Meet Me in Gaza Page 2

  It’s dark when the taxi drops me at the al-Deira. The hotel is a surprise too: it is arabesque, filled with graceful archways, lanterns, well-watered plants and tiled stone floors where footsteps echo like memories. Shadi is waiting for me in the café at the back of the hotel, which is huge and freezing. I can hear the sea hissing outside.

  ‘Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six welcomes to Gaza!’ Shadi stands up, grins at me like an old friend. Welcoming guests is a big deal in Palestine, and his exaggeration makes me laugh, as does his first question, which is, ‘Did you bring any whisky?’

  I reassure him that I had so much booze stuffed inside my suitcase, I could hear myself clinking through the Erez crossing. Shadi laughs, exposing brown, smoke-stained teeth.

  ‘You know alcohol isn’t illegal here,’ – he scans the few other busy tables – ‘just prohibited. We used to buy it in shops like normal people, but the government closed the shops years ago, long before Hamas. Now because of this fucking siege we can’t buy anything.’

  In June 2006 a posse of Gaza fighters tunnelled into Israel and snatched teenage Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conscript, Gilad Shalit. In retaliation, the Israeli government sealed the crossings into Gaza and bombed the only power plant in the Strip. Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza, Israel has steadily tightened the blockade and now, says Shadi, everything, from industrial fuel to children’s hearing aids, even orange juice, is restricted or outright banned. Local supermarkets mostly sell dry goods because they don’t rot or need a refrigerator.1

  We sit in the café with our coats on, drinking steaming black tea infused with sage leaves. As we talk, Shadi is constantly checking his phone or lighting another cigarette, shifting and restless like the sea outside. He tells me he is from southern Gaza and spent five years studying economics in Algeria, but he hasn’t been out of the Strip since the summer of 2006.

  ‘I have been a human rights activist more than fifteen years now, I never stop working. If there is even a whisper in the northern Strip, I still hear it.’ He speaks English like a poet.

  I drain my cup and huddle inside my coat, but I don’t want to go back to my cold apartment yet. A man with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes strides over to greet Shadi, then offers me his hand too. Khalil, his name is. As he is speaking to me, a loud dull blast booms close to us. For a few seconds everything in the café stops; customers freeze in their seats, cups in their hands, cigarettes halfway to their mouths. The waiters halt mid-step … then, just two or three breaths later, they continue bearing trays across the café and conversations bubble up again. I’ve never heard a bomb explode before and look from Shadi to Khalil.

  ‘That was an air strike,’ says Shadi, his voice calm.

  ‘We should be safe here,’ says Khalil, ‘but we shouldn’t leave for a while.’ He lights a cigarette and sits down.

  Five minutes later, Shadi’s phone bleeps with a message: Majid Harazin, senior commander of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, has just been blown up by an Israeli rocket while driving his car near the Gaza City beach front.2

  ‘Hamas has warned people to stay away from the car as there might be more explosions,’ says Khalil. His phone has also just bleeped. ‘But Harazin was carrying $100,000 dollars in cash when Israel hit the car. There are dollar bills on fire all around it and people are out there, chasing the money.’

  The two men exchange a glance. I look around, imagining the scene outside: $100 bills burning round a charred car, a hulk of roasted flesh still slumped in the driving seat.

  I excuse myself and go to find the bathroom, then wander to the front of the café, where huge sliding windows open onto a terrace. I stand out there, breathing in cold salty air. The Mediterranean is glinting midnight blue like petrol and I can see small lights blinking on the horizon. They must be fishing boats. From here they look like a rope of small lanterns loosely strung together.

  I don’t feel frightened. I don’t know what the hell to feel.

  An hour or so later, Shadi offers to drive me back to my apartment. It’ll be safe now, he says. His car is parked just outside the hotel. It looks like a square biscuit tin on wheels. When I squeeze inside, the dashboard is held together with brown tape and I can’t shut the passenger door. ‘Don’t worry,’ – Shadi chokes the engine into life – ‘my car is the best-in-the-West!’ He leans over and slams the door on my side shut. The whole vehicle shudders and my window slides wide open. I give him a look. We both start laughing and our laughter reassures me.

