The animals gather to plan a coup. They consider poisoning the Royal Pond or kidnapping some of Jim’s children to ransom them for water. They decide, instead, to feed Jim and his royal family a banquet of magic mushrooms. The plan works. The stoned crocodiles become so convinced they’ve grown wings that they rush to the cliff and hurl themselves over the edge to their deaths. “We dodged a bullet—what a narrow escape,” the other animals cry out. “We will vote much better next time.” The end.
I’ve never read a stranger children’s book than Election Day, but I didn’t understand Hamas’s objections until a volunteer at Tamer’s Gaza office explained it to me. “Don’t you see?” he said. “The lion is yellow. This is the color of the Fatah flag. And the crocodile is green, the color of Hamas.” The plot of Election Day too closely resembled the 2007 election in Gaza, when a security-obsessed party of green unseated the long-reigning party of yellow. Critics accuse Hamas officials of crocodile-levels of corruption and nepotism. Even Jim’s two-way border guards echo Hamas’s frequent refusal to grant exit visas to its political opponents. Apparently, Hamas did not want Gaza’s children to associate their party with the book’s villains or, I suspect, to give them any revolutionary ideas.
I contacted the book’s original French author. Roy hadn’t heard about the ban. She told me she wrote Election Day as an allegory of another election, the 2002 French presidential contest that saw the troubling rise of the right-wing National Front party. Jim the crocodile was named after National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Hamas’s censure of the book surprised Roy, but not the staff at Tamer. Nor did it stop them from reprinting the book in 2008 as a gift for the children of Gaza, who had just endured another war. Tamer also adapted the book into a play that they performed in eighteen different places around Gaza. In the end, the Hamas ban of Election Day had fewer teeth than Jim the Crocodile.
On a Saturday, I met with a Tamer employee named Hani to attend the final event of the Baba Read to Me Campaign, an annual Tamer program that encourages parents, especially fathers, to read to their children. Hani raced his rental car along the coastal road to the Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza. Like the other camps I’d seen, Deir al-Balah consists of mostly unadorned cinder block buildings. A field of tall date palms towers over the camp, and ramshackle fishermen’s huts line the beach. “Everyone in Deir al-Balah is a fisherman now,” Hani told me, but many of the families came from a farming village called Kawkaba where, before 1948, they lived off grain, grapes, and figs. Nearly eight hundred Palestinians from Kawkaba fled to Gaza during the Nakba.
The community had gathered in the bright, walled-in courtyard of Deir al-Balah’s Women’s Program Center. Women, all in hijab, occupied the rows of plastic chairs at one end while their children sat cross-legged in front of them. All the babas—fathers, grandfathers, or male relatives standing in for them—were the honored guests of the event and sat sprawled on thin foam mattresses laid around the perimeter of the courtyard. Some wore red keffiyehs held in place with black cords, but all had beards and cell phones in common. Everyone seemed excited. “The men are happy to see the changes in the children that the Tamer programs inspire,” Hani said. “They enjoy school more. Their grades improve. They start to write stories. This makes their fathers proud.”
Hami and I sat on the mats beside a group of local sheikhs. Their leader sat next to me. He wore an impeccable white beard and a white taqiyah on his head. His blazer and brown robe smelled of a spicy woodsy fragrance often worn by important men in Palestine. The sheikh welcomed me and urged me to sit closer, but I opted to lean against a metal pole holding up the canopy. Even after all my time on the foam mats of the Middle East, I have never learned how to sit comfortably cross-legged unless I can prop my back against something.
A wide brazier stood in the center of the courtyard with a half-dozen brass coffee urns warming on the hot coals. Tall clay vessels supported trays of tiny ceramic cups and fresh dates. After Tamer volunteers served the guests, they unveiled a new mural painted on the courtyard wall depicting scenes from the camp: a refugee house, clothing hanging on a line, the lifeguard tower that stands on the nearby beach. Afterward, another volunteer recited a well-known folktale the older people in the audience recognized. Then my sheikh, who usually gives the Friday sermon at the local mosque, stood to address the crowd with a speech about the important roles of fathers, mothers, schools, and mosques in the upbringing of children. In particular, he urged the children to respect and honor their fathers “so that your own sons will help you in the future.”
