Meet Me in Gaza Read online

  The siege lasted more than two months, during the height of summer. Alexander was wounded twice as his troops tried over and again to breach the Gaza City walls. Reeking, rancid and half-crazed with thirst as the local wadis (riverbeds) ran dry, his troops became murderous. Finally, on their fourth major assault, they broke through the walls into Gaza and unleashed bloody carnage, slashing and slaughtering some 10,000 of the men inside until the walls were crusted with their black gore, raping and enslaving women and children, and sacking the city of its treasures, including its troves of perfumes and spices.

  But even in defeat, Batis refused to bow to Alexander. The conqueror’s henchmen forced through a rope between Batis’s ankle bones and his Achilles tendons, bound the rope to Alexander’s own chariot and dragged the eunuch alive around the city until his body was nothing but eviscerated meat.20

  With Gaza crushed, Alexander continued south towards the Nile Delta, where he ‘liberated’ the Egyptian Empire, founded the city of Alexandria and was pronounced the new ‘Master of the Universe’, at the grand old age of 24. His men would have stormed down the ancient ‘Way of the Sea’, right along this coastline where I am standing now, barefoot in the placid Mediterranean.

  Tariq and his friends are slightly ahead of me, but someone else is waving at me from the beach. Not another joker, please. He comes loping towards me, a man with a shaved head, smiling like he recognises me. Ah – now I know who it is.

  ‘Marhaba, ya Louisa – how you like al-Arish?’

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ I exclaim as Muhammad the driver and I shake hands, laughing.

  ‘Fucking helwa (great)!’ He almost sings the words, his face alight with joy. This is the first time I’ve actually seen him outside his taxi.

  ‘Did you bring your family with you, Muhammad?’

  ‘No. We don’t know how long the border will be open and you know my wife is pregnant. I will go back to Gaza tonight – I just came to see this with my own eyes.’

  He doesn’t say anything else. Just stands there with a blissed-out smile.

  ‘Look, Muhammad, I’m supposed to be at work today – so, er, don’t tell anyone you saw me, OK?’

  ‘Loueeza!’ His expression is pure wicked triumph. He has caught me out and is delighted to have done so. But I’m sure he won’t tell on me. A few minutes later I have to go, to catch up with Tariq and his relatives. When I reach them and glance back over my shoulder, Muhammad is still standing at the gentle lip of the sea.

  Tariq, who did tell his boss he was crossing to Egypt, wants to stay here another day or so. Fair enough, I say, this is a nice place to linger. But I must be on my way. We easily find a crowded minibus heading back to Rafah and I set off alone, just after lunch. A few hours later I stroll back past the waxwork Egyptians with their riot shields. As I clamber over the crumpled fence, this time in sunlight, the man in front of me is guiding a herd of goats into Gaza. And the TV cameras have arrived.

  Why did Hamas do it? Did they blow up the border to boost their popularity with Gazans? Or to thumb their noses at Israel, or at their neighbour and gate-keeper, Egypt, the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel, back in 1978? Many Gazans despise the Egyptian authorities for allowing Israel to control the crossing at Rafah and effectively seal it – they did this in June 2006, after the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit (thereby cutting off the only route out of Gaza that bypasses Israel).

  The Egyptians also cooperate with Israel over the network of Gazan smugglers’ tunnels snaking under the Rafah border. My colleague Shadi is from Rafah and has told me about the Egyptians pouring concrete down the tunnels and pumping gas into them, forcing the smugglers – men and boys – to escape from 15 metres underground, like foxes fleeing from hounds. Not all of them make it. Several have already suffocated this year.21

  Twelve days after Hamas has blown up the border, the Egyptian authorities begin rebuilding it. They give Gazans still inside Egypt a few days’ grace to return before the border is completely re-sealed, but don’t allow anyone else to leave Gaza except Egyptians who crossed into the Strip to see family and friends. By now around half the population of Gaza has crossed back and forth over the broken border into Egypt and Gazans have spent millions of US dollars in northern Egypt (one estimate is $250 million in al-Arish alone), giving a massive boost to the local economy. I half-expect, half-hope, that thousands of Gazans will refuse to be corralled back inside the Strip and instead just sit it out at the border, demanding that Egypt keep the Rafah crossing open and maybe even shaming the ‘international community’ into confronting the Israeli siege.

