A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  Some groups were organised, others formed spontaneously to dance, sing, play a space-limited version of volleyball or attempt gymnastic feats with improvised equipment – the real thing having gone up in flames. Quite often linguistically ambitious seniors gathered around me to improve their English. Others preferred sitting in circles on the sand, chatting and giggling and experimenting with cosmetics; these trickle through the tunnels and are, according to Yara, of dangerously poor quality. One girl, messily applying mascara, informed me with a wide grin, ‘Salafists hate this!’

  The adults, as UNRWA staff, were understandably wary of discussing with a stranger anything remotely political. In contrast, several older girls were healthily uninhibited in their criticisms of officialdom. Especially they condemned the strict dress code regulations, announced in July 2009, which allow government schools to expel pupils who refuse to exchange their jeans and shirts/sweaters for IUG-style jilbabs. This Salafist-pleasing move was made – Deeb told me – to avoid attacks on the schools or their pupils. Yet to many it looked like another example of the unsettling fuzziness surrounding Hamas qua ruling authority. Several girls mocked the Education Ministry for imposing such rules by remote control – countering complaints by blaming individual school heads.

  In general these youngsters were an ebullient lot, upholding the Palestinians’ hard-earned reputation for resilience. But I remembered Yara’s comment that those most in need of such breaks don’t get them: can’t afford the picnics – or feel self-conscious about threadbare garments – or have been too traumatised by Cast Lead and other horrors to feel secure away from their home corner (too often literally a corner).

  * * *

  At least one of Gaza’s clouds has a silver lining; the blockade has driven farmers back to organic agriculture. Since 2007 the chemical fertilisers and pesticides once so popular have not been available and the ancients of my generation, who can remember ‘how things were’, find themselves in great demand as agricultural advisors. It helps that the Minister of Agriculture, Dr Mohammed al-Agha, is an IUG professor of environmental science. In 2010 the government launched a ten-year programme designed to restore traditional farming methods. This rewarded the hitherto ignored preaching of Gaza’s Safe Agriculture Producers’ Society whose Director, Abd el-Munem, announced: ‘The siege gives us our first opportunity to persuade cultivators that chemical-free growing can work.’

  Bader, another of Anwar’s numerous grand-nephews, had recently upset his parents by dropping out of university and becoming an apprentice with Palestinian Environmental Friends. He was a most engaging young man, full of hope for the Strip’s organic future and choosing not to think about its political future. ‘Allah is planning what to do, we must wait to see that plan.’ He described himself as ‘training to be a dung consultant’ and invited me to admire his workplace.

  In a pungent palm grove, near fields of raised strawberry beds, Bader proudly led me between mounds of rotting foliage and mature dung collected from farmers all over the area. These fertilisers are applied in alternate layers, having been chopped up by a neat home-made mill not unlike a concrete mixer and designed locally; nothing of the sort would be allowed past Israel’s border guards. ‘We might develop a nuclear weapon in it!’ chuckled Bader. This enterprise is now producing about 600 tons of fertiliser annually at US$100 per ton – less than half the price of the only available Israeli fertiliser, derived from sewage and distrusted by the Ministry of Health.

  A short serveece ride took us to the central Strip where I was suitably impressed by a fish-cum-vegetable farm; fish-enriched water is delivered by drip irrigation to sandy plots of carrots, tomatoes, rocket and spinach. But for the foreseeable future – Bader sadly explained – Gazan produce will be unable to gain organic certification since the relevant inspectors are excluded from the Strip. When next I met Yara she opined that this absence of inspectors had one advantage; they would certainly object to the use of child labour. And at least four families in her neighbourhood were largely dependent on the admittedly meagre wages earned by their pre-puberty children. ‘Poverty isn’t just a statistic in Gaza,’ said Yara. ‘It’s for real.’