Then the volunteers handed out books to each of the babas and urged them to read it to their children. Two or three children crowded each baba to hear the story. The Western practice of parents reading bedtime stories to their children is not common in Palestine, and the children enjoyed the novelty of having their baba read to them and hold up the illustrations for them to see. Afterward, another Tamer volunteer encouraged the children to read a story every day. “And not just your schoolbooks. Read stories you like to read.”
A troupe of skilled dancers followed the storytelling session. They wore black pants and shirts, purple vests, and keffiyehs tied on their heads. They performed a traditional wedding dabke, then a modern dance to a song called “The Dove of al-Aqsa.” The dance started with the performers pretending to hurl stones at an invisible enemy. One boy mimed being shot, and the other dancers surrounded him to mourn his death. The dance ended with fists in the air. In a final speech, an organizer insisted that “al-Quds will return to us if we know our culture.”
These final words struck me. They suggest the pathway to justice, embodied best by Jerusalem’s return to the Palestinians, is paved with culture. Art will bring change more than bullets, bombs, or politics. A people who continue to read their own stories and poems, who sing their songs and dance their dances, cannot be defeated. They sing, dance, and write themselves a continued existence. Just as the old books in the Khalidi Library testified to the historical presence of the Palestinians on this land, these new books, and their young readers, ensure this presence endures.
There are those who would interpret this longing for al-Aqsa as a call for Israel’s destruction and a declaration of war. They forget the war was declared long ago and three generations of Palestinians have known nothing but. To reach for Jerusalem is to express Palestinian resolve—to remember all they’ve lost and what they continue to lose.
A spray-painted portrait of author Khaled Juma colors a wall near Karawan Café. His face, adorned with glasses and a mess of black hair, hovers over a depiction of the border wall and a tangle of blue graffiti that reads, “They are as beautiful as the cities they came from,” the title of one of Khaled’s poems. Though I met Juma in Ramallah, where he now lives, he reigns as one of Gaza’s most beloved authors.
The Juma family fled to Gaza during the Nakba from a village called Hatta, and Khaled was born in the al-Shaboura refugee camp in 1965. He doesn’t remember when he started writing, but his mother recalls how Khaled made up lyrics to his favorite songs when he forgot the original words. He wrote his first poem when he was seventeen years old: an ode to a sunrise Khaled now considers “very silly.”
Khaled published his first poetry collection in 1992. His greatest challenge as a poet, he said, was to rid his own poems of Mahmoud Darwish’s voice. “That is why I waited until I was twenty-seven years old to publish my first book of poetry, because I felt there was something that was not me in my poems,” Khaled said. “The moment I could show that Darwish was out of my poems, I started to publish them. I love him, but I don’t want to be a copy of him.”
Khaled placed poems in newspapers and magazines while pursuing a degree in architectural drawing from Hebron University—back before the blockade, when Palestinians could easily travel to and from Gaza. Architectural drawing bored him, but he worked as a draftsman for the local municipality for over a decade before quitting in 1998 to write full-time and head the
culture department of the Palestinian Authority’s news agency.
In 1992, Khaled wrote a song for a Tamer Institute reading campaign that encouraged children to read books in order to find answers to all of their questions. Why is the moon a circle and not a square? Ask a book. Why does rain fall in the winter and not the summer? Ask a book. Tamer’s campaign organizers loved the song. So did the children. “Once they put the song to music it was like a bomb going off. Every child in Gaza was singing it.”
The song’s success inspired Khaled to write his first children’s book, a tale about the importance of hygiene called Diaries of a Germ. He wrote seventeen more books for children, many published by Tamer with whimsical titles like The Rabbit Who Did Not Like His Name and Sheep Do Not Eat Cats. “I’ve written articles, novels, and poems, and I am telling you the 100 percent truth that writing for children is the most difficult thing you can do in your life,” Khaled said. “You have to turn yourself into a child, and that is difficult. You have to lose everything you’ve learned after you’ve turned six years old. You have to give it all away.”