  But like songbirds allowed out of their cage for a brief stretch of their clipped wings, or jailbirds recalled from parole, the Gazans obediently cross back over before the wall is rebuilt around them. For a couple of days, I still see the odd wagon with an Egyptian flag and passengers in white headdresses who don’t quite look Gazan. But the party is almost over.

  What with one thing and another, I haven’t seen Saida for a little while. The next time we meet, back at her home, we eat with the family, then retreat to the bedroom she shares with her sister, Maha, to talk among ourselves. Saida has some news: the human rights centre where she has been volunteering has offered her a full-time job, researching human rights in Gaza. In her serious, steady voice, she tells me that she’s very happy about this.

  ‘But already they are giving me a lot of work, habibti. I know I am going to be very busy. Khalas! (Enough!) – it’s better to be busy in Gaza and not think about our situation too much.’

  I raise a toast to her new job. We clink our coffee cups.

  ‘Did you cross the border this week?’ I ask her afterwards, curious as to whether she would have done so or not.

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘To Egypt.’

  ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘Yes, just for one night. With Tariq. We climbed over the fence, with thousands of other people, and we ended up going to al-Arish with a Bedouin …’

  I want to share the whole escapade with her, but falter under her penetrating gaze and fall silent. When I’ve finished speaking, Saida is silent for a moment. Then she says: ‘That is your choice. But I will not cross the border like this, climbing over a broken wall like a prisoner escaping from jail. No, habibti. When the Egyptians really open that border, then I will walk across it with my family and we will visit Egypt like normal people visit other countries. But not like this.’

  I see the steel flash of her eyes and know that she means every word.

  Gaza from the air

  When the Egyptians re-seal the southern border, life returns to, if not normal, then what it was before this brief interlude of freedom. One of the most striking things about life in Gaza for me is the daily semblance of normal street life. Gazans get on with their day-to-day lives because what is the alternative? As Mediterranean people, most of them are early risers. After breakfast, the lucky ones go to work (unemployment is running at 40 per cent right now, one of the highest rates in the world), women cook and clean for their families, and children go to school – frequently in shifts because there are chronic shortages of classrooms and no available materials to build new schools. The Muslim working week is Sunday to Thursday; Friday is for prayers and Saturday is traditional family time.

  During the week I’m usually at work by 8.30 in the morning, and back home again around half past three in the afternoon, for a late lunch. By then I’m usually ravenous. But often I just have a snack of bread, tomatoes and hummus because I receive so many invitations to dinner. Gazans I’ve never met before, friends of my Palestinian friends over in the West Bank, keep calling to invite me to eat in their homes and meet their families. I have dinner with Saida and her family too, at least once a week. When I first arrived here, almost two months ago, I presumed I would be spending most evenings home alone. But my mobile keeps ringing and now I rarely spend an evening in my own company. I wonder how many people in Scotland or England invite virtual strangers
to their houses for meals that last half the evening.

  One night I have dinner with the family of Sharif, my first Arabic teacher, who I met in Ramallah. After we’ve eaten a fine meal, Sharif ’s mother takes me to one side. She tells me Sharif has been in touch: he’s very homesick and wants to visit them. She takes my hands and begs me to see her son next time I’m in Ramallah and to persuade him, for his own sake, not to come back.

  When I go out at night, it’s usually Muhammad the driver who drops me off and then brings me home again later, when I’m sleepy and full of good food. I always enjoy his company as we drive around town. Most of the time we just banter, making bad jokes about the life here, distracting ourselves from the realities festering around us – like the mounds of rubbish stinking in the streets because there is no fuel for the municipal trucks or enough power for the plants to crush the rotting debris.

