposing his wishes, the cultural imperative prevailed.

  As individuals, Ghada’s father and Yara’s father are not comparable. But the power of the cultural imperative too often prevails, regardless of personalities.

  Four months later, I heard that Yara had become a second wife.

  * * *

  On one of our excursions Nita and I hired Nabeel, a young taxi-driver who had moved to Gaza six months previously from the UAE. There his father had ‘found a problem with the government’ and returned hastily to the Strip. Nabeel, aged twenty two, would have preferred to remain in his birthplace but was ordered to accompany the family, which included eight younger siblings; his earning power would be needed.

  One afternoon we called into that same palm-thatched café, where Nabeel fetched drinks (water and Coke) and a hookah. Nita admitted then that for years she’d longed to try a puff. Twice Nabeel urged her to experiment – declared young women were free to smoke as much as they wished in the Emirates – wondered why the Gazan way of life was so ridiculous.

  There followed another futile debate about culture, religion, tradition, customs, family obligations. Nita couldn’t conceive of doing something which would upset her parents. (They were kind, loving parents: I’d met them a few times.) Nabeel remarked that as we were the only patrons, they would be unlikely ever to find out. Her mother said smoking was bad for the health. Emphatically I agreed – but then why may men smoke? Is their health not equally important? Nita exclaimed, ‘I often think that! But the Holy Koran says women mustn’t.’ She looked puzzled when I pointed out that tobacco came from the Americas centuries after Mohammed took direction from Allah. I was reminded of Khalil’s assertion that not only Muslims but all Jews and Christians were forbidden to drink alcohol. ‘The imam said so, in the mosque.’ He looked disbelieving when informed that Christ’s first miracle was turning water into wine and that Jews drink wine as part of their Sabbath ceremonies – and may have a shot of vodka as an optional extra.

  Nabeel questioned Nita about the jilbab – why did all the IUG students have to wear black? Apparently because bright colours draw attention to the individual young woman and thus encourage ‘competition to be noticed’ which is ‘against our religion’. Nabeel laughed scornfully. ‘This is all Wahhabi stuff!’

  I asked about the niqb (full face veil) and Nita explained some women (on the Strip an increasing number) choose it because it’s more respectful to Allah. A visible woman’s face can make her seem more attractive to men – especially ‘bad men’. Also it may tempt her to communicate with people outside the family. I asked, ‘What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘She could smile at people she shouldn’t communicate with, in the market or the street.’

  ‘You mean smiling is forbidden? When she buys fruit or eggs and smiles at the trader as she takes her purchase – that’s wrong, sinful, against the Koran, offends Allah?’

  ‘Yes’, said Nita, ‘it’s wrong – maybe not sinful, but wrong, we shouldn’t do it! But of course most of us do, unless we feel we’re being watched by some jihadists.’

  ‘I think this place needs to go for treatment!’ said Nabeel.

  I agreed. Invariably, people voiced anxiety about my walking alone in the dark; I had regular arguments with serveeces reluctant to put me down not directly outside my destination – because of my gender, not my hostage potential. I mentioned this to my companions and wondered, ‘When these sex-related fears are cultivated, what does it do to a society? When girls are taught to regard all non-related men as possibly “bad”, poised to rape given a chance?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ observed Nita, ‘the related men are the worst.’

  I persisted. ‘Isn’t this danger-mongering insulting to Muslim males? Or, if they’re really so dangerous on the Strip, why not start a movement to civilise them?’

  ‘How?’ asked Nita. ‘By now you know we’ve a big problem, females not correctly dressed are vulnerable to attack!’

  Impatiently I replied, ‘So why don’t the world’s “uncovered” women – the majority – have this problem? Where men are so dangerous, they must have been conditioned to see “incorrectly” dressed women as legitimate prey. That’s why I say it’s time to recondition them. But yes, you’re right – that’s much easier said than done!’

  Such states of mind, on the part of both predator and prey, are self-perpetuating. For most brain-washed Gazans, reconditioning probably won’t take place within the Strip under its present regime.

  In entirely trivial and irritating ways (never mind ethical or pseudo-ethical matters) childhood conditioning can be irreversible. Some of my mature US friends would wet their pants on long motor journeys rather than pee by the wayside – yet these are rational beings in all other respects. (Come to think of it, I myself still feel vaguely uncomfortable if a male accompanying me along a pavement walks on the inside – though no one under seventy would understand why.)