  * * *

  I spent memorable evenings in the home of Dr Nasser Abu Shabaan, surgeon in Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital. I had first heard his name during Cast Lead, in Beit Sahour, where Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh was my host. When the IDF began to fire white phosphorus shells into Gaza, Mazin’s advice was sought. I remember wandering off to the Shepherds’ Field, sick with horror, while he tried to fax al-Shifa. The IDF couldn’t deny that war crime. About 200 155-millimetre shells were fired into the Strip, where people subsequently collected the canisters to present as evidence to Amnesty International investigators.

  As my base was close to al-Shifa, Nasser picked me up at 6.30 pm when he usually came off duty. (Usually but not always; in any emergency he remained available.) One evening Nita met him briefly and afterwards remarked that he looked more like a film star than a surgeon and should have operated in another sort of theatre. I saw what she meant; Nasser is very tall and well built with classical Arab features. But his old-fashioned graciousness and compassionate temperament might not have been appreciated in Hollywood.

  At our first meeting, as we drove to the Shabaan flat in a luxury (by Strip standards) apartment block on the edge of Gaza City, Nasser put his background in a nutshell. The patrilineal great-grandfather was a wealthy merchant operating on the Yemen– Gaza trade route. Grandfather distinguished himself as an Arabic scholar at Alexandria University, fought with the British army during the First World War and died soon after, leaving his widow to raise a large brood on a small income. When Father found work as a minor civil servant in Jerusalem he resolved to put his eldest son through medical school in Cairo. Nasser graduated with honours, quickly achieved FRCS status and spent most of his working life in Saudi Arabia. In 2003 he decided to return home, as the Second Intifada was taking its toll on the Strip. His Saudi monthly salary was US$10,000 and al-Shifa offered only $1,200 for a much longer working day – and, often, night. ‘But that was no problem,’ said Nasser. ‘We’d saved enough.’ Now he and his multi-talented and very beautiful wife (Nita might say ‘another film star’) work with various voluntary projects including developing courses in Primary Trauma Care, established in Gaza by two English doctors, John Beavis and Terence English.

  As Nasser remarked, his family history well illustrates the reverse-globalisation of our time. It was easy for great-grandfather to trade personally with the Yemen – sometimes accompanying his camel caravans to and fro, not merely doing financial deals by computer. For his grandfather it was easy to study in Alexandria, and nothing hindered his father from becoming a cog in the Mandatory machine in Jerusalem while maintaining important links with Sa’na, Cairo, Alexandria and Gaza. Now, despite air travel, middle-eastern political borders curtail most people’s movements.

  In an elegant fifth-floor drawing-room one window’s venetian blind was half-closed to shut out Cast Lead’s nearby devastation. Mrs Shabaan’s English was as fluent as her husband’s and we talked of many things while far in the background two adored grandchildren were being high-spirited in a civilised way and their willowy mother (inches taller than her husband) was preparing supper. I learned then that among the generality of Muslims the pill and condoms are approved contraceptives and hysterectomies are allowed for medical reasons but the very notion of vasectomy made both my host and hostess flinch. After all, marriage’s main objective is to provide men with children – preferably sons. To voluntarily make oneself sterile – well, that’s a twisted denial of Allah’s plan for humankind. Such aberrations inspire Muslims to try to shield their communities from Western influences.

  Not until the younger generations had left for home did Nasser talk about Cast Lead; during those three weeks he rarely got more than one hour’s sleep at a stretch.

  When a white phosphorus shell hit the Halima farmhouse, at Siyafa village, the fat
her and four of his nine children were killed, his wife and the other children grievously burned. Their neighbours, terrified by this uncontrollable mass incineration of human bodies, fled across the fields. The survivors were brought to al-Shifa and Nasser described the bewildered frustration of his team, who at first didn’t know what they were dealing with. ‘We had never before seen anything like these burns. They reached down to bone and muscle and continued to smoke for hours and that smoke had a sickening stench.’ Finally, Nasser and a colleague ‘took out a piece of foreign matter’ and the colleague identified it as white phosphorus. That was the first of dozens of similar cases.