  Occasionally, though, Muhammad talks to me about what’s really going on in his life; he speaks about his wife, Lina (Tender One), who is pregnant with their fourth child, and his worries for his three young children and their future here, with all these bombs, the endless political troubles and the lack of money. Like hundreds of thousands of other Gazan men, Muhammad used to work in southern Israel. He spent ten years as a textile worker in an Israeli factory.

  ‘They spoke Arabic, we spoke Hebrew, we all ate the same food. I used to go to work in Israel, then come home to Gaza to my family. Ya Allah (By God), life was better then,’ he tells me as we drive, his voice suddenly dreamy and nostalgic.

  The first Palestinian intifada began in Jabalya refugee camp in December 1987. Years of Israeli–Palestinian tensions, exacerbated by the brutish ‘Iron Fist’ policy of the Israeli military, erupted when an Israeli tank driver knocked down a group of men from Jabalya, killing four of them. Palestinians united against the Israeli occupation in seven years of mass, mainly non-violent, demonstrations and civil strikes that tainted Israel’s image, yet utterly failed to deliver independence for the Palestinians. The second intifada, which started in September 2000, saw blood on both sides’ hands.22 The Israeli military launched tanks, helicopters and live ammunition against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and stone-throwing youths. Impotent against Israel’s military might, Palestinian militants launched suicide missions, deliberately blowing themselves to pieces in crowded Israeli discos, cafés and public buses crowded with civilians. Hamas, and others, unleashed forty-seven suicide attacks inside Israel in 2002. Overall, it is Palestinian civilians who have borne the brunt of these clashes. Three and a half times more Palestinians than Israelis were killed between December 2000 and February 2005, thousands of Palestinians still languish inside Israeli jails – and a whole generation of Gazan men like Muhammad the driver lost their jobs in Israel and started scrabbling for work inside the Strip.

  This evening Muhammad drops me off in Nasser district, just north of the city centre, where another friend of a friend has invited me for dinner. Her name is Niveen. When she opens the door, I see a small, middle-aged woman, with striking cheekbones and shoulder-length, thick mahogany hair. She lives with her plump teenage son, Fadil, who comes into the kitchen, says marhaba and promptly disappears straight back into his bedroom.

  Niveen has invited three other people for dinner. She introduces me to a woman called Sousi and two men, Muhammad and Wissam. We all stand around the large kitchen-cum-dining-room, watching as Niveen scoops fried fish from a pan and lashes it with fresh lemon juice. When she called to invite me over, Niveen warned me she was a lousy cook. But soon we sit down to the fresh crispy fish, accompanied by bowls of clear broth with barley, rice inlaid with baked root vegetables, sultanas and almonds, various salads, and baba ghanoush – smoked aubergines mashed with onions, tomatoes, garlic and tahini. With all these hearty dinners, I’m starting to look very well fed myself! Niveen’s son doesn’t join us at the table. He’s hanging out on the roof terrace, smoking narghile.

  I sit opposite Muhammad. He’s a class act, this guy – with his black winkle-pickers and his shiny, two-tone purple shirt. A real smoothie. His dark hair is shiny too, slicked back, gleaming with oil. He looks me up, then down, taking his time. Sousi, on the other hand, is pale-skinned, modestly dressed and seems quiet as a dove. It is Wissam – who works as a TV news director for a foreign broadcasting company – who completely dominates the dinner-table conversation.

  ‘We will be having more armed clashes soon – and I love clashes!’ He beams around the table. ‘I do not care if it is the Israelis, or Hamas and Fatah – if there’s a clash, I’m always the first on the scene! We’re lucky – we can see everything from my studio because it’s on the fifteenth floor of the media tower, downtown. Louisa, habibti – come on up with Niveen and see the view! I’ll send a driver over to collect you.’

  As we savour the feast in front of us, Wissam rolls out stories of weaving through Gaza’s refugee camps and border buffer zones, shooting clashes. I watch him, gesturing like a ringmaster whipping up the crowd, gleefully complaining about the lack of clashes at the southern border last week, when the Egyptians were re-sealing the blown-apart fence. We all know he’s performing, and he knows that we know. But we are enjoying these tall stories because he does it so well, mocking the mainstream media, war voyeurs and Gaza’s livid streak of self-destruction. All in the same take.

