Meet Me in Gaza Read online

  ‘Usually we have the bottles on the table,’ says Rawiya quietly, ‘but we will keep them under the table this evening because it’s Ramadan and the waiters are Muslims.’

  The hovering young waiters look bored, and oblivious, as we raise our glasses to toast the party. Our bottles, and a few others, are passed around, glasses are filled, other toasts raised. I offer Adham a top-up of wine.

  ‘I thought you would never ask!’ he chuckles again.

  We clink glasses and drink to the engaged couple, who have yet to make an appearance.

  When the bride-and groom-to-be finally make their entrance, the young woman – trussed into the traditional meringue of a dress and caked in white make-up – stares straight ahead, swallowing hard. Her fiancé is beaming like he cannot believe his luck. Schmaltzy romantic music fills the room as they move towards the dance floor for the obligatory slow twirl in front of hundreds of pairs of prying eyes. The bride-to-be looks mortified.

  When the couple retreat to their white thrones on the stage, the guests take to the dance floor. At first the dancing is stilted, but as more people join in, the crowd starts to warm up. Rawiya wants to dance too. As she and I squeeze our way towards the floor, two older, immaculate women look me up, then down, curling their shiny lips as they sneer.

  Ustaz Mounir, and other friends from outside the city centre, often complain to me about the snobs in al-Rimal looking down on everyone else in Gaza, especially people from the camps, their sense of self-importance inflated by their sense of being from a better class. I follow Rawiya onto the dance floor, feeling a bit mocked and self-conscious.

  As we dance, people smile and my confidence returns. Adil joins us, taking our hands in turn and spinning us around. The floor fills up with small, excited children, teenage girls in beaded, strapless ballgowns and portly older men whose faces become flushed and damp as the music gets louder and bolder. Rawiya and I dance for most of the evening, pausing only to drink water and a little more wine. A posse of long-limbed shabab, their eyes bright with testosterone, come over and I share a slow dance with one of them later; he is a tall teenage lad who holds me at arm’s length, giggling nervously, his breath smelling of coffee, cigarettes and cardamom. Women and men mingle, the atmosphere is relaxed and easy, and I do spy one or two muhajabas in the flowing crowd.

  ‘Come. I want you to meet someone special.’ Rawiya takes my hand and escorts me to the table nearest the stage, where she introduces me to a man with a full dark beard and dressed in flowing black robes who is sitting back watching the dancing. Father Artemius is the resident Greek Orthodox priest. The Christians call him Abunah, Our Father. I’ve seen him before, at the al-Deira Hotel, smoking shisha in the café.

  ‘Come, visit the church any time you like. You are most welcome,’ he says, shaking my hand. His feels soft and fleshy, and his smile is warm. I thank him and say that I will.

  By the end of the fourth century AD, thanks to Greek Bishop Porphyry and his messianic disciples, the majority of Gazans were at least token Christians. A hundred and fifty years later Islam erupted from the Arabian peninsula, following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Armies of Muslim Arabs marched along the ancient caravan route from Mecca to Damascus and swiftly captured Syria from Emperor Heraclius’s ailing Byzantine Empire. The Arabs then stormed south towards Gaza and Egypt, seizing Gaza City with little apparent resistance from local inhabitants. Due to its long history of trading, many Arabs were already living in Gaza. The Prophet’s great-grandfather, Hashim Ibn ‘Abid Manaf was buried there. The new Islamic rulers permitted Gazan Christians and Jews to practise their own religions, so long as they paid the requisite taxes. But just as the Christians had laid waste to Gaza’s pagan temples at the first opportunity, so the Muslims tore down Gaza’s remaining churches, creating mosques over the ruins and sparing only the Orthodox St Porphyry, one of the oldest churches on earth. There are around 3,500 Christians left in Gaza. The majority are Greek Orthodox, plus a few hundred Catholics with their own (fairly modern) church and a mere handful of Baptists.

  Eventually the party winds up. We crowd downstairs and into the hotel car park, where people linger, talking, laughing and smoking.

  ‘Did you like the party?’ Rawiya asks me.

  ‘I loved it!’

  ‘Tonight was like we were not in Gaza at all, but in another place,’ her husband says, unlocking the car.

  I know exactly what he means; but the fact that we are in Gaza is what made it so special.

