Meet Me in Gaza Page 11

  We haven’t seen anyone yet. But hang on – a heavy-set man has just emerged from a doorway and is pounding towards Samir with strong strides. He must be one of the Swailams. Then half a dozen kids appear from nowhere, just as the dog starts barking enthusiastically. Samir and the heavy-set man reach each other and embrace as other men, and women, stream out of doorways to see who has just arrived.

  Majd looks at this small crowd, and I hear him exhaling.

  ‘Louisa, don’t worry, you are safe with me. Everything is hunky-dory now.’

  As we all start shaking hands, my anxiety evaporates like clouds in a hot sky. Three or four generations of the Swailam family are here, from chubby toddlers to elders with stooped shoulders and faces like old maps. The man who first strode towards us introduces himself as Jamal Swailam. He is large, handsome and wide-shouldered, with a silver moustache that would make a walrus proud. He beckons us to follow him into the last cottage in the row of four, nearest to Erez.

  Samir, Majd and I enter a big kitchen. Jamal offers us white plastic chairs, warped slightly out of shape by previous occupants. There is very little other furniture. Despite the sunlight outside, the kitchen feels cold and slightly damp. Jamal and Samir sit together, heads bent towards each other, talking between themselves.

  I shuffle in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Majd nudges me.

  ‘Look at these walls.’

  The kitchen walls are bare and white, the upper sections spattered with bullet holes and embedded with shrapnel. The corner of one wall looks as though it has been torn or blasted away.

  ‘This kitchen does not get used much,’ says Majd.

  There are no signs of cooking, dirty dishes, cups or even food. I nod, taking in the nakedness of a house that no one actually seems to live in.

  Two boys sidle into the kitchen, one balancing a tray of small cups. The older lad scrapes a chair across the floor and sits next to Jamal, the younger passes round the coffee cups.

  ‘This is my big son, Imad.’ Jamal pats the narrow shoulders of the teenager beside him. Samir sits back in his chair, his conversation over. I lean slightly forward.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ I ask.

  ‘I was born in this house nearly fifty years ago,’ says Jamal. ‘I have always lived here, my father too. This is his land. He’s resting now, but you can meet him when he wakes up.’

  ‘Are you farmers?’

  Jamal flashes an amused smile.

  ‘Of course we are farmers! We used to have groves of orange and lemon and grapefruit trees – guava too – because our land here is very rich. This area all used to be orchards; our district of Beit Hanoun was the garden of Gaza.’

  This is not just the view of ‘Hanounis’ (Gazans’ nickname for those from Beit Hanoun). I have heard other people, including my teacher, Ustaz Mounir, reminisce about the exquisite orange orchards that used to flourish all across northern Gaza.

  The tenth-century Iraqi historian, al-Mas’udi, known across the Middle East as ‘the Herodotus of the Arabs’, described orange trees arriving in the Arab world from India around AD 912. The trees, he said, were first planted in Oman, but quickly spread across Syria to Palestine and its neighbour, Egypt. Oranges were yet another strand of the burgeoning medieval spice trade. Oranges exported to Palestine were traded in Gaza, and trees were planted en masse in Beit Hanoun because it is blessed with the highest rainfall in Gaza and with rich, dark, moist soil. Trees planted by Hanouni farmers flourished and blossomed into vast perfumed orange orchards. Even now, twelve hundred years after these small fruit first appeared in Palestinian souqs, the intensely sweet oranges of northern Gaza remain the most sought-after.

  ‘We used to have so many trees on our land …’ Imad interjects, then falls silent as his father continues speaking.

  ‘We farmed citrus fruits for many years,’ says Jamal. ‘But when the second intifada started, the Israelis came and bulldozed our trees. We replanted all of them. When they bulldozed the trees again, we replanted them again, all of them. The Israelis damage and destroy, and we rebuild – this is our life. But the fourth time they bulldozed our trees, we did not have the energy or the heart to begin again. Some of the trees we lost were fifty years old. We still farm 17 dunams, but now we only grow vegetables.’34

  ‘Do the Israelis still come here?’