An abundance of self-confidence can poison a children’s writer, Khaled said. “When you write for children, you have to be scared all the time. They either like your story or dislike it. They love or hate. They don’t have something in between.” Before Khaled sends new work to his publisher, he gathers a few children into an informal focus group and lets them read his manuscript. “Then I take their notes,” he said. Adult readers can critique Khaled’s language or comment on the messages his stories attempt to convey, but the children don’t care. Khaled’s young readers don’t want to be lectured to. “They want the good guys to win. They want the bad guys to lose. They want to be happy. That is what they are looking for. They are not looking for signs and struggles.”
Despite his success in the genre, Khaled doesn’t consider himself a children’s writer. “I am a poet doing other things,” he said. In his poems, Khaled aims to “shine a light on the things that people can’t see.” Instead of depicting a bereft mother dancing for the cameras at her martyred son’s funeral, Khaled imagines her alone at night, long after the public theatrics of mourning, staring at her son’s photo. Instead of writing about the overt humiliations imposed by Israel’s checkpoints, Khaled describes how a closed crossing once prevented his friend’s fiancée from leaving Gaza. “He was happy,” Khaled said. “The checkpoint made his lover return to him.”
Khaled remembers fondly the time between the Intifadas. “Gaza was open,” he said. PA salaries were being paid, and workers could cross the border to high-paying jobs in Israel. Gazan cinemas, restaurants, and hotels were busy. Licensed clubs and dance halls—where Gaza’s Nawar, or “Gypsies,” danced onstage—were full of men drinking and smoking. Stores sold alcohol and rented videos. Then, in 2000, the Second Intifada began and weakened the Palestinian Authority. Hamas operatives in Gaza saw an opportunity to flex. The Intifada was hardly two weeks old when vandals torched the liquor stores. Then the video stores, the cinemas, and the beachside nightclubs were burned down. “Hamas was ready,” Khaled said. “They had been hiding. You think they stole Gaza just in one night? They were prepared. For thirty years they had been preparing.”
In 2005, Hamas took erroneous credit for Israel’s decision to force Jewish settlers out of Gaza. Khaled remembers carloads of hamsawi driving around Gaza City, waving their flags and declaring, “We did this.” Gazans were happy to see the settlers go, but their absence put Gaza into immediate peril. With no Israelis left in Gaza, Khaled said, the Israeli government “started to see Gaza as another country that they could bomb and fight. Before, Israel was the occupation. Now the situation is much more dangerous.”
Hamas also put a chill on Gaza’s writing community, but the lack of attention Hamas paid to Khaled unnerved him. “I knew that a few of my articles were on Ismail Haniya’s desk,” Khaled said, referring to the Hamas leader in Gaza at the time. “Every other writer Hamas investigated was asked about ‘the communist Khaled Juma.’ But I was never called in myself. Why did they not send for me? I was scared.”
“Did you have relationships with the communists in Gaza?” I asked.
“Do you know what Hamas means by communists? They mean anyone who is not Hamas.”
A PA contact helped Khaled secure a permit to leave Gaza and enter the West Bank for a wedding in 2014. On his second day in Ramallah, Khaled asked a friend to bring him to Darwish’s grave. They spent twenty minutes standing in front of the tombstone. “Nobody spoke,” Khaled told me. “We just stood there.” Darwish’s gravestone is inscribed with lines from his poem “The Pigeons Fly.”
Sleep, my love
With my hair over you, peace be on you.
Khaled didn’t believe these were the verses Darwish would have chosen for his gravestone. So Khaled lifted a fistful of soil from the nearby garden and scattered it over the white stone. Then he wrote with his finger a few lines from one of Darwish’s last poems:
Tell the absence: You missed me
And I am present . . . to complete you
“I think he wrote this to be put on his grave,” Khaled said. “It is something very philosophical. Very deep. Very beautiful.” Khaled held up his phone and showed me a photo of his gravestone edit. Darwish’s words curled through a thin dusting of reddish soil.
