Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

The IDF considers the roof knocking evidence of its efforts to spare civilian lives. But even when this works, the practice can feel like punishment. I heard stories of families who heeded numerous warning calls and roof knocks, each time scrambling terrified from their homes, but no missile ever struck. These false alarms impose their own acute cruelty on families who are forced, over and over, to flee missiles that may never come, each time wondering if this time the warnings will hold true.

  Rana was born in Minsk in 1997 to a Belarusian mother and a Ghazzawi father. The two met in Belarus, where her father was studying law. Many Gazan men traveled to former Eastern Bloc countries for university in the open days between Intifadas, and many returned with new wives and children. “You will find here a lot of people my age who are half Belarusian, half Russian, or half Ukrainian.” Rana came to Gaza with her parents when she was five years old and her father found work as a lawyer for the PA.

  Tania, Rana’s mother, studied English literature in Belarus and gave Rana books about Cinderella and Pippi Longstocking. She started writing her own stories in the third grade. “In my stories, Pippi Longstocking would come to my house and have dinner with me,” Rana said. Her parents enrolled her in workshops at the Tamer Institute, where she worked with Khaled Juma and Atef Abu Saif. “I was lucky to be in a family that gave me the space to be myself,” she said.

  Rana most enjoys creating lives for the characters she invents in her stories. “If I had to choose a job, I would choose the job of God,” Rana said. She paused, then added, “I am sorry. I am not religious.” Most of the time, Rana publishes her stories on her Facebook page, but one piece, titled “The Bus Mirror,” earned inclusion in a Swedish-produced anthology of writing by Gazan youth called Novell Gaza. In 2015, Rana was among thirty-five young writers chosen from Arabic-speaking countries, Russia, China, and the United States to attend the two-week Between the Lines program at the University of Iowa. She was the only Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza to be accepted into the program.

  Unlike the other Palestinian writers I met, in Gaza and elsewhere, Rana does not craft Palestinian lives on the page. “I am trying to create my own world,” Rana said. “To escape what I see in Gaza.” Rana sets her often romantic short stories in locales that are vaguely European, and she rarely gives her characters Arab-sounding names. “Atef said I should try writing something from my reality. But I can’t. I can’t imagine anything from here. When it comes to writing a story, I will never write about Gaza.”

  If Gharib Asqalani represents the first generation of Palestinian writers, who wrote in the service of the nationalist cause, and Atef represents the second generation, who traded nationalist symbols for the details of a regular Palestinian life, then perhaps Rana represents the next generation: men and women who are not compelled to portray Palestine at all. I asked her if she feels any responsibility to write Palestinian stories. “I feel a responsibility to the people,” she said. “Not to the cause.” Rana bristles at those who talk about Palestine solely in relation to borders and territory. “When they say ‘land,’ I say, ‘Go fuck yourself with your land. This is not about the land. It is about the people.’” She also resents the Palestinian tendency to neglect the future in favor of the past. Rana sees little value in simply enumerating lost lives and stolen villages. Palestinians need forward momentum. “The point is not what happened. The point is what’s next.”

  More than anything, though, Rana wants her writings to reveal that Gazans are normal. “I am under occupation. I lost a lot of my friends and family members during the wars,” Rana said. “But I also think about good-looking guys. Like teenagers all over the world, I have my crazy stuff. You can find me dancing at midnight every night. It is normal. I am trying to act like a normal human being.” She resents the fact that much of the world looks at Gazans as if they are “mentally sick” and in need of help. “Don’t help me,” Rana said. “Understand that I am human.”

  After she graduated from high school, Rana enrolled at Gaza’s al-Azhar University. She was two months into a law program when we met, and things were not going well. “It is not for me. I am dying,” she said, with typical teenage melodrama. She especially despises waking early for lectures and holds particular disdain for her Islamic studies class. “The professor’s voice is really loud, and he keeps shouting the whole lecture. And he just reads from the textbook. So I sit in the back and read Dan Brown.” Rana appreciates the irony of surreptitiously reading The Da Vinci Code during a lecture on religious history in an Islamic university. “I know I am not the ideal university student.”