  I ask for the following Sunday morning off work, to attend a service at the Orthodox church. The service starts at eight in the morning, and when I arrive the church is already almost full. It lies slightly below ground level, like a sunken bath; the interior is inlaid with gold, the vaulted ceiling is heavily frescoed, the walls lined with paintings of solemn saints. Towards the front of the church a majestic chandelier, apparently donated by Empress Catherine the Great, is suspended like an oracle.

  I sit in a pew amid older women, some wearing lace veils over their hair as they chant prayers in Arabic and Greek. Father Artemius is absent and the service is taken by a younger priest draped in the same loose black robes. After the mass, as the congregation slowly file outside, this young priest stands at the church entrance, greeting people as they leave. He singles me out as a newcomer and offers me his hand. His name is Alexius; he says he has only been in Gaza a few months.

  ‘You know, this building was a pagan temple until Bishop Porphyry built this church in its place,’ he speaks, with a slight nasal squeak, and pats the outside church wall to make his point.

  ‘How many churches were there before the Muslims arrived?’ I ask him.

  ‘At the beginning of the fifth century, we had about 400 churches,’ he says, his eyes smiling at the thought. ‘But then the Persians came and destroyed them.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say, thinking they really are all as bad as each other.

  Gaza stabilised under Muslim occupation until the arrival of the Seljuqs – medieval Turkic nomads from southern Central Asia. The Seljuqs’ feudalism stagnated regional trade, and the restrictions on pilgrims visiting the Holy Land sites outraged the Christian world. Pope Urban mobilised a massive force of Crusaders, who eventually reached Jerusalem in midsummer 1099, intent on the violent salvation of this most Holy City. The Crusaders smashed their way through the city walls and massacred some 10,000 people, without sparing Arab Christians. The lands of the Eastern Mediterranean were then divided into four Latin kingdoms and a Crusader named Baldwin was crowned King of Jerusalem, including Gaza. Resistance to the Crusaders gathered momentum in the mid-twelfth century, led by a sadistic Seljuq with a penchant for torture, Imad al-Din Zengi, who united the Muslims against the infidels whom they regarded as nothing but barbaric and bovine.

  In the year 1170 one of Zengi’s dynasty, the Kurdish warrior and father of seventeen sons, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (also known as Salah al-Din or Saladin) gathered an Egyptian army to attack the Christians. But it was seventeen years before Gaza finally surrendered to Salah al-Din’s fighters, in the autumn of 1187. A month later, Salah al-Din seized Jerusalem too. There were three bloody Crusades in all. After the third, the Mongol hordes also swept briefly through Palestine, reaching the gates of Gaza before they too were routed by the next wave of invaders, led by a ferocious, flame-haired pagan slave.

  There is a tantalising footnote to the Muslim invasions of Gaza: local Muslims used to whisper of a ghost, a monk who haunted the old quarter of Gaza City, casting incense as he drifted through the dank streets where the Orthodox church still stands. Was this, perhaps, the ghost of Bishop Porphyry, or Mark the Deacon, or another lost soul? Whoever he was, this restless spirit has not been seen for a very long time now.

  Despite the rigours of fasting from sunrise to sunset every day for a month, many Gazan Muslims tell me they welcome Ramadan.

  ‘I love this time’, says Saida, ‘because it brings me closer to my God.’

  I share many b
reakfasts with Saida and her family, and they are not fasting merely in order to conform or to appear pious. For them, Ramadan is something sacred.

  Just before the end of September, at the tail end of Ramadan, I get an unexpected phone call from Samir, the community worker up in Beit Hanoun. We exchange greetings, then Samir asks what I am doing for Eid, the four-day festival that immediately follows Ramadan, when Muslims traditionally give each other presents, buy outfits of new clothes, visit relatives and eat a lot.

  I tell him I haven’t made any plans yet, wondering what he has in mind.

  ‘I want you to come to Beit Hanoun,’ he says. ‘We are planning an operation.’

  Operation Smile and Hope

  On the last morning of Ramadan, a dozen of us meet at the community centre in Beit Hanoun, where Samir works, to carry out the operation. There is a minibus waiting for us outside the centre, with the engine running. We are going to visit farming families living along the northern Gaza border, to distribute traditional Eid presents and, in Samir’s words, ‘remind these families they have not been forgotten’. Samir calls this Operation Smile and Hope. Before we leave, each of us is given a sleeveless vest with the community centre logo branded on the back, so we will look more like aid workers and hopefully will not be shot at by Israeli snipers. Apart from me, Samir and the minibus driver, the rest of our contingent are all local teenagers.