  Over the next few days, Joumana keeps me busy at work at the Centre, editing documents and press releases that have been translated into English and writing official correspondence. Almost every afternoon there is a press release about one or more Gazans being blown up by the Israeli military, and every night I go to bed to the pounding of bombs striking northern and eastern Gaza. The bombs don’t physically frighten me, they sound far enough away – more like resonant booms than the punching detonation I heard from the al-Deira Hotel. I sleep quite well. But a small knot of anxiety embeds itself inside my guts.

  I think it’s probably healthy to be slightly anxious here, like having my own early warning system. I just want to manage my fear, not the other way round.

  Shortly before I left the West Bank, a friend of a friend, originally from Gaza, gave me some advice. ‘Worry about your own safety, but not too much – there’s no point,’ he said. ‘Just keep your eyes open, don’t do anything really stupid – and laugh as much as you can.’

  After work I either go to the Metro Supermarket or take a Lebanon Taxi straight back to my apartment. From my brief look around al-Rimal, I can see that my new neighbourhood is a posh corner of the city, maybe the only posh corner there is. I need to get out more, but don’t know where to go; an hour after work, dusk is already thickening and the power cuts out every night. My landlord – his name is Abu Ali3 – has given me a little electric bar heater, but even when there is electricity it makes little difference. Some evenings I just crawl into bed very early, longing for a hot-water bottle.

  It’s almost Christmas. Winter is going to last another two months. Feels like a long time.

  Shadi, my colleague at the Centre, monitors the goods that Israel allows to enter into Gaza, including fuel, as part of his job. He tells me the power cuts are just going to get worse.

  ‘Since October Israel has been reducing fuel supplies to us. Now they have cut 30 per cent of the gasoline [petrol] we need in Gaza every day, 42 per cent of the benzine [diesel] and 80 per cent of the gas [it comes in bottles; people use it for gas stoves].4 If this continues, then the power plant will shut down suddenly. Gaza City will be in the dark, the towns and camps in the middle areas of the Strip too. Can you imagine?’ He shakes his head and swallows a bitter laugh. The Israeli government claims these deliberate shortages are not collective punishment of the population of Gaza en masse, but aimed only at Israel’s ‘enemy entity’: Hamas and its political supporters.

  Shadi and I are sitting in his small office at the Centre, in our coats. I’m smoking because the heating is off and smoking distracts me from being so bloody cold.

  ‘There is only one place to keep warm now, habibti,’ he says, grey eyes glinting.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, thinking here we go …

  ‘Hammam al-Samara!’

  I sit up straight. ‘What – a hammam, a steam bath, here in Gaza?’

  ‘Yeesss …’ He rolls the word inside his mouth like a wave about to crash. ‘It is in the old quarter of the city. What is his name, ah, Abu Abdullah … he has been the keeper of the hammam for so many years. You should go and see it for yourself.’

  Muhammad, one of the Lebanon Taxi drivers, pulls up in the narrow street outside Hammam al-Samara. It is hewn from oak-coloured sandstone bricks, now rounded like well-baked loaves. A small carved sign is mounted above an arched wooden door, left open just wide enough for a streak of winter sunlight to lead the way inside. I push the door and see a staircase descending int
o a passageway lit by coloured oil lamps. Irresistible.

  Down I clamber, making my way along the passage to another slightly open door. Inside, a man with a thick silver moustache is sitting on a wooden chair. For a moment we look at each other, then he stands up, taking his time.

  ‘Good afternoon. Is this your first visit?’ As he speaks, his moustache twitches like a little silver fish.

  ‘Yes. Are you Abu Abdullah?’

  ‘Indeed I am … Welcome to Hammam al-Samara.’

  I am in a large domed chamber lit with a huge iron chandelier. There’s a separate resting area set back into the thick walls, rugs and piles of crimson cushions draped across-wide stone ledges. The light is soft. It feels peaceful and very, very warm.

  Ten minutes later, clad in nothing but a thin cotton wrap, I step into the inner sanctum of the steam chamber. I’m lucky: I brought my stuff with me and arrived at the hours set aside for women. As I enter the chamber, a wall of wet heat hits me full force. For a moment I can’t see anything, then realise half a dozen women are either crouched on low stools, scrubbing themselves, or lying on towels on the hot stone floor as though they are sunbathing.