  Rana would switch from law to psychology the following semester, but her affection for post-secondary education would not increase. “University sucks!” she wrote to tell me a few months later. “I hate mornings and I hate morning people.”

  Najlaa Ataallah wore a blue headscarf with pink stars and a pink sweater when I met her in her living room. She was three months pregnant at the time and her husband, Raghab, served us sage tea and date-filled cookies as we talked about war.

  During the wars of 2008 and 2010, Najlaa felt a distance between herself and the danger. The Israelis launched attacks on specific targets, and there were places in Gaza where she could feel safe. But like I’d been told over and over again, nowhere felt safe in 2014. Najlaa’s family lived on Jal’aa Street in the city center. The safest neighborhood in Gaza, they thought. And yet her cousin was killed by an airstrike only a hundred meters from her front door. “I felt it so close. The sounds of the war happened inside me,” Najlaa said. “From the first minute of the war, I thought these were our last moments in this life; every Gazan will die sooner or later. And when they targeted the towers, I totally believed they would also target our house.”

  In the final week of the war, warplanes attacked three multistory apartment towers in Gaza City. On Saturday, they completely demolished the twelve-story Zafer 4 Tower in Tel al-Hawa and rendered forty-four families homeless. The following Monday, three missiles from an F-16 sheared a side off the sixteen-story Italian Complex, which included fifty residential apartments. And before the sun rose on Tuesday, the last day of the war, Israel bombed the al-Basha Tower. All thirteen floors came crashing down in a heap of rubble. The IDF took care to ensure that the residents of these towers had evacuated before the attacks, and no one died when the buildings came down. But aside from vague suggestions that the towers “housed facilities linked to Palestinian militants,” Israel never explained why it chose to level entire buildings rather than launch more directed attacks on individual apartments. An Amnesty International report suggested that the destruction of the towers was wanton, unjustified, and “intended as a form of collective punishment against the people of Gaza.” It called the attacks a war crime. I’ve heard Gazans refer to them as Gaza’s 9/11.

  As the bombs and buildings fell around her, Najlaa started to write. She posted daily on her blog about her experiences during the bombing. In one entry, Najlaa imagines a boy who, after surviving a night of bombing, vows to reveal his feelings to the girl he fancies:

  After surviving each aggression, you always make a promise to yourself. The promise that if you were to stay alive, you will live and embrace life with more joy than ever before. You will tell the carefree girl in your neighborhood as you observe her walking in and out of her house that you really admire her. In fact, you will tell her that you love her. You will not hold back in reluctance, not even for once. You feel this love exploding inside you as did the explosions that took all the houses in the airstrikes.

  In another post, from the fifth day of the war, Najlaa wrote:

  Shook out of bed from the all the deafening sounds that reached your ears, yet mostly from the vivid scenes of war in your own head. You reach out to feel your body parts, making sure every piece is still in its place. Your head still sits above your neck. You rush to the mirror and examine every detail of your face; you confirm and reassure yourself, “These are my two eyes . . . My nose
. . . My mouth . . .” They are still intact, where they all should be. Neither part is lost nor shattered into remains. You are still in one complete piece, the way your mother had given birth to you.

  Taken as a whole, Najlaa’s blogged diary of the war reveals what it means to be in constant terror. The same fears echo over and over in her work, and the repetition has a cumulative effect. Days of dread piled on Najlaa’s psyche like bodies in a morgue. The scale of her horror is striking and inescapable.

  This writing gave Najlaa no comfort. “When I write, I feel the conflict more. I don’t feel better. I feel the danger so close to my house. So close to my heart. So close to my room.” Najlaa wrote through the war because she knew no other way to express what was happening around her. As a writer, she felt a responsibility to make people outside Gaza understand.

  Najlaa was raised to be a writer. Her mother started giving Najlaa Agatha Christie mysteries to read when she was seven years old and rewarded her good behavior with Russian novels. “I remember reading Crime and Punishment for the first time when I was eleven,” Najlaa said. She started writing her own short stories when she was ten years old and joined the Tamer Institute in her teens to work with writers like Atef Abu Saif and Gharib Asqalani. “They encouraged us to keep this talent inside us,” she said. Her first novel, A Cup of Coffee, followed the life of a girl about Najlaa’s own age who rebelled against the rules and customs of Gazan society. Tamer published Najlaa’s second novel, The Picture, when she was twenty years old. The book focused on the struggles of an overweight teenage boy in Gaza and was named as one of the best 101 books for adolescents in the Arab world.

