Meet Me in Gaza Read online

  ‘I know that men do not always respect women in Britain, Ustaz. But I still feel free there. I don’t think women here in Gaza have much freedom. Men tell them how to live.’

  ‘Yes, women have less freedom here. But we treat them with more respect.’

  ‘So why can’t women have freedom and respect, Ustaz?’

  ‘I told you, our culture is different.’

  We both stand our ground in these discussions about sexual politics that we never call sexual politics. Sometimes I get frustrated, and occasionally really pissed off, with Mounir, for his conservative patriarchy and traditional views of women. He gets frustrated and pissed off with me too. Sometimes we both raise our voices, insisting on being heard. But we carry on talking and listening to each other. One of the reasons I enjoy his company is because he’s not a liberal, and very often we don’t agree with each other. I like the challenge and I’m learning a lot about Gaza from him. Many of our debates, which flow from Arabic to English and back again like the local tides, take place in candlelight. Often there is no electricity when Mounir arrives, or else it cuts out within the first few minutes of our lesson. He tells me how lucky I am to have electricity when I come home from work. In his home, near Jabalya refugee camp, they get their ration of electricity late at night, after his family have all gone to bed – and he can’t afford to buy a generator.

  ‘We Gazans used to dream of freedom,’ he says. ‘Now we dream of having electricity and enough fuel to make dinner on our kitchen stoves.’

  Almost 70 per cent of Gazan families are refugees who were expelled from other parts of Palestine by the Zionists in the years leading up to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Registered Palestinian refugees receive assistance, protection and advocacy from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). There are eight refugee camps across the Gaza Strip.17 Jabalya camp, where Mounir comes from, is up in northern Gaza. After he was married, Mounir taught in a local Jabalya camp school and he and his wife saved to build their own home outside the camp, the ambition of many young couples from refugee families.

  ‘You cannot imagine how hard life was in Jabalya camp,’ he says. ‘Really we lived in fear, especially during the second intifada. So many times I was frightened that my wife and children would be killed in front of me.’

  I’ve been to Jabalya camp, a sprawling ghetto of more than 108,000 people crammed into just over half a square mile – and a traditional Hamas stronghold, where militants use open areas around the camp to launch rockets and mortars towards southern Israel, and where the Israeli military strikes with an iron fist. It is a concrete jungle with no trees, where children grow up with fearful parents inside anxious walls.

  ‘I worked hard and saved hard,’ Mounir continues, ‘and finally a few years ago I was able to build my own house and we moved out of the camp. We have to stay near Jabalya camp because the rest of my family is there – and in our culture families stay together, or near to each other. I do not want to live on the other side of Gaza from my family. But now we are in Beit Lahiya and it’s a better place to live. But I have been kept awake so many nights in Beit Lahiya too.

  ‘I have five children now, and there have been times at night when the situation with Israel was so bad I thought we would be killed in our beds. Some of those times I told my wife to dress the children, and we left the house and got into my little car and we drove away from the north in the middle of the night. Because my family is all in Jabalya, and my wife’s family is from Egypt, there is nowhere else for us to go – nowhere safe to protect my wife and children from what might happen. We have slept some nights in my car on the street in Gaza City, in these streets near your apartment – because this is the safest place in Gaza. Can you imagine the feeling of knowing you can’t even protect your own children? It is like being eaten by fear.’

  That evening, after Mounir has gone, holding onto the banister so he doesn’t topple down the dark stairs, I sit alone on my couch as the candle burns down, picturing a man spending a night in a car with five cold children, his wife too scared to cry as explosions rock the streets around them. I stub out my cigarette, thinking how darkness takes many different forms.

  Towards the end of winter, a Palestinian blows himself up in a shopping centre in the Israeli city of Dimona, dismembering an elderly woman as she is making her way to her local bank. This is the first Palestinian suicide attack inside Israel for more than a year and it really rattles me because I do not hear a word of pity for the dead woman from anyone. I do not hear people rejoicing at her killing or celebrating the death of a Palestinian shahid, or ‘martyr’; I just hear them hoping the suicide bomber is not from Gaza. Because if he is, then God help us, they say: Israel will make everyone here inside Gaza pay for it. During our next lesson, I blurt out my agitated confusion to Ustaz Mounir.