  He tells me the Israeli military enter the area in tanks and jeeps. Sometimes they just come up to the Swailams’ houses or around their land, sometimes they go on to Beit Hanoun. But they always pass by these white cottages. Jamal says they shoot indiscriminately, so his whole extended family – forty adults and children share this row of cottages – have to stay inside whenever they see the military coming. There have been times they have all had to stay inside for more than two days, to try to be safe. Two years ago, his farmer neighbour was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. He shakes his big head.

  In the past, the Israeli military have instructed Gazan farmers living in the northern and eastern border areas not to plant crops that grow taller than knee height. The Israelis claim that they uproot trees and crops planted close by borders and buffer zones in order to protect Israeli ‘national security’.

  All along the eastern border areas are fallow fields and empty homesteads, abandoned by Gazan farmers who are frightened to work their own land for fear of being shot by Israeli snipers. The villages close to this eastern front look half-empty and feel haunted. The silence is skin-prickling.

  The few farmers who are as tenacious as the Swailams have vowed to stay put. They now harvest a mere fraction of what they could grow if they were safe to work their own fields. But Israeli bulldozers roll into eastern Gaza almost every day, levelling land, crops, sometimes entire farms. Since September 2000, the equivalent of 15 square miles – more than 10 per cent of the entire Strip – has been bulldozed.

  This wanton destruction is one of the reasons that the bulk of fresh produce in local souqs like al-Zawiya does not actually come from the fields of Gaza. Israel turns hefty profits dumping thousands of tons of its own agricultural leftovers into the Strip every year, while denying local Gazan farmers access to markets outside the Strip. Gaza is stuffed to the gunwales with Israeli goods. It is, quite literally, a captive market.

  Young Imad interrupts the conversation again. ‘We do not ever go outside after five o’clock,’ he says. He has a tight, furrowed brow and deep-set eyes the colour of coal. ‘Our life is fear and tension.’ He looks at me. ‘And it is lonely here. No one ever visits, people are too frightened.’ He radiates an intensity that is unnerving in such a young face.

  ‘How far is Erez?’ I ask Imad.

  ‘Four hundred metres from our door,’ he replies.

  Jamal shrugs shoulders as broad as his son’s are narrow.

  ‘This house and our land is all my family know. We are not leaving.’

  He eases himself out of the tight-fitting plastic chair.

  ‘Come. I want you to see something.’

  Jamal moves towards a flight of stairs I haven’t noticed until just now and starts to climb them, his plastic sandals smacking the bare concrete. We follow him upstairs, along a narrow landing to a room at the top of the cottage. He pushes open a door – and the stench almost knocks me sideways. Inside is a floor-to-ceiling cage, where at least a dozen green-and-yellow budgerigars perch, fluttering narrow mottled wings. They look clean and bright-eyed … and they stink to high heaven. Majd backs away, hands clamped over his nose and mouth like he has just seen something dead. Jamal opens the cage and puts both hands inside, his fingers outstretched. Two of the birds hop aboard his thick dry fingers, their tiny heads bobbing.

  Jamal looks at me. I’m holding my breath. He’s smiling serenely.

  ‘They help me feel peace,’ he murmurs.

  A memory slips through my mind: of strolling through a refugee camp over in the Palestinian West Bank a few months ago. Seeing small cages of birds being hung from balcony railings and store-front awnin
gs by men who looked like Glasgow pimps, but who handled them with the greatest delicacy. As the fresh air ruffled their feathers, those caged birds sang. But these tiny creatures have nothing to say.

  Jamal places the budgerigars back in their cage. We peer inside the other upstairs rooms, and each is utterly bare, except for curtains flapping across the part-open windows. In one room I move towards the window to look outside. But Samir blocks my way with his arm.

  ‘Keep back from the window!’ he snaps at me. ‘They might shoot you.’

  Samir radiates intensity too, like a man hunted, or haunted. I step back and he drops his arm.

  ‘We don’t sleep up here,’ says Jamal. ‘Downstairs or next door is safer.’

  The last bedroom looks directly towards one of the Erez watchtowers, so we don’t linger. Instead Jamal takes us to meet his father.