  The IDF routinely used these munitions. On contact with air, white phosphorus ignites and continues to burn at 816°C until completely starved of oxygen – hence the smoking wounds, before Nasser and his team learned how to cope. Each air-bursting artillery shell spreads 116 burning wedges over a radius of, on average, 125 metres from blast point. The IDF deliberately fired phosphorus into densely populated areas. Among its public targets were al-Quds hospital, the Red Crescent headquarters, UNRWA’s main Gaza City compound and an UNRWA school in Beit Lahia where more than 1600 ‘displaced persons’ (bombed out of their homes) were sheltering.

  Khoza’a village was declared a ‘closed military zone’ before being attacked. Six people died at once, enveloped in flames; more than a score were deeply burned and permission to evacuate them was refused. A Red Crescent ambulance, defying this ban, attracted more white phosphorus. Gazan paramedics can have no masks effective against this smoke. Its victims may fall unconscious for three or four hours, then seem to recover and be sent home – only to return soon, in agony, their extensively burnt lungs not responsive to treatment. In many cases, as the body gradually absorbs the white phosphorus chemical, potentially fatal damage is caused to all the major organs. Perhaps Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli Prime Minister, had this in mind when he warned: ‘Rockets from Gaza will bring a severe and disproportionate response.’

  Nasser also treated scores of injuries inflicted by other ‘innovative’ weapons. Some patients, apparently merely in shock when admitted, with not a mark to be seen on their bodies, began to deteriorate within hours – and within a few more hours were dead. Post-mortems revealed internal injuries consistent with the use of thermobaric weapons which Nasser showed me, close up and in colour, on his computer. This ‘portfolio’ included melted brains, shredded lungs, cooked livers, exploded kidneys. Do arms manufacturers and their politician customers ever look at such pictures? Do they ever think about children or parents gazing at bodies unidentifiable as their children or parents – mangled beyond recognition as human beings … And why did the Quartet not demand an end to war crimes during those hideous three weeks? Instead, the Goldstone Report has been ‘managed’ to Israel’s satisfaction, proving yet again – to quote Richard Falk – that ‘The United Nations shows neither the capacity nor the will to implement its own resolutions.’

  The current drugs shortage had compelled Nasser to postpone or cancel numerous operations and many more patients urgently needed to leave the Strip. In May 2011, 92 per cent of applicants for permits to seek medical treatments elsewhere were successful – a considerable improvement on the 2010 monthly average. However, Israel habitually uses slow-motion bureaucracy to torture the gravely ill and their families. The granting of the original permit can still leave patients immobilised at the Erez crossing amidst a tangle of red tape and quite a few die while this is being unknotted. The Shabaans were particularly concerned about the number of IDF-maimed (far in excess of al-Wafa’s capacity) for whom so little can be done on the Strip. In many cases, advanced medical technology could make a life-changing difference were those victims free to travel. No wonder most Gazans want foreign campaigners to emphasise their demand for freedom rather than material ‘aid’. Incidentally, I relished Nasser’s only half-joking comment that Hamas’ insistence on its democratic right to rule on the Strip had helped the tiresomely named ‘Arab Spring’.

  Then Nasser gave me the good news. Dialysis patients’ timetables had recently been adjusted to make the most of the machines still in working order. And at the beginning of June the Health Ministry had reluctantly authorised the reuse of some ‘disposables’. As a lay person I refrained from comment but my (rather prominent) Green bit reckoned this ‘emergency measure’ might be no bad thing. Octogenarians can remember hospital equipment being routinely sterilised before ‘disposables’ came on stream to generate indecent profits for their manufacturers. Alas! there will soon be no one left to bear witness to those days when we were comparatively free of The Market.

  * * *

  M— had suggested (by mobile) our meeting on the beach, under the awning of a makeshift café, soon after sunrise. As he approached (elderly, tallish, neatly bearded, still wearing his prayer-gown) I noticed two soberly dressed youths seating themselves half-behind the café trestle-table; they were out of earshot but could keep the surrounding beach – as yet almost deserted – under surveillance.