  After dinner Wissam swans back to his studio to work late, Sousi and Muhammad the Smoothie sit discussing something like the old friends they obviously are, and I finally get a chance to talk to Niveen. She tells me about her work as a gender researcher, specialising in the social and economic conditions facing women and girls in Gaza. She prefixes many of her sentences with the words: ‘Speaking as a Gazan woman …’ And she laughs a lot – a great dirty laugh, full of smoke and mischief, a cigarette constantly clasped between her fingers. She strikes me as an unusual woman here – economically independent, free-spirited and alone. She does not wear the hijab because she doesn’t feel the need, and insists on exercising her free choice. I’ve seen other women out in the streets without a hijab, but not many. Niveen must sense my curiosity about her seeming alone-ness, because at one point she looks straight at me and says, ‘I’m a widow, habibti. My husband, he died five years ago.’

  ‘Ah – I see. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Gaza is the city of death!’ She enjoys a dark chuckle. ‘Most welcome to our seaside prison camp!’

  I start laughing, and so do Sousi and the Smoothie. It’s different for me, I can leave the Strip but they can’t, and this gallows humour is something like local medicine, to relieve the anxiety that constantly charges the air, like low-level static.

  Sousi stands up. She has to go now, though it’s still early. She reaches for the black hijab lying on the shoulder of the couch and starts wrapping it round her black hair.

  ‘She has to be home before dark,’ says the Smoothie. ‘The muqawamah are always on the street outside her house. If they see her, they’ll want to know why a married woman is out after dark without her husband.’ He sneers.

  The muqawamah are the local armed resistance, the masked Hamas fighters who prowl the eastern outskirts of the city at night as its self-proclaimed sentinels and protectors. There are a dozen militant factions in Gaza, and some of them hate each other as much as they despise Israel.

  Sousi looks over at me and nods.

  ‘They’re on the road outside my house every night, so I must leave early.’

  She kisses each of us goodbye and closes the door quietly behind her.

  The Smoothie sits back and lights another cigarette, clearly settling in for the evening. Niveen touches my arm.

  ‘Habibti, why don’t you and I visit Wissam in his TV studio this week and see what the city of death looks like from the sky?’

  The view is astounding.

  Today’s sky is cloudless, perfect, vast as the sea. Gaza is spread around us like a giant open book. We are standing fifteen storeys above Umar al-Mukhtar Street,
smack in the city centre, high enough to see across the entire city over to the shining Mediterranean, yet low enough to appreciate the details. Niveen and I gaze in all directions, like we are drinking Gaza in, or searching for someone who is lost. The streets look ordered and peaceful from here, built in cross-sections with squares in between. Umar al-Mukhtar Street – named after the Libyan ‘Lion of the Desert’ who fought the Italian colonialists until they hanged him in 1931 – appears as wide and tree-lined as a European boulevard.

  We look down over the pale, elegant Parliament building in its fine courtyard, and the main city hospital, al-Shifa, sprawling behind it. As our eyes adjust to the panorama, Niveen and I can make out individual cars and donkey carts trafficking through the streets, diminutive figures walking – and, out to sea, a wink of fishing vessels pitching through foaming waves as the sunlight sparkles like summer rain. Beyond our gaze, Israeli warships are out at sea too, patrolling Gaza’s waters day and night. As my eyes move back towards the shore, I can see the modern port, lying slightly south of the city.

  The ancient Gaza port was built slightly north of the city, at a site called Anthedon – City of Flowers – where the remnants of Roman columns, villas and a pagan temple can still be found today. Gaza’s coast road stretches from one end of the Strip to the other, bypassing towns, villages, refugee camps and fishermen’s huts dotted along the Strip. Niveen and I try to pinpoint our individual apartment buildings, but get lost in the sunny seaside metropolis planted below.