  I find a stool beside a stone basin built into the walls of the steam chamber and begin washing my body. The basin is smooth as soapstone from aeons of bathers. I tip bowl after bowl of cold water over my soapy skin. Then, red and tingling, I lay my towel down on the stone floor too and surrender to the heat. Hot water pumps steadily through the old pipes lining the walls like the beat of the human heart. I chat to the woman lying closest to me, both of us dozy as cats. After she leaves, I lie there sweating until my skin feels newborn and my bones soft as oil.

  When I finally stagger out of the steam chamber, the woman is still sitting in the changing room, fully dressed, stubbing out a cigarette. She offers me one and laughs as I collapse onto the bench.

  ‘Come back next week, habibti,’ she grins at me through a veil of smoke, ‘this is the best thing we have in Gaza!’

  When I eventually emerge, flushed and damp, Abu Abdullah is in his chair. He asks me if I’ve enjoyed my time. I say yes, and ask him how old this place is.

  ‘Almost 1,000 years old. This is one of the oldest hammams in the whole Middle East, built in the Mamluk period. But never destroyed …’

  ‘How long have you been working here?’

  ‘Forty years. But my family, we are the al-Wazirs, and we have been looking after this hammam for more than one century. It is part of our history.’

  I pay him and thank him, then pause by the door, suddenly deeply curious about the histories and secrets soaked inside these old thick warm walls, and inside Gaza.

  All I know of the Mamluks is that they were Turkish warriors, originally slaves, who once ruled this region, though I’m not even sure exactly when it was. But now that I think about it, the history of this place could be a key to understanding the violence festering here. I have plenty of time on my hands at the moment and I can spend some of it unravelling the story of this beguiling, broken place.

  the hafla

  The day before New Year’s Eve one of my colleagues at the Centre takes me aside.

  ‘We are having a hafla tomorrow night. Out of town. Someone will pick you up at your apartment at nine o’clock and we will drive somewhere away from the trouble. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring anyone with you.’

  A hafla is a ceilidh, or gathering. A party. This hafla is going to be out of town because violence is stewing between Hamas and Fatah again. New Year’s Day is the anniversary of the founding of the Fatah movement, the de-facto government in the West Bank, and Hamas’s political enemy. Hamas has banned all public Fatah celebrations in Gaza, claiming its activists are being harassed and detained by Fatah in the West Bank.5

  I have been in Gaza just two weeks now, and don’t know what to expect at this New Year hafla. At nine o’clock I am picked up just outside my apartment, as arranged, by a man called Samir and his wife. We drive north and park outside a large detached white villa. Inside, the villa is open-plan, with a sweeping staircase and a wood fire crackling smoky orange flames. There are a few other foreigners like me, and maybe thirty Gazans; most of them seem to be in couples. I’m introduced to everyone in turn – lawyers, businessmen, journalists, local UN staff, all of them elegant, wealthy-looking, confident. The host asks whether I would prefer wine, vodka or whisky. At first we sit around sipping our drinks and chatting, but soon people start getting up to dance. I hesitate, suddenly self-conscious among these strangers, until one of the men extends his hand. ‘Dance with me,’ he smiles.

  We dance. And laugh, and get rowdy. At midnight we cheer as the men uncork bottles of champagne. There’s lots of kissing – toasting the New Year and each other – before we descend on a vast spread of meats, salads, dips and warm flatbreads. Afterwards we carry on dancing for hours; a happy, sweaty rabble of men and women, laughing, occasionally stumbling, all of us enchanted. At some point I gaze around me, drunk and happy, mesmerised by the beautiful surprise of being here with these friendly, joyous people.