  M— was an old friend of Said Siam, the first Hamas Minister for the Interior, who had topped the poll in Gaza in January 2006. Back in the ’90s, M— told me, while resentment of Oslo was deepening and the Second Intifada brewing, Said had de facto resigned himself to the existence of the State of Israel and was developing his political thinking in accordance with that difficult readjustment. (No comparable adjustments were ever made on the Zionist side.) M— added, ‘I say de facto because he couldn’t bring himself to put it in simple Arabic. He conveyed it clearly without being explicit. To me that seemed a mistake and I told him so. But he had a tangled constituency to consider.’

  Like Dr al-Zahar, Said didn’t last long in the cabinet once attempts began to regain Western funding (lost after the election). On my first (2008) visit to Israel I had heard him included in lists of hardliners who were feared and hated. ‘Hardliner’ is in this context an ambiguous term. It can mean an Islamist fanatic, or a Palestinian who has no scruples about killing Israeli civilians because Israeli soldiers kill (with impunity) so many Palestinian civilians of both sexes and all ages. Or it can, as in Said’s case, mean a Palestinian who greatly upsets Zionists because his realistic grasp of the current political situation and its historical background is frequently and clearly articulated. Mr Siam (a schoolteacher by profession) saw that the indispensable keystone for peace-building is Zionism’s recognition of the injustices done to a people who, as human beings, have certain basic rights. And this, as M— pointed out, is precisely what the famous Olga Appeal, discussed below, argued a few years later.

  Said Siam had long been in the IDF assassins’ sights and after a few near misses a targeted bombing ‘eliminated’ him towards the end of Cast Lead. Israel’s long-term policy of political assassinations has incidentally drawn attention to Hamas’ high quota of talented leaders. As M— shrewdly observed, Zionists fear Hamas’ collective brain-power much more than its rocket stockpile. He invited me to imagine peace negotiations in which all Hamas’ murdered leaders were sitting opposite the best and the brightest from Zionism’s governing class, everyone peace-seeking in earnest and the convener a neutral, if such exists. Given the quality of the Zionist case, and the sort of military/political hybrids who come to power in Israel, the Palestinians couldn’t fail to win every round.

  M— referred scathingly to those official visitors to Gaza (like the VIP I saw zooming through at Rafah) who spend their few hours on the Strip meeting UNRWA representatives and NGO staff but never any member of the democratically elected government. We mustn’t talk to ‘terrorists’, our Washington bosses would never forgive that … Gaza’s present Prime Minster is Ismail Haniyeh, an Arabic literature scholar and a level-headed leader who has always belonged to Hamas’ political wing and narrowly escaped an assassin on 6 September 2003. Immediately after the election he announced that ‘Hamas will formulate its own peace plan, with a long-term truce with Israel at its centre’. By long-term, M— said, Isma
il meant 10 or 15 years – preferably 15, by the end of which period, it was hoped, mindsets all round might have shifted. The international media paid little attention to this statement (‘never trust a terrorist!’) but Ha’aretz had a cheerful headline: ‘Hamas Appoints Moderates as PM, Speaker of PLC’ (17 February). Exactly one week later Ynet reported that Avi Dichter, former Shin Bet chief, Ariel Sharon’s main advisor and now Minister of Internal Security, had proclaimed, ‘The Hamas top man Haniyeh is a legitimate assassination target.’

  As M— commented, only the peculiarly twisted Zionist mind could use this phrase. According to Chambers, to assassinate is ‘to murder by surprise or secret assault; to murder (especially a prominent person) violently, often publicly’. Killing may be legal in self-defence, if one cannot otherwise avoid being killed, but anyone above the mental age of seven can identify ‘legitimate assassination’ as a contradiction in terms. However, Israel routinely deals with political opponents by murdering them and its boast to have made ‘political assassination internationally acceptable’ seems justified, given the muted global reaction to such behaviour.

  M— saw a close connection between Zionism’s contempt for the law (international or domestic) and Israel’s refusal to provide that ‘keystone’ Said had spoken of by accepting responsibility for past or present crimes. Which took us back to the Olga Appeal.