  Abu Jamal is sitting on a rough-hewn chair inside what looks like a garden shed on its last legs, tucked in between two of the white cottages. The shed door is open, ribbons of sunlight streaming inside. When he grasps my hand in greeting, his feels like an old claw. His voice is thick, his tongue coated white. His small eyes are milky too, dimming inside cataracts. Abu Jamal is almost 100 years old.

  ‘When I was young, this was all trees – just big orchards of fruit,’ he says, opening wide his stiff arms, as though embracing the land around him.

  When Abu Jamal was a young man, back in the early 1940s, neither the state of Israel nor the Erez crossing existed. This area was part of southern Palestine, with its small, traditional farming communities. The village of Dimra, a settlement of some 500 or 600 people who farmed citrus fruit and cereals, lay a kilometre or so north of these cottages. Dimra had a small village school, and no doubt a small mosque too. But in October 1948 the villagers fled. Either they panicked for their lives as Israeli troops advanced south – or else they were forced from their homes by an armed Zionist militia, possibly the Givati Brigade.35 Or both. Whoever invaded the village in 1948 destroyed it.

  A year later, an Israeli kibbutz, also called Erez, was established on part of the ruins of Dimra. The Erez kibbutzniks still harvest, and sell, their own oranges and other citrus fruit. The Swailams and their handful of scattered farming neighbours who lived beyond the boundary of Dimra escaped the 1948 onslaught and survived with their homes and land more or less intact. When the Erez checkpoint was first erected in 1956, their homes were just inside the boundary of Gaza, where Abu Jamal has been living for almost a century.

  Majd and I leave Abu Jamal warming himself in a small pool of sunlight, like a stiff old cat, and go to admire the allotment out at the front, which is flourishing with peppers, aubergines, beans, tomatoes, potatoes and clusters of small red chillies. At the end of the allotment, a fence has been cobbled together from old bedsprings and scraps of metal.

  Majd shakes his head. ‘That is the Swailam demarcation line,’ he says. ‘The Israelis have watchtowers and zananas, and these people have the remains of an old bed no one can sleep on any longer!’

  We exchange a wry smile. These white cottages feel like an island stranded in a dry, hostile sea. Local fighters launch their missiles towards southern Israel from this area – though not from right here, because we are in full view of the military watchtowers, where patient Israeli snipers wait. This is why no one visits the Swailams, or any of the few other farming families who refuse to budge.

  No one yet knows whether the recent tantalising rumours of a Hamas tahdiya, or ‘period of calm’, with Israel will soon bear its own fruit.

  Catherine and the Tulip

  Saida and I are at the al-Deira Hotel, on the café terrace overlooking the sea, eating warm grilled meat sandwiches and drinking melon juice.

  ‘I missed you, habibti, while you were outside,’ she says.

  ‘I missed you too,’ I smile. ‘Did you get my emails or my texts? I never heard back from you.’

  She doesn’t reply. I look at her across the table, a half-eaten sandwich in my hand.

  ‘What is it?’ I say, because there’s something wrong. Saida has lost weight and looks slightly braced, like she is holding something in.

  ‘I did get your messages, but …’ She wipes her long fingers with her napkin and lays the napkin on the table. ‘Habibti, it’s easier for me not to reply when you are away. Because I am still here. I work and see my family and – what else is there, here? Being in touch with you outside just reminds me how I am stuck here in Gaza.’

  She holds my gaze and I hold hers.

  ‘I understand.’ I put my tepid sandwich back on the plate. ‘You don’t need me going on about my foreign travels …’

  ‘No – listen to me!’ She interrupts. ‘When you are back here it’s fine, because you are with us in Gaza again. And now I want to hear everything.’ She extends her hand towards me, inviting me to speak. ‘You understand what I am saying?’ she adds.

  ‘Yes. I’ll tell you my news – but first, tell me yours.’ Now I extend my hand towards her.

  Saida rolls her eyes.