  Her current novel should have been finished by now. Tamer expected it last year. “I am a little lazy,” Najlaa admitted. The book follows a teenage refugee who dreams of leaving Gaza and continuing his studies elsewhere. “He sees Gaza as a jail,” Najlaa said. “Throughout the novel he asks himself, ‘Why was I born here?’ ‘Why am I in this camp?’ ‘Why is my mother my mother, and my father my father?’” After the split between Fatah and Hamas, many young people in Gaza have these questions and yearn to leave.

  Much of Najlaa’s writing focuses on the intimate physicality of her characters, often with a vivid sensuality that reminded me of Raji Bathish’s work. In a story called “Midnight,” the narrator is a weight-obsessed young woman who describes the feeling of her body after a workout:

  I lie on my irritating bed, remembering to flex my torso and hold myself in a good posture—my thigh, my hands, my flat stomach, and a little bit of love . . . I’ll wash myself, I’ll strain to get my body’s weight over there and get rid of the last few drops of sweat with a little purifying water. My clothes are wet; as I take them off I focus for a moment, trance-like, on my breathing, my increasingly rapid panting. A beautiful body, and a loving power that has grown with each of the twenty years I’ve lived in it for.

  The corporeal evolves into the erotic in Najlaa’s “The Whore of Gaza,” which appeared in The Book of Gaza. The story brings readers into the bedroom of a woman named Azza who works as an escort for men but is still technically a virgin. The story is remarkable for its descriptive scenes of female eroticism rarely seen in the writing of Palestinian women. In one section, Azza lies masturbating on her bed. She fondles her own breasts, “receiving them with her lips, moistening them” before “reaching out for her heavenly center.” The scene ends as she “rubs vigorously, to the point of burning up, feeling the liquid coming out of her, the thrill subsiding.”

  The inner landscape of Azza’s lonely bedroom reflects the claustrophobia of Gaza itself, especially for women, whom Gazan society pressures to conform and behave. Her sexual fantasies aside, Azza most longs for a cigarette, but Gaza denies her even this tiny, physical pleasure. For women, cigarettes are “carved in stone as forbidden.” Azza rages:

  It is not for stupidity that even past the age of thirty I’m afraid of everything! Of the hymen. Of walking accompanied by one of them in public. Of letting a strand of my hair show in case one of them should stop me in the street, scared of my very eyes, and scream at me to cover up. Or of simply being seen with a male friend in a public place where we might talk about things: What will happen to this little place called Gaza? More to the point, what will happen to us? How we have lost or are wasting our lives, draping ourselves in sins we haven’t committed or that we fear committing!

  Najlaa wanted to reveal the inner social lives of women in Gaza, “but people don’t read as you want them to read,” she said. All her critics saw was the sex. “I broke some taboos in Gaza, and wrote about things you are not supposed to talk about.” To desire is normal, Najlaa said, but to express desire, like Azza does in her bedroom, is forbidden. “It is not good for an Oriental girl to write a story like that. It is not good for her reputation.” Najlaa regrets writing the story. She was only twenty-one years old when she wrote it and at a stage in her life when she had “this enthusiasm of youth that wanted to break everything, even religious things.”

  Now Najlaa is older. And married. “And in six months I will have a baby,” she said. “The world changed, and my thoughts changed. Now it is better to be conservative in my writing. To respect my country and my country’s traditions.” Raghab agrees. He supports and encourages her writing but vets all her stories before she shows them to anyone else. He makes sure she doesn’t put out anything that can be seen as critical of the government or will cause her trouble. “He is afraid for me,” Najlaa said.

