Meet Me in Gaza Read online

  Most of us stand together, feeling uneasy and watched, though we don’t know who is watching us. After a tense couple of minutes, four men appear from one of the outhouses at the same moment, their unsmiling eyes fixed on us. One aims a kick at the nearest dog, which dodges the blow by sinking towards the dust, tail curled under its backside.

  When Samir steps forward with our Eid greeting, the men stare him down. A stream of thin small children run from one of the tents, then stop dead, and they stare too.

  We are not visitors, but trespassers, and right now it feels like this could all go very wrong.

  Khalil clears his throat, opens up one of the boxes and begins to hand out presents to the children, who push and shove each other forward. The first gift goes into the cupped palms of a girl who could be anywhere between 6 and 12 years of age. Skinny and stunted-looking, she clutches the earrings without even looking at them, as though they will be snatched straight back off her. Backing into her own space, she holds them up to the light and begins to jump up and down, screaming, ‘I have a present – I have a present!’

  Her joy ruptures the tension. Women begin to emerge from another tent. We all begin to smile. But the children’s delight is tempered by their parents, who accept their gifts with reticence. Few words are exchanged between us and the Bedouin’s faces never lose their wariness. I cannot begin to imagine their lives, at this jagged edge of Gaza. I ask one of the women where the border with Israel is, and she walks a few of us to the other side of the camp. We stand on a small sandy tussock and witness for ourselves the breath-catching closeness of the Israeli fence. We can actually see the rooftops of an Israeli town just across the border.

  ‘Yehud,’ the woman points at the red-and-white roofs, meaning the Jews are over there.

  ‘It is Sderot City,’ says Samir.43

  As we walk back into the camp, he says to me, ‘Everyone’s life here in Gaza is hard. But these people: no one understands what they go through, no one visits them. They are forgotten.’

  I think he is referring to all the families that we’ve seen today, but especially these Bedouin, who inhabit a small, separate, isolated world. I don’t know anything about the Gaza Bedouin and have never heard other Gazans talk about them.

  ‘Can we come back after Eid and see your friend Manah?’ I ask him.

  Samir nods. ‘She has already told me she wants you to visit.’

  bedouin

  Over the next few weeks, Samir and I go back to Siafa several times to see Manah and her family. Manah has a lightness, a joyousness about her that is infectious. We laugh a lot together. She has a second daughter, called Abir, the kind of young woman that my mother would call ‘strapping’, who is often out tending to the family’s small herd of sheep. Manah has lived on this piece of land for thirty-five years now; yet these sheep seem to be the family’s only source of income, apart from a grove of lemon and olive trees. I never figure out how they actually make enough money to survive. I do, though, quickly learn that they have no electricity in their home, or running water. Manah never mentions a husband, and I never ask, sensing that whoever he is, or was, he has long gone. Once a week she hitches her donkey to a cart and trundles off to the Beit Hanoun market, but she and her daughters spend most of their lives in and around the small world of their hilltop home. Only her son, Sa’ed, comes and goes, sullen and nearly silent whenever I see him, seeking only the company of Samir.

  After seven months in Gaza, this is the quietest place I have visited. No cars, rowdy neighbours or people in the streets. No planes or helicopters. Noise is such an essence of Gaza life, it is the texture of calm that I crave these days, and here the silence feels like a quiet tide.

  ‘What was it like here before the tahdiya?’ I ask Manah one afternoon as we sit drinking very sweet mint tea.

  She smiles, flashing her crooked white teeth.

  ‘It is better here now.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘Before the tahdiya? Aayy!’ She gives a loud howl that makes me flinch, holding her hands in front of her and shaking them as though she has just burnt her fingers; another local gesture of fear.

  ‘They [the Israeli military] used to fire rockets and bombs from planes and helicopters – and the zananas – terrible! We would run from the fields.’

  She mimes covering her head with her arms, like the brace position you adopt as a plane hurtles towards the earth.

  Sometimes, when Manah and her daughters are talking, they use words I don’t understand, words that don’t sound at all Arabic to me.