  * * *

  I spent half the next day at Rafah Gate, waiting for someone who didn’t arrive. Normally
vehicles enter Gaza via side-tracks by-passing the main gate, which is opened only for departing vehicles. But that morning one VIP’s 4x4 was allowed to use it and we later heard the Person was an EU official on a four-hour visit to Gaza City – ‘an insult!’ fumed several of my friends.

  Two youngish English-speakers approached, offered coffee, asked permission to sit with me. They were an interesting pair though I suspect I wasn’t seeing them at their best – and vice versa. The Rafah Gate generates an unquiet atmosphere. Nawaf was a classical guitarist anxiously awaiting his brother, due home after a chemotherapy course in Cairo. His friend was more talkative.

  Murad had returned from Sweden three years previously when his father, a former PA security officer, found it necessary to flee to Egypt and dared not come back. Therefore his mother needed her only son at home. Without hesitation he said au revoir to his Swedish wife and two-year-old daughter who could not visit Gaza even if they wished to do so. Ever since the three have been bonded by Skype and Murad said, ‘It makes an ache in my heart’ – he placed a hand on that organ – ‘when Miriam says in Swedish “Daddy come home, come home I want you!”’ However, no inner conflict bothered this parent; as an only son he had to put his mother first – not his own preference, he explained, but Palestinian women are conditioned not to be able to cope without a man. So a Swedish woman suffers … (Or maybe she doesn’t?) Murad couldn’t guess when next he might see his wife and child, both displayed to me on his phone in scores of poses.

  As a highly qualified hydraulic engineer, Murad lived well in Sweden; in Gaza he drove someone else’s taxi while saving up to buy his own. He condemned both Fatah and Hamas as ‘power-seekers not caring about ordinary people who only want peace’. (I seemed to be hearing this refrain more and more often.) His wife had introduced him to beer (‘Not much, you couldn’t afford to get drunk!’) but on the Strip he didn’t really miss it. However, he resented the Islamists’ prohibition régime. He himself loved Gaza but even were it possible he wouldn’t want Miriam to grow up on the Strip. At which point Nawaf’s brother emerged from a serveece – bald and pale – and in the joyous relief of that reunion I was forgotten.

  Around Rafah, and other southern Strip districts, it greatly alarmed me to see quite a few pre-puberty girls in adult garb, securely concealed and hijab-ed; and in those same areas the niqb incidence was higher. Anwar repeatedly lamented that this tightening stranglehold on women’s freedom is too easy in a Gaza so isolated – not comparatively open, like the West Bank, to the ‘corrupting’ influence of Jews and Internationals. Thus, he argued, the blockade reinforces some of the most undesirable elements in Palestinian society: as undesirable, in their very different way, as the PA’s quisling elements.

  This view was apparently validated by the common riposte to my comparison of Gaza’s new hard-linery with the West Bank’s relative moderation – Jewish and International presences have corrupted the West Bank. As one academic put it, ‘You met weak Muslims in other places, here we know how to stay strong, defending the Holy Koran. You should learn that “Muslim” and “Islamic” are different. Some saying “I’m Muslim” are not Islamic, not respecting our Holy Koran.’

  Yet the opposite conclusion to Anwar’s may be drawn from Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction by Malise Ruthven.

  The surge of fundamentalist movements … we are witnessing in many parts of the world is a response to globalization and, more specifically, to the crises for believers that inevitably follows the recognition that there are ways of living and believing other than those deemed to have been decreed by one’s own tradition’s version of the deity.

  Does this not mean that the isolation of the blockaded Strip should lessen hard-linery?

  ‘Not really,’ said Anwar. ‘Gaza is a special case. Remember Hamas has been busy physically resisting the Occupation. And maybe will be again, though we hope not. Without the blockade and the Occupation, Hamas’ moderates would now have much greater influence.’

  Incidentally, Anwar regarded Fundamentalism as the most essential guidebook for all visitors to Gaza.

  The academic quoted above baffled me. He was an immensely likeable man, an eminent Gazan who had travelled widely in pre-blockade times, being respectfully listened to at international conferences. Yet when the conversation turned to Islam he sounded embarrassingly crude as he raked over all the tedious stuff about women being ‘physiologically and emotionally different’, therefore needing to be ‘protected and respected’. I warned him that life among the Palestinians had belatedly aroused within me those anti-male emotions felt two generations ago by Women’s Lib activists. Also I had become a shameless cultural imperialist, no longer willing to tolerate condescending double standards in deference to their being non-European. Example: ‘It’s for women’s protection’ when the custom in question is blatantly for the preservation of male control. Indignantly my friend protested, ‘Allah made the rules, it’s not men being determined to dominate!’ And the rules cannot be modified, must remain as laid down in the seventh century AD.