Khaled decided to stay in Ramallah for a few months after the wedding to finish a project with his West Bank colleagues. That way, he’d have the chance to meet with the people he worked with face-to-face rather than having to rely on dropped phone calls, unreliable Skype connections, and Gaza’s buggy internet service. When 2014’s summer war began, Khaled could not go home. He was forced to watch the fighting from a distance. “I lost twelve kilograms during the war, just sitting and writing. Watching the TV and my mobile and the internet. Sleeping for only one hour a day.”
The international media’s coverage of the wars frustrated Khaled. Journalists act as accountants rather than storytellers, tallying corpses but ignoring the lives that remain. He reminded me of what Atef wrote about war reducing humanity to mere numbers. “The media shows only demolished houses and dead people. The sound of blood is louder than the sound of tears,” Khaled said. “But the most dangerous thing that happens in war is what is not said, what is not photographed, and what is not talked about.”
Instead of describing the dead, Khaled wrote about the injured, especially those who lost limbs and for whom the war never ends. “At first, people will say they are champions, but after a time, they are just handicapped.” He wrote about the storehouse of memories lost each time a family home is destroyed, about the guilt and trauma endured by fathers who cannot keep their children safe, and the ironic cruelty of rockets. “Explosions travel faster than sound,” Khaled said, “so if you can hear the rockets, then you are alive. You can’t hear what kills you because it kills you before you hear it.” Even when he writes about the children killed in the 2014 war, as he did in his heartbreaking poem “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza,” Khaled writes about their lives rather than their deaths:
Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me
with your screams under my window.
You who filled every morning
with rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase
and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back,
and scream as you want and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back.
Just come back . . .
Khaled planned on returning to Gaza until ISIS threatened to slit his throat. In December 2014, the Gaza affiliate of the Sunni extremist group fighting in Syria and Iraq published a statement on Facebook. The notice accused eighteen Gazan poets, authors, and journalists of apostasy and immoral writings and threatened to kill them within three days if they did not repent. Khaled’s name was on the list. Few consider
ed the threat serious. Some believed Hamas wrote the notice to garner support against suspected ISIS threats. For its part, Hamas denied writing the statement and claimed the Gaza ISIS affiliate did not exist at all. Three days later, instead of the promised executions, a second Facebook notice appeared, apologizing for the first. The whole episode was bizarre, and many dismissed it as a bad joke.
Khaled, though, wasn’t laughing. The ISIS letter spooked him, and he hasn’t returned to Gaza since.
“But that list turned out to be a hoax,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. If someone stupid reads that, they will not think about whether it is fake or not. If he shoots me, it doesn’t matter.”
Actor and theater impresario Jamal Abu al-Qumsan wanted a place where Gaza’s writers, artists, and intellectuals could meet and drink cheap coffee. “Many intellectuals don’t have any money,” he explained. He opened a café in a gallery inside Gaza’s Ministry of Culture building in 2005 and named it, suitably, Gallery Café.
The place quickly evolved into an impromptu arts center and the informal heart of Gaza’s cultural community. “I wanted to put a sign on the door that said, ‘There is no need to shake hands at Gallery, because everyone already knows each other here.’” Established writers like Gharib Asqalani and Khaled Juma used to come and give readings, while young poets came to seek their advice or perform poems aloud in front of Gallery audiences. Stage and film actors met over tea and nargileh with directors and producers. Musicians rehearsed at the café’s tables—though Jamal once exiled a young oud player to a table in the farthest corner of the café until his atonal playing improved. Jamal’s customers floated from table to table, frustrating the waiters when the time came to pay their bills. “I had a big book of unpaid tabs,” Jamal said.
When Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, officials told Jamal he could continue to operate his café at the ministry as long as he enforced separate sections for men and women. Hamas also insisted Jamal prohibit his female customers from smoking nargileh or playing music. Jamal feared the new rules would destroy the free and congenial atmosphere he’d fostered, so he decided to move Gallery elsewhere. Owners of a café called Laturna offered Jamal a partnership, but he turned them down. Jamal knew they were proper businessmen who wouldn’t tolerate his ease with unpaid bills. So Jamal rented a large outdoor space that used to belong to the construction workers union. He called the place the Union Gallery Café, but didn’t put up a sign. Jamal didn’t want Hamas to know where it was. Three thousand customers came to the new café’s opening day.
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