  ‘Nothing new – I work long hours because I can forget about the situation when working, and in the office we are always busy. But we have no generator at work, and often no electricity during the day. When I get home we have no electricity either! So I go home and rest, and then I get up and do my work in the evening when we have electricity at my home. This is Gaza. Sometimes I see my friends, but not very much because I don’t have many friends here now …’

  This is why I love Saida. She’s completely straight with me about her situation, neither playing it up nor down. She gets on with her life, making the best of what she has here, accepting the choices she has made. She treats me like a sister – still protective, sometimes stern. I, in turn, fret that Gaza is eating away at her. Things have not been any easier here since I got back. The power cuts continue AD nauseam, and despite the talk of a Hamas/Israeli ceasefire being negotiated, Israel is now ramping up the fuel cuts too; maybe to put pressure on Hamas to accept the ceasefire. Fuel stations are closing across the Strip because the pumps are dry. Only a fraction of public transport is working, hospitals are taking ambulances off the roads, and taxis have almost doubled their prices to cover costs. The fuel coming through the tunnels from Egypt is expensive, filthy stuff that clogs up engines, so drivers have resorted to converting their cars to domestic oil (the stuff they use to fire kitchen ovens), cooking oil, even bottles of (potentially lethal) domestic gas. The city streets reek of stinking, uncollected garbage and oily fumes. To quote the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, ‘The residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars because they have a murderous terrorist regime.’ It is a strange and sad privilege, seeing a people being collectively bullied because they live in a land they cannot leave.

  Saida and I finish our lunch, order coffees and I tell her about my trip away. She asks about my family, and an hour later we’re still at our table. When she asks what I am doing after work tomorrow, I give a brief shrug and realise that, while I’ve been here, I have picked up this gesture of not knowing. These days I do the Gaza shrug.

  ‘You want to come to my aerobics class?’ Saida asks.

  ‘Ha ha! No way!’

  I went to Gazan-style aerobics with Saida once and still cringe at the memory. The instructor was a female gladiator. Ten minutes into her class, I was whimpering, as she lambasted me: ‘Louisa! One two three four! Yallah! One two three four!’

  I shudder and reach for my cigarettes.

  Saida rolls her eyes again, but now she’s smiling.

  ‘OK, kaslana (you lazy thing)! You can sit and talk to Catherine. I will do aerobics and then we can see if the sauna is working.’

  We shake on it and arrange to meet at the Tulip Beauty Salon tomorrow after work.

  The Tulip is situated on the second floor of a tower block, just a couple of minutes walk from my place. When I arrive, slightly late, Catherine is at the reception desk. She looks me up, then down.

&nbs
p; ‘You fat bitch!’ she says, grinning at me.

  ‘Nice to see you too, Catherine.’

  ‘You haven’t been around for weeks – where did you go?’

  ‘I was visiting Scotland.’

  ‘You must have stuffed your face the whole time!’ she chortles.

  ‘Your double chin’s doing very well these days!’ I shoot back.

  She’s something of a Gaza legend, Catherine – a pale-skinned, dark-haired English rose from the Lake District, her Cumbrian accent still strong after twenty-four years in Gaza. She speaks rapid-fire Arabic and has a mouth like a sewer, but she’s really a big softie. While Saida works out in aerobics, she and I sit behind reception, drinking tea with milk and chomping on biscuits.

  Catherine and her husband Muhammad met in Israel in 1980. She was on holiday with a pal and he was working in a hotel, back in the days when hundreds of thousands of Gazans worked in Israel. They got married the same year and moved to London. But her husband – she calls him Mo – couldn’t settle in London, and a few years later they decided to make their home in Gaza. Catherine often reminisces about their decision to do so.

  ‘It was 1985 and we were back here in Gaza again, on holiday. We were sitting at a restaurant on the beach, having a nice fish dinner. Mo asked if I thought I could actually live here. There was a beautiful sunset in front of us and I remember thinking – why not?’ She drains her cup. ‘This place, even now, it’s got something. Mind you – I’ve been slappin’ myself ever since!’

  I dunk a biscuit in my tea and chuckle. I’ve heard this story before, but I still like it.

  As we sit and chat, a stream of local women flow through the reception. Catherine and Mo opened the Tulip in 1999; it has a gym, hairdressers and a beauty salon. But the pièce de résistance has to be the ever-popular ‘breast vibrator’. Apparently it does wonders for droopy boobs.