  When I asked if any women were involved in interpreting the sacred texts I was told only men could interpret, very highly trained scholars of whom there are but a few in each generation. Aware of sounding truculent, I demanded, ‘Why not allow for the unavoidable, undeniable fact that societies and civilisations evolve, change beyond recognition?’

  Again my friend repeated, ‘No modifications allowed! The word of Allah is not changed by fashions, reforms, revolutions or trends. It’s for all time, helping men do what is good and right for society. The Holy Koran protects the family. In the materialistic West, people think themselves separate, not responsible for family and community. The more the West seeks to take over the world, economically and culturally, the more we guard our Holy Koran against those trying to make us imitate others.’

  This friend was a keen Hamas supporter, though not a party member. It gave me some satisfaction, when we next met, to show him a 1999 statement from Yahya Musa, speaking as head of a Political Bureau (Hizb al-Khalas) linked to Hamas:

  All Islamic parties work under the umbrella of Islam … They start from the same point but their differences derive from their interpretation of the Koran and Hadith. The Islam implemented during Mohammed’s life is different from the Islam implemented today or should be. Islam should be implemented according to current conditions. Other groups have a more literal interpretation and want to separate out from current reality. This is the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

  Eight

  Seen from the coast road, UNRWA’s summer camps for ‘refugee’ children form blue blots on the beach. Each is enclosed by high walls of plastic sheeting, curving down to meet the wavelets, and there’s not a child in sight – but the sounds of hordes having fun are reassuringly loud. Since 2010 these recreation spaces (some hundred yards long by sixty yards wide) have perforce become isolated, with something of a prison ambience as one approaches seeking entrance.

  On 23 May 2010 UNRWA’s Director, John Ging, took delivery of a communication containing three bullets (for him not a new experience). In part, the letter said:

  We were shocked when we heard about establishing beach locations for girls at the age of puberty and adolescence aiming to attack Muslims’ honour and morality. You have to know that we will give away our blood and life but we won’t let this happen and will not let you malicious people beat us. So you either leave your plans or wait for your destiny.

  This message had been left with an UNRWA guard who was tied up by thirty or so jihadists, masked and armed, before they burned down a sports facility being constructed for the summer camps. Who were they? Naturally the answer you got depended on whom you asked. A few weeks later, another camp was comprehensively vandalised.

  Anwar suggested as the most obvious suspect one of the Salafists’ armed wings, Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Supporters of God). Before the attacks, they had been circulating leaflets denounc
ing the employment of women teachers in boys’ schools and the sponsoring of North American and European trips for female students.

  My Fatah friends had no doubt: ‘Definitely Hamas, they’re so angry about competition with their own brainwashing holiday camps.’

  ‘Of course it’s Salafists,’ said my Hamas friends, ‘they know Ging wants mixed camps.’ Deeb was slightly on the defensive. ‘Why would Hamas attack? We’re the government, if we want to close a camp we order it to close!’ Which made sense, but that sort of logic doesn’t always operate on the Strip. However, the relevant Ministry was now providing guards for all beach camps. And their purdah plastic walls meant nobody could be scandalised by the sight of bare-headed little girls making sandcastles, and playing such risqué games as leapfrog and blind man’s buff, while ‘malicious’ supervisors taught females how to swim (fully clothed), and dance and perform acrobatic tricks – and even imitate their brothers by practising breakdancing which in Islamic eyes is a vile perversion.

  Because of Gaza’s fast-growing refugee population each batch of schoolchildren (aged six to sixteen) can be happy campers for only two weeks of their three-month summer holiday. The adult/child ratio is 15 to 100 and the campers are so happy that discipline is maintained without any hint of authoritarianism. I’d expected these supervisors to be dutiful rather than enthusiastic yet they, too, were obviously enjoying themselves. To me, coming from a society where rebellious adolescent tendencies are cultivated by The Market, these intergenerational relationships seemed extraordinarily harmonious.

  My two happy days as a guest at girls’ camps showed UNRWA at its best. I arrived as the first busloads were scampering down the sand dunes, being monitored from a dormobile-style police post parked by the roadside. Each girl carried her own picnic and, for security reasons, all had to queue at the one narrow opening in the tarpaulin. For us, confinement to these plastic cages would not induce ‘seaside’ elation; knowing from where these children come, I could empathise with their sense of release. Once beyond eye-reach of the male population they discarded their ‘correct’ street attire, as did most of the adults.