  Despite its blighted history of being invaded and occupied over and again, there have been golden times too, when Gaza flourished and everything seemed possible. Perched at the edge of the eastern Sinai, the ancient crossroads between North Africa, the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe, Gaza was a lodestar of the medieval spice trade, once the most lucrative business on earth. For at least ten centuries Arabian merchants crossed the Rub’ al-Khali, the fabled ‘Empty Quarter’, with fragrant cargoes of frankincense, myrrh and other spices, bound for the port of Gaza. This thriving port, and Gaza’s proximity to Egypt, made the city a renowned spice emporium. It was also renowned for its beauty: back in the sixth century, a wandering Italian traveller, remembered only as the ‘Piacenza pilgrim’, found Gaza to be ‘a lovely and renowned city, with noble people distinguished by every kind of liberal accomplishment [and] they are welcoming to strangers.’6 The twentieth century also saw some good times in Gaza, squeezed in between half a dozen wars and military occupations. Even now, under the shadows of Israel and Hamas, my new friends are making life more than worth living.

  Eventually I flop onto one of the couches for a breather, next to a man whose name I can’t remember. He offers me a cigarette and leans forward to light it for me. We sit side by side, smoking and watching the dancers. Stubbing out his dog end, he leans towards me again.

  ‘You see what a strange life we live here!’ he says, with a sharp laugh. He tells me he is a lawyer. Has been here most of his life. Loves Gaza but hates the politics. ‘We are not fighting the Israelis any more,’ he says sadly, ‘just destroying each other. You’re working here – right? You will see how beautiful and terrible this place is. I hope they are not killing each other out there again tonight.’

  He’s talking about Hamas and Fatah. Political adversaries since Hamas was created in 1987 and now violent, bitter enemies, who goad each other like punch-drunk boxers as the roaring crowd flinches.7

  I have no idea what time it is when the hafla starts to wind down. But it is very late when we leave the villa. We move quietly, like burglars or absconding inmates, no lingering or banter outside; we just slide straight into the cars and start driving back to Gaza City in small convoys. I’m in Samir’s car again. His wife has already left and a broad-shouldered Gazan called Tariq is on the back seat. The three of us are great friends by now.

  Just a couple of minutes after setting off, we see the car in front being stopped by two masked gunmen. Samir curses. But we can’t do anything.

  ‘Put your cigarette out,’ he says to me, his voice terse. ‘They are al-Qassam.’ 8

  Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas. These men launch rockets and mortars against Israel and often have day jobs as Hamas police officers. As the car in front slowly pulls away, one of the gunmen motions us forward, gesturing for me to open my window so he can take a good look at us. Suddenly cold sober and dry-throated, I slowly wind down t
he window, staring straight ahead as he stoops and glares inside the car, his rifle clenched, his face a black balaclava with slits for eyes. He fires questions at Samir.

  As he stares us down, I throw a glance at him and have a sudden terrible urge to laugh. It must be the booze. I know this is a bad situation. But the gunman is very short and is wearing small gold reading glasses.

  We are being held up by a myopic masked midget.

  I press my lips together hard and don’t make a sound until the gunman nods and Samir pulls away as I wind the window back up. Samir swears all the way back, Tariq says we’re lucky and I bray with nervous laughter.

  At work the next morning, the colleague who invited me to the New Year hafla takes me aside again and reminds me not to mention the party to anyone. These things need to be kept quiet. People here talk too much. Then he tells me that violence has poisoned this New Year in Gaza.

  While we were drinking champagne and dancing to Egyptian pop star Amr Diab, militants from both sides were out on the streets battering each other. Six people have been killed, including a man aged almost 80 – Ibrahim Abu Delakh – who lived with his family in Beit Lahiya, not far from the plush white villa where the hafla was held. Just before midnight, Hamas police officers raided the Abu Delakh home, beat the family up and ordered them to take down the yellow Fatah flags fluttering outside their house. Minutes after the police left, a masked gang swarmed into the house, murdered the old man in front of his terrified family and tore down the flags. The police stood by. Or joined in.

  moles in damp tunnels

  Early evening, a week or so after New Year. I am loitering outside my apartment. The street is dark and freezing. But above me something beautiful: a luminous full moon rising into the pitch-black sky. Peering across the street, I can make out the gated buildings opposite, palm trees lining the garden paths. I’m waiting for a taxi, but Muhammad the driver is late. I hope he won’t be long. It is so cold, I am pacing like an animal in a cage. A dark cage. Tonight is a mother of a power cut.