  ‘What language are you speaking?’ I ask her another afternoon, as we sit in her sunny tranquil courtyard.

  ‘Our Bedouin language, habibti,’ Manah winks.

  Bedouin, ‘those who inhabit the desert’, are an ancient tribal culture of Arab nomads and camel breeders who traditionally lived in camps of extended families, called ashiras, presided over by a local sheikh. Some Bedouin women used to ink their faces with distinct blue tattoos, but these can only be seen on very elderly female faces now. A minority of Bedouin cling to their traditional semi-nomadism, but the vast majority have been pushed into squalid settlements in Palestine and Israel, and left to quietly rot. In pre-1948 Palestine, some 90,000 Bedouin were scattered across the southern Naqab desert (also known by its Hebrew name, the Negev) in eight tribes. Manah and her family are from the al-Tarabin tribe.

  Not all Bedouin are black like Manah and her family, and communities of black non-Bedouin still live across Palestine. Some trace their roots to neighbouring north-east Africa, especially Sudan; others to a tribe of black Muslim Arabs, the al-Salamat, who settled in the Hijaz region of western Arabia bordering the Red Sea. As trade and migration flowed through the Mediterranean, and along the ancient Way of the Sea through Gaza, so North African traders, Muslim pilgrims and members of the al-Salamat tribe journeyed back and forth through Palestine, and some inevitably stayed on.

  Rheumy-eyed old Palestinian Bedouin also tell stories – passed down through generations of tribes – of young African children being kidnapped, or purchased in markets, and brought to Gaza to live with Bedouin as their young slaves. Only prominent Bedouin families, so the story goes, owned and traded the abid, or slaves, and by the same accounts remnants of slave labour lingered until the late 1950s in a smattering of remote Bedouin ashiras.44

  Manah welcomes me fiercely into her small, isolated world – but she has no time for her Bedouin neighbours down the hill.

  ‘Those ignorant people! Been at that camp thirty years and will only mix with their own kind, no one else,’ she says, dismissing them with a flick of her hefty hand.

  There are thousands of Bedouin living across Gaza; some are in the cities, many on the outskirts, and there are several established Bedouin villages. Poor Bedouin families, though, are mostly confined to squatter camps, and treated by many Gazans, especially liberal city-dwellers, as social outcasts, and backward petty criminals who’ll do anything for cash. I have often seen Bedouin families riding their rickety donkey carts down Salah al-Din Street selling scraps of firewood, scavenging bits of scrap metal, or herding their goats in the shallow sandy hillsides surrounding Khan Younis. The only people in Gaza, it seems, who have fewer visitors than the Swailams are these Bedouin.

  bell jar

  I have my small secret world inside Gaza too, these days. I am still having a fling with Sakhar, the silver-maned lion I met at a UN party a few months back. His tenth-floor apartment is just a few minutes’ walk from where I live and we always meet at his place, discreetly. Our affair is no one else’s business. We enjoy cold beer in his lounge, with its sea view, and go to bed early, or lie in his big jacuzzi-style bathtub with its endless hot water.

  ‘You UN guys are spoilt!’ I tease him, and he laughs and flicks soapy bubbles at me.

  Many of the expat UN staff stationed in Gaza have done other ‘hardship postings’ in places like Darfur, and say they cannot believe the seafront, air-conditioned luxury of their
Gaza accommodation. They don’t get out much though; despite the tahdiya, they still have to travel round in armoured vehicles and can visit only a handful of local hotels that have been vetted, like the al-Deira. They are not allowed to visit any private homes either, which is why Sakhar never stays at my place.

  ‘Why do we get on so well, you and I?’ he murmurs into my ear late one night.

  ‘Because you’re an oddball and I’m a misfit,’ I reply, and we lie back on the pillows and laugh out loud, because we both know there is truth in it.

  In the mornings, we always leave his building separately. I ignore the looks from the armed Gazans half-heartedly patrolling the front door of his building. I don’t want to care what they think. I’m happy.