  “The Whore of Gaza” was not the only story in The Book of Gaza to draw criticism. Readers wanted more stories about war, politics, and the blockade—issues of larger import than what Raghab called “small problems not worth writing about.” Raghab feels that writers should tackle bigger issues in their work that increase awareness of the struggle, especially when they publish in English for an international audience. He sees little value in writing about internal issues like Palestinian cultural heritage or domestic violence. Najlaa disagrees. She doesn’t believe every Palestinian writer should “carry the cause.” Besides, everything she writes will be seen through the lens of politics anyway.

  After they were married, Najlaa and Raghab obtained exit visas to leave Gaza for their honeymoon. They dreamed of traveling to Istanbul, but decided not to. They couldn’t rely on the Erez checkpoint being open when they returned from their honeymoon and didn’t want to risk losing their jobs in Gaza. Najlaa and Raghab also briefly considered buying an apartment but decided against this, too. They did not want to spend their savings on a home that might not survive the next war.

  Gazans lack certainty more than anything else. They cannot rely on anything or take anything for granted. In a 2009 interview, Atef Abu Saif said, “I think nothing in Gaza is regular. Everything is irregular. You cannot expect anything. You cannot say I want to do this tomorrow and I want to do that the day after. I think even you cannot promise to do anything.” A mother in Gaza does not know if her musakhan will finish baking before the power goes out on her electric oven. A fisherman does not know how far he can sail on any given morning, and a farmer does not know if there will be a market for the strawberries he plants today. The fresh university grad smiles for selfies in her graduation robes but knows the degree in her hand cannot guarantee her a job. Gazans don’t know if the border will ever open, whether they will be permitted to visit their cousins in Ramallah or pray in Jerusalem. Only war is reliable. It’s as certain as the seasons.

  One day at noon, as the Friday sermon boomed out from the Fisherman’s Mosque, I went for a walk along the seafront road. The November air felt warm to me but evidently too cold for Gazans, as the beach was completely deserted. I stepped off the sidewalk and across a white sand beach littered with plastic bottles, take-out containers, and the carcasses of ketchup packets. Fried chicken bones were picked clean by seabirds and bleached white by the sun.

  Down at the water’s edge, where the sea smooths the sand, human litter gives way to wh
at a sea leaves behind. A scattering of clamshells—orange, blue, and brown—spreads across the packed sand. They crunch beneath my sandals along with the occasional claw from an unfortunate crab. The sea here smells like a sea should. On the edge of the water, at least, the beach is beautiful the way all beaches are.

  I remember walking with Mona after our tour through Shati. She wanted to bring me to Kazem, one of Gaza City’s famous ice cream parlors, for a morning sundae, and we walked along the seafront road a few kilometers north of this stretch of beach. There, open trash bins stunk of rot and buzzed with flies next to leaning shacks built of wood scraps and rusting sheet metal. “It is not a very nice walk,” Mona said, but then her gaze lifted over the stench and squalor to the Mediterranean beyond. “I don’t know how people can live without the sea,” she said.

  The sea grants Gaza its only visible horizon and its only open space. Every other vantage point reminds Gazans of closure and incarceration. Mona said that the seaside is the only place she can imagine being out of Gaza. The sea offers no actual escape, of course; Gazans are not allowed a port along this coastline. No ships carry Gazans away from here. But the sea is a window, at least, if not a door.

  CONCLUSION

  Her Name Is Maram

  I wanted to find the girl in the green dress. The girl who plucked books from rubble during the 2014 war. The girl who first inspired me to seek out Palestine’s books and writers.

  I contacted the Palestinian media agency that first published the photos. It connected me to the photographer, Mo’men Faiz. He remembered the girl. “She had very beautiful eyes,” he said. “I thought her family might be from Afghanistan.” He agreed to meet with me one morning and to help me find her.

  Mo’men’s body tells its own narrative of war and resilience. Ten days before the outbreak of the 2008 war, on the Eid al-Adha holiday, Mo’men and two other journalists traveled to the border to cover a story about the closing of the Karni checkpoint in northern Gaza. An Israeli rocket struck the neighborhood and blasted Mo’men into a coma. He woke up in a hospital bed days later surrounded by weeping relatives. Mo’men’s legs felt heavy. “As if they were tied to a tank,” he said. When he pulled away the blanket he saw that both of his legs were gone.