  ‘All killing is wrong,’ he says, ‘including killing Israelis. This was not a good Muslim.’

  He is the only person I hear condemn the suicide bombing.

  With three hours tuition a week, and so many lessons devoted to conversation, my Arabic does really start to improve. And so does my confidence about walking the streets and interacting with people I meet along the way. I greet people easily and get to know many of the local shopkeepers by name. At the Centre my colleagues notice the difference too. I can banter with them in Arabic a little – and even answer them back. Every day I learn a few new words. It is like having another sense begin to fully awaken.

  On my way back home from work one afternoon, carrying a bag of fresh warm pitta breads from the bakery just down the street, I pass by a posse of shabab. I’ve seen this lot before, but this time I can hear them egging each other on until one shouts, ‘Nice arse!’ The others start braying like the local donkeys and soon they join in too: ‘Nice-arse-nice-arse-nice-arse …!’

  I stop dead in the street. Turning on my heels, I remove my sunglasses and stare them down. Then I launch into a slow, loud tirade of Arabic.

  ‘Is this how you speak to women in Gaza – with no respect at all? Haram! Shame on you! If only your mothers – and your fathers – could hear you now …’

  I’m really quite enjoying myself. But the posse are staring at me, bug-eyed, their feet glued to the pavement. I take a slow, deliberate step towards them.

  ‘Now listen to me – don’t you ever dare speak to a woman like this again. Igliboh!’

  Their jaws hit the ground. And to a boy they all apologise for being so rude.

  even the foreigners are escaping!

  One morning at the end of January, Hamas blows up the southern Gaza border with Egypt. The operation is well planned, brilliantly executed. Sections of the 12-metre-high fence are detonated one after another until it lies in a concertina stretching for more than three and a half miles. By the time I get to work, just after 8.30 in the morning, thousands of Gazans have already poured across the border into northern Egypt. My colleagues are hanging out in reception, smirking like teenage joyriders.

  Shadi struts across reception, beaming about the busted border.

  ‘You heard the news? Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six mabrouk (congratulations) to Gaza! Hamas has suddenly broken the prison walls!’ His smile is radiant as a sunrise.

  We try to work. But everyone is too gleeful and we can’t settle at our desks. The impossible has been done and the air is charged with possibilities. We are all nervous, restless and excited. I keep imagining what the atmosphere must be like down at the border – the elated crowds spilling over into Egypt, seizing the day. Gazans are always saying they live in a sijin, a prison, and local resentment against Hamas is slowly gathering because for all their firebrand rhetoric, nothing is changing inside this siege. Now, for once, they have delivered.

  In the early afternoon, I get a call from Tariq, who I met at the New Year’s Eve hafla, when we encountered the masked midget. Sometimes he and I have coffee together in the evening at the al-Deira Hotel. Tariq is a chain-smoker with the body
of a rugby player; he works for one of the local UN departments and this evening he too is crossing to Egypt.

  ‘You want to come with me, habibti?’ he asks.

  ‘I can’t,’ I tell him, catching the reluctance in my own voice. But my colleagues have warned me not to go to Rafah. The Egyptians could start re-sealing the border at any moment, the Israeli military might get involved and the whole thing could burst like a piece of overripe fruit into a bloody clash. I have a job here and am expected at my desk first thing tomorrow morning. I really cannot join him.

  Late that evening: a white ear of moon suspended in the black sky. We walk slowly forward, keeping the pace of the crowd. Thousands of us are clambering over the concertinaed fence; the atmosphere is like a huge carnival, the air charged not with anxiety, but laughter and shouting. Round-shouldered old men and women hobble, clutching the arms of youngsters who lead them tenderly, like lambs. Whole families have come out to share the joy of tonight’s walk into another country.

  I clamber down from the fence with a little jump and Tariq and I make our way over the wasted no-man’s-land between Gaza and Egypt, past lines of Egyptian soldiers brandishing riot shields, yet passive as waxworks. For the first, and almost certainly the only time in our lives, we walk across a fortified international border without papers. And congratulate each other with tears in our eyes. I had to see this for myself, I just had to.