  But then Sakhar goes on leave. He is gone longer than I expect and when he does return, a few weeks later, he is still charming and affectionate, but a little distant, and he stays later at his office in the evenings so I don’t see him quite so much. Something has changed. I don’t ask what happened while he was away because I’m not sure that I want to know.

  One morning at the beginning of November, the Centre director calls me into his office and tells me that he is sending me to a conference in Brussels. The flight is tonight. So I need to go home early, pack and make sure that I reach Erez before the crossing closes this afternoon. The director was meant to be going to the conference himself, but cannot secure a permit to leave Gaza. I, on the other hand, only need to telephone the Palestinian District Coordination Office (DCO) and inform them that I’m leaving Gaza today. Ironically, getting out of Gaza is much easier for me than getting back in.

  I don’t want to go to Brussels tonight.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks me. ‘Do you have other plans for this evening?’

  I do have other plans for this evening: Sakhar has assured me that he is free tonight. But I give the director a wide smile and tell him I’d be delighted to go.

  Sakhar is not the only reason I am so reluctant to go to Brussels tonight. I don’t want to leave Gaza because it involves crossing Erez, and I can already feel the knot in my guts pinching at the thought of the X-ray machine, the cameras, the security checks and questions, and the nagging anxiety that on my return I will not be allowed back inside the Strip. But no one else from the Centre can attend this conference; I’m the only one who can leave for Tel Aviv airport this afternoon.

  When I leave the director’s office, Shadi is standing outside in the corridor.

  ‘Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six mabrouk!’ he cries out. ‘You are so lucky!’

  He gives me a hug and I wish with all my heart that it was him going to Brussels tonight. Shadi is still spending much of his time helping the Free Gaza crew, some of whom have decided to stay here for quite a while. Being a human rights activist is not only Shadi’s job, it dominates most of his life. I promise to bring him back a bottle of decent whisky and a box of his beloved red Gauloises.

  As I finish off bits and pieces, so that I can leave early, Joumana and a dozen other colleagues all pop into my office to tell me how lucky I am and how pleased they are for me.

  ‘Put me in your luggage, habibti!’ says one of the Centre fieldworkers, a young woman with a radiant, smiling face and a neat three-month pregnancy bump.

  By the time I leave the Centre, I am clasping a long list of duty-free perfumes, cigarettes and drinks to bring back from the world my colleagues cannot reach.

  I walk home and start packing. I am nervous and smoke while I’m packing. I’ve already tried to ring Sakhar but his work number is engaged. I call Saida to tell her I will be away for the next week or so.

  ‘Mabrouk, habibti!’ she says, like everyone else. She asks if I can visit her sister, Alla’, in the West Bank while I’m outside. I am their go-between, bringing gifts, hugs and kisses from one arm of the family to the other. But I have to tell Saida that I don’t think I can visit Alla’ this time; I will be coming straight back to Gaza from Brussels. Even speaking these words aloud sounds strange now. I ask Saida if she wants anything from outside.

  ‘Just come back soon, habibti, and come back happy. We need you to be happy for us,’ she says, in that calm, restrained voice that I know so well.

  I call Sakhar’s mobile. But that number is busy too. He calls me when I’m in the taxi en route to the Erez crossing. It’s mid-afternoon, a good hour before the crossing closes, but Erez is never predictable.

  ‘You’re leaving me!’ He croons down the phone and even though I know something has changed between us, I feel myself flush. I can’t say much because I am sitting next to Harb, the taxi driver. I tell Sakhar I will call him from the airport.

  Harb and I have to stop at the Hamas checkpoint close to the Palestinian side of no-man’s-land. A bearded Hamas officer (most of them have beards) writes my name down with great care and asks politely whether I am coming back to Gaza. I tell him I expect to return in about a week – and we are done.

  When we reach the edge of no-man’s-land, I ask Harb if he would like something from outside. Muhammad the driver has a new job with an international organisation, so I take a lot of taxis with Harb these days and have become very fond of him. Harb shakes his grey head and tells me that he doesn’t need anything.

  ‘Belgium,’ he says slowly, rolling the word around his mouth. ‘I cannot imagine Belgium.’