  Samir looks different this morning; his face seems softer and his mood lighter, as though some weight has been lifted from his narrow shoulders. He catches my gaze, giving me a brief warm smile I haven’t seen before, which crinkles the skin around his fierce eyes.

  ‘Welcome, Louisa. Welcome to our resistance!’ He almost sings the words.

  I clamber into the minibus beside him, happy to see this chink in his shell. The minibus has ‘Operation Smile and Hope’ hand-painted on both sides.

  We drive north from Beit Hanoun, towards the border with Israel. The driver stops at the Hamas checkpoint stationed close to the Palestinian side of no-man’s-land. Samir asks me to go with him, to speak to the officers at the checkpoint and explain what we are doing today, so hopefully they won’t hinder us. The bearded Hamas officers look blank, then baffled, when we tell them we have come to distribute presents to local farming families; especially as we now have an entourage of local media following us in several cars. There hasn’t been much news in Gaza recently, so these journalists are keen to film us. To my surprise, the Hamas officers just wave us on our way. We park the minibus beyond the checkpoint and start walking along a dirt track to visit our first family. We are in open fields, about a kilometre from the Israeli border. The Gazan paparazzi trail behind us, TV cameras at the ready.

  Before we reach the first house, the entire family comes outside to see what on earth is happening. They don’t get many visitors around here. Samir steps forward.

  ‘Eid Mubarak! (Happy Eid!) – may every Eid be happy for you and your family,’ he greets them as they gawp at us all, looking as baffled as the Hamas officers back at the checkpoint. For a moment no one moves. Then the Beit Hanoun shabab begin distributing presents – toy cars for the boys, sparkly hair clips for the girls and small boxes of toiletries for their parents. The children begin to gurgle with pleasure and skip around and the parents and grandparents break into smiles as the journalists zoom in for close-ups of this fleeting joy. But we have a dozen more families to visit today, and cannot tarry. So after brief handshakes with the adults, we start walking back towards the minibus as they wave and call their thanks.

  This operation is quite mad, I think: but it’s also quite beautiful because it is so innocent and at the same moment so utterly real. Samir steps up beside me.

  ‘Now we are going to see the Swailams,’ he says.

  The driver parks the minibus much closer to the Swailams’ house than I expected. As we walk towards the row of white cottages, the shabab are boisterous and laughing, like this is just a good day out. I fall into step with one of the older ones, Khalil, who is carrying a box of presents. Khalil works with Samir, and like the rest of this friendly, rowdy crowd, he lives in Beit Hanoun.

  ‘You know, when I was little, this place was paradise,’ he says. ‘It was just one big garden of trees …’

  As Khalil reminisces about scampering round the orchards of Beit Hanoun, I recall Niveen telling me about her time in the West Bank, where she was studying at Beir Zeit University in the 1980s. Whenever she used to return to visit Gaza in winter, Niveen told me she could always smell the Beit Hanoun orange blossom before she even caught sight of the trees; it was, she said, the most exquisite welcome home possible. Palestinians’ connection to their land is as visceral as blood and bone.

  The Swailams come out of their cottages, curious to see these unexpected visitors. I shake hands with Jamal. He acknowledges me with a nod and a faint smile. I ask him how the situation is now, three months into the tahdiya.

  ‘Not so bad,’ he says, as though measuring out his words. Then he shrugs and I read this as resignation to the continuing pressure of not knowing if and when things will get better or worse. It must be like holding your breath for three months. One of the Swailam women, Sayra, tells me things are easier. They can go out into their fields around their home every day now. But the young children are still frightened and nervous.

  ‘My little one will not leave my side at all,’ she says, as her young daughter pushes up against her legs, eyeing me jealously. While we are speaking, Sayra is also baking flatbread in a taboun, or traditional clay oven, for tomorrow’s Eid feast. I admire her willpower, baking fresh bread while still fasting.