  The city of Rafah is divided between Gaza and Egypt in more or less the same way that Berlin (where I was born) used to be divided between East and West Germany, with houses on each side of the fortified border lying within sight of each other.18 On the Gaza side, the houses are so bullet-and mortar-spattered they look pebble-dashed. Some look half-eaten. The Egyptian side of Rafah is smaller, and between the two is the 12-metre-high border fence that imprisons Gazans inside the Strip. But now most of the fence is lying on the ground, buckled and useless as a crashed car.

  At the end of no-man’s-land we enter Egyptian Rafah. I have never seen so many people swarming in a single street, so many trucks bulging like obese men, as flocks of worried sheep and goats on rope leads are being driven back into Gaza (Israel has also banned imports of livestock). Cars, motorbikes and donkey carts are stranded in the melee as the crowds push all ways at once. For a moment the sheer volume looks like a mob and really frightens me. But then I see that amid the chaos is some kind of calm; people are helping each other, and often waiting for their turn to move. This is an exodus, not a riot.

  ‘You all right?’ asks Tariq.

  ‘Yes, I’m good, thanks. Glad I’m here.’

  We want to reach the next Egyptian town, al-Arish, because Tariq has Palestinian friends living there, so we press on down the street. Because Rafah was only divided back in 1978, most of the locals in this Egyptian half of the city are Gazans too.

  I haven’t seen anyone who resembles a Westerner – this story has only just ‘broken’ and I guess the foreign press hasn’t arrived on the scene yet. With my short hair and white fake-fur coat, I feel utterly conspicuous. As we attempt to wade across the street – which right now feels like trying to part the sea – one man in all these thousands suddenly stands still, points straight at me and roars something at the top of his lungs. The crowd surrounding him all appear to turn their eyes on me at once and then erupt into guffaws of laughter that bounce across the street towards us.

  What the …?

  Like a confused child to a parent, I turn to Tariq for an answer – but he’s laughing so much that he is almost bent over double.

  When he straightens up, he says, wiping his streaming eyes, ‘That man over there, he shouted: “Look! Even the foreigners are escaping from Gaza!”’

  I start laughing too. Tonight I’m a jailbreaker!

  Eventually we find a minibus we can squeeze into and start the tortuous crawl south out of Rafah towards al-Arish. Our elation saps as we stare at the crowds and vehicles bottle-necked at the town entrance. My head is throbbing and my lungs sting from diesel fumes leaching out of hundreds of vehicles going nowhere.

  Tariq slumps in his seat, which is too small for his big, square body.

  ‘I’m glad we are here, to see this – but it’s crazy. You know, we Palestinians used to dream of real freedom, our own independent state. And look at us now – blowing up our border to escape for a few days shopping. Pathetic.’

  He pushes drooping hair out of his eyes. Tariq came back to Gaza just seven months ago. He was studying at university in the US, and returned here the week before Hamas took over the Strip. He cracks jokes about his own terrible timing. His father is Gazan, his mother comes from the Balkans. I met her once and she told me in her still-strong Slavic accent that she could live with war; people from the Balkans and Gaza, they know how to live with war. It was the imprisonment that was slowly killing everyone, she said; this siege is like sentencing people to a long, slow death.

  Tariq has told me that on his way to work, he sometimes has the overwhelming urge to keep driving his car until he reaches the border fence, then crash straight through it and just go out in flames. He lights a cigarette and offers me one, and we smoke because there is nothing else to do. I’ve been too caught up in the thrill of this night for any kind of reflection, but for all its audacity there is something pathetic about this crush; it’s like a mass breakout of prisoners or refugees with nowhere to flee to because nobody wants them. Many are already on their way back inside. Tariq asks a man squashed beside us in the bus why he crossed the border this evening.

  ‘To breathe some fresh air outside our sijin,’ he says.

  He’s a Hamas policeman. His friend, sitting beside him, is a policeman too – but a Fatah supporter, so he is out of work.19 The two of them say they are best friends and have just come along for the ride. They’re going to al-Arish too, then back to Gaza before dawn, because the Hamas guy has to be at work in the morning. Come to think of it, so do I.