  He turns his taxi round, to drive back into Gaza. I wave, then walk over to the portacabin, to hand in my passport and wait for coordination to cross no-man’s-land. It is strange and unnerving how relatively easy it is for me to leave Gaza. And this afternoon I don’t even have to wait very long to cross. After just twenty minutes or so, I am told that I can proceed.

  When I step out of the portacabin, I see Debby and a few of the other Free Gaza crew sitting on a bench. They must have just arrived while I was in the portacabin.

  ‘Where are you going?’ they want to know.

  ‘To Brussels.’

  ‘Wow!’ they chorus.

  ‘When are you leaving Gaza?’ I ask Debby.

  ‘We can’t leave. We can’t get permits to cross Erez; and we tried to get out at Rafah, but the Egyptians turned us back,’ she says. ‘We are Palestinians now.’

  ‘No you’re not!’ I snap at her. ‘Someone will get you out – you’ll be able to leave Gaza soon. Because you’re not Palestinians.’

  Apart from the Free Gaza posse on the bench, the crossing is very quiet today. The only other people around are a few taxi drivers waiting for arrivals, and the local porters who ferry people’s luggage to the gates of the Israeli side of the crossing. The porters are all Hanounis; they earn tips for carrying luggage and bicker bitterly among themselves about whose turn it is to take my suitcase this afternoon.

  A skinny man with a small head wins the job, hoicks my case onto his narrow shoulders and we set off across no-man’s-land, towards the mouth of the tunnel that leads into the main Erez crossing terminal. Though it is mid-November, the sun still feels like it’s roasting the earth. I have the strangest feeling about this trip; in fact, I have an almost violent urge to turn round and run straight back into Gaza. I don’t know what’s up with me today; maybe I am just nervy about the bloody crossing. I walk on beside the porter. There is no path for me and him to follow; we weave our way around rocks and rubble. To my right, I can see the Swailams’ row of white cottages and a thick splash of green where their vegetables are ripening. To my left, the shattered remains of some other buildings, reduced to tottering wooden frames and piles of stone. Just a few hours from now, I will be in another universe; sitting at a hotel bar drinking cold beer from a frosted glass shaped like a vase. I’m aware that I have barely said a word to the porter. I have nothing to say to anyone right now. As we approach the tunnel, I’m just possessed by the thought that everyone has heard of Gaza and most people will never see inside this Strip for themselves.

  We reach the tunnel. Inside, the air is cooler. The roof, high as a cathedral, is covered
with a ripped red tarp that flaps like a bird’s torn wing. The uneven floor is made of stone. I’m thirsty. At the end of the tunnel is a gate of metal bars that opens onto the walkway leading into the main building. When the porter pulls the gate, it swings open with a whine like human nails scraping a board.

  This porter can go no further. I thank and tip him, and with a brief nod he is gone. As I step onto the walkway, a second porter appears like a magician’s assistant. They each have their pitches. Taking my bags, he escorts me along the walkway to a series of metal doors embedded in a wall. He presses a buzzer. One of the doors clicks open. We step into a wide passage, where two tables lie side by side, in front of another barred gate. The porter lifts my bag onto one of the tables, opens it and waves towards a camera tilted towards us. I wonder how he does this every day, ferrying travellers’ bags almost to the border, then going back for the next job lot, without any hope of crossing himself. But this is no place for small talk. A light above the gate flicks green. I offer the porter a tip. He looks aghast. I think it’s generous and refuse to give him any more. I step through the gate; he retreats back inside the Gaza wall.

  I’m inside the main terminal building. The walls are straight and hard-edged. I enter the security area, where my bags are lifted onto an airport-style conveyor belt and opened. I lay the contents of my handbag out on a tray like a meal. The security guard and I acknowledge each other briefly.

  My luggage moves away. I step through a glass door, then another, and enter a transparent tube, where I place my feet over the footprints painted on the floor and raise my arms. The doors shut and rotate with a swoosh as I am X-rayed. When the door opens in front of me, I step forward. A disembodied voice says in English, ‘No. Go back inside, please.’