  I ask her where Abu Jamal is and she directs me to a narrow arch tucked between two of the white cottages. I slip through it and find myself in a small courtyard. Abu Jamal is fast asleep on a narrow cot beneath a lone olive tree. His ancient face is tranquil, his chest rising and falling with a quiet rattle, as though he and this tree belong to each other. Leaving him undisturbed, I go back to the others and find the Swailam children gleeful with their small presents too. As we take our leave, Sayra presses a plastic bag into my hands. It is filled with flatbreads, hot from her stove.

  ‘Eid Mubarak, habibti,’ she says with a smile.

  For the next few hours, we move from one family to the next, carrying out our operation. The families – all of them farmers – say their land is not being invaded by the Israeli military, or by Gazan fighters, and they feel safer now. A few have even started planting spindly orange and lemon seedlings.

  ‘Our old trees were all destroyed,’ one farmer tells me. ‘God willing, this peace will last long enough for these new trees to give us fruit.’

  By early afternoon, we are all beginning to flag. Everyone in our group is fasting, except me, and I can’t bring myself to drink from my bottle of tepid water in front of a dozen thirsty activists. The Gaza paparazzi have long gone. But Samir insists we have one last round of visits to do, along a strip of the north-eastern border known as Siafa, where local Bedouin live. Siafa is usually inaccessible because it lies so far inside the buffer zone. But the tahdiya has given us a rare opportunity to visit this remote, cut-off corner. As we drive towards the eastern border, the only vehicle we see is a donkey cart driven by a hunched woman with a face like a windfall apple. As she trundles past, she waves, and the shabab stick their heads out of the windows and cheer.

  ‘You people are crazy!’ shouts the driver. ‘I am from Beit Hanoun and I’ve never come this close to the border in my whole life!’

  When he parks the minibus at the end of a faint track, I see a white house a little way ahead, perched alone on the crest of a shallow hill.

  ‘Now we’ll visit my Bedouin friends,’ says Samir, with another rare smile. He really does remind me of Ustaz Mounir.

  We stroll up to the white house. Samir leads us through a narrow gate into a courtyard, where two women and a man are sitting on plastic chairs beneath a canopy of dry palm leaves. The older of the two women se
es us first and rises to her feet. She’s wearing a long yellow robe embroidered with small white flowers, a scarf tucked loosely around her head and draped over one broad shoulder. She has a gap between her teeth and shining, sun-darkened skin.

  ‘Marhaba, Samir!’ she cries. ‘Eid Mubarak!’

  Samir introduces us to Manah al-Tarabin.

  The other woman and man in the courtyard are Manah’s daughter and son – Sharifa and Sa’ed – both of them shy compared to their exuberant mother. Sharifa giggles and blushes, looking overwhelmed by this boisterous invasion. Sa’ed shakes hands but says nothing, his face closed and sullen. He smiles only for Samir. We present our small gifts and Manah insists on gifting us back; clasping a dagger, she hacks great clusters of ripe red dates from a tall palm tree in one corner of the courtyard, around which an outside staircase appears to be wrapped.

  I cannot take my eyes off her. She beckons me up the stairs, onto an empty roof terrace, and we stand there together, looking out eastwards. Maybe 100 metres ahead of us is the Israeli border fence, and immediately behind the fence, a road, presumably for Israeli military patrol vehicles. After visiting the Swailams, I didn’t believe anyone could live any closer to the border. I am trying to take it all in, but Samir is already calling for me. I know I have to come here again.

  ‘Can I visit you another time?’ I ask Manah.

  ‘Whenever you like, habibti!’

  We go downstairs. The shabab are waiting. When I kiss Manah goodbye, her cheeks smell of sunshine and earth.

  Our final visit of the day is to some neighbouring Bedouin, who live in a camp on the other side of this shallow hill, a mere 50 metres from the border. As Samir leads us towards the camp, even the shabab are unsettled.

  ‘This is too fucking close,’ Khalil hisses to me.

  But like obedient children we traipse after Samir across this open, exposed land, even when he circles around a blackened Qassam rocket lying spent on the ground like a firework. At the other side of the hill, we squeeze through a gap in a fence of wild prickly pear bush, one at a time, recoiling as vicious-sounding dogs begin to howl. Inside, we find a makeshift camp of tents, wooded outhouses, scratching hens and the skin-and-bone dogs yanking at their chains. Samir calls out. There is no answer.