  The minibus barely moves and eventually the four of us desert it. We start walking out of town and eventually find a Bedouin man with bad breath and a bashed Mercedes-Benz who agrees to take us to al-Arish for a price. Everything has its price.

  Al-Arish is a small Mediterranean seaside resort 28 miles south of the Gaza border, on the road towards Cairo – but we all know that checkpoints have been erected just outside al-Arish, to make sure Gazans don’t stray beyond the town. The Egyptian authorities don’t have the resources to rebuild the wall for at least the next few days, but offering sanctuary to Gazans would jeopardise Egypt’s brittle rapprochement with Israel – and the authorities there fear Hamas’s relationship with the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement.

  As he tears along rough roads with no headlights on, the Bedouin’s Mercedes bucks like a horse. When we eventually reach al-Arish it’s very late and Tariq and I are exhausted. But the Bedouin has mentioned a hotel with a bar in town and Tariq’s thirst is now almost as great as mine. We easily find the hotel – a square monstrosity on the main street – and invite our two new policemen friends along for a drink in the bar. Which turns out to be a plush red circular salon with long drapes, frilly pouffes and two uniformed waiters who both look about 12 years old. But there is beer and gin behind the bar – and they even have ice! I ask for a gin and tonic, and when the boys look at me blankly, I just slip behind the bar and mix it myself. Tariq has a beer. The policemen both drink Egyptian-style Coca-Cola. We raise our four glasses and drink a toast to freedom, giggling about this ridiculous luxury just down the road from our sijin.

  It is much too late to talk politics, but I can’t resist asking our police escort how they became such good friends, given that one of them works for Hamas and the other for Fatah.

  ‘We are from the same village,’ says one of them. ‘We have always been friends and we never talk about politics.’

  ‘Palestinian politics is poison,’ says the other. ‘They want us to fear and hate each other – just like the Israelis want us to hate and fear each other. Bu
t I think for myself. That is the only freedom we’ve got in Gaza.’

  When we leave the bar, the policemen bid us goodnight. They’ve seen what they came here for and are going back home now.

  Hours later I wake up in the pink bedroom of a young girl who has been shunted to another bed so that I can sleep in hers. For a few seconds, I forget about arriving here after the bar and being welcomed by Tariq’s friends. Instead I look around, bleary-eyed, trying to recall where the hell I am. Then remember that this is Egypt, not Gaza, and I should be at work now. I call the Centre and whine about having a bad upset stomach, saying hopefully I will be well enough to come to work tomorrow.

  ‘It is probably the drinking water,’ says Joumana, who is so sympathetic and concerned – even offering to pop round to see me on her way home – that I feel slightly queasy afterwards for lying to her.

  Our hosts are Gazans who settled in al-Arish before 1978 and they like life here. It’s busy in summer, quiet in winter – and not occupied by Israel. They are delighted to see Tariq, who’s one of the extended family. He’s in good spirits this morning, teasing me about calling in sick at work and joking that Gaza is so small, one or both of us is bound to see someone we know here. We share a late breakfast, then all stroll down to the beach for some Egyptian sea air. The beach – the main attraction here – is a long stretch of clean, pale sand, washed by clear shallows that gift good bathing and fresh seafood. We wander slowly along the sand towards a local café.

  I pull off my shoes and paddle just for the pleasure of it. The water is cold and my toes tingle. I feel like I’m on holiday; last night seems an unreal, and surreal, experience. Right now I don’t have the words to describe it, even to myself.

  Cities are besieged when belligerent forces want to beat the local population and their overlords into submission. After more than 3,000 years of invasions and occupations, Gaza is a veteran of sieges. When Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, arrived in Gaza in 332 BC during his conquest of the Persian Empire, he expected the city to fall quickly or else to send advance notice of its surrender, as other cities en route to Egypt had done. But Gaza had a secret weapon: a charismatic, statuesque eunuch called Batis, who was a daring and resourceful military commander. Batis defiantly hired Arab mercenaries, rallied local Philistines, Persians and Arabs to gather weapons, food and water and prepared the city for siege. Its slightly elevated hillside position gave the Gaza stronghold a great advantage, and the city was also protected by a high wall that Alexander’s troops found impossible to penetrate.