Meet Me in Gaza Read online

  He sits upright, his eyes bright with smoke and righteous anger.

  ‘Other people’s zift situations are always fascinating,’ I say.

  Before I came to Gaza, I watched a lot of TV footage about the Strip – it was mostly presented as bombed-out ruins filled with masked jihadis, veiled women, scowling mullahs and weeping children. I never expected to be living in a neighbourhood like al-Rimal – which has an elegant local French Cultural Centre – or to be drinking coffee in an arabesque seafront hotel like the al-Deira. These places are exceptions, but they are not mirages. The Gaza streets are dirty, sometimes filthy, but they feel reasonably safe to walk. Hamas is cracking down on its political opponents – literally – but has also made the streets much more secure and popular new cafés are opening up across the city centre. There are chronic shortages, overcrowding and poverty. But Gazans are not starving and there are pockets of family wealth here too. Last week, for instance, I paid a visit to the Gaza Equestrian Centre, where well-heeled parents pay $200 a month for their children to learn the pleasures of horse riding and show jumping.

  Many of the Gazans I meet – and not just the wealthy and privileged – expend most of their energy on making their own lives worth living. On the face of it, Gaza is not quite as zift as I expected. But just beneath the surface I can feel livid strains of anxiety and fatigue, from years of chronic uncertainty and fear. Compared to many conflict zones, the death toll here is low. But I have never met such weary people in my life. I say all this to Mahmoud.

  ‘We are not animals or victims; we are ordinary people who want to be allowed to live and breathe,’ he says in response. And we leave it at that.

  I wander over to the other side of the small courtyard in my bare feet, to a small bush of red roses, and squat down to smell their tentative perfume.

  ‘Do you have to go back to the city now or can you stay here for the afternoon?’ asks Mahmoud.

  ‘I’m free all afternoon.’

  ‘Shall we go to the youth centre and watch them dancing dabke?’26

  We wander back though the sandy streets, where the dark-skinned, barefoot kids are still running around, and then cut through the crowded souq. Above the boisterous din I can hear another ambulance wailing. More women are veiled here and more people stare at my uncovered short hair. Some scowl at me and my shoulders tense. It’s the first time I have felt any personal hostility here. Mahmoud leads me out of the souq into a narrow alley, then into a two-or three-storey whitewashed building. As we climb the stairs, we can hear pulsing music and feet thumping the floor. We reach a wide landing. Mahmoud walks to the far side, pushes open a door and gestures for me to follow him.

  Inside, a long line of teenagers, boys and girls, are flowing across the floor, laughing and clapping as they buck into the air, like unbroken young horses. The boys kneel, the girls sweep forward, then dart away, looking back over their shoulders at the flushed boys looking back at them. They whoop and cheer and stamp and blaze with life. Mahmoud and I stand just inside the door, grinning at the dancers, and each other.

  ‘See!’ he shouts over the pulsing music. ‘Boys and girls having fun together in a zift Gaza refugee camp!’

  scents of history

  A Saturday afternoon towards the end of February. I have just finished work for the week and am in a taxi, on my way to the vegetable market at Souq al-Zawiya to stock up on fresh food. Saida and I were going to do our shopping together, but she called to say she was working at home because finally they had electricity and so she could finish off a report for work. I decided to shop alone. But Muhammad the driver seems reluctant to drop me off in the old quarter.

  ‘Why you want to go shopping here?’ He frowns as we pull up at the busy crossroads beside the souq. ‘I can take you to a good fruit store in al-Rimal and drive you back home afterwards.’

  ‘I like this souq.’

  ‘But how you will get home?’

  ‘I’ll take a public taxi.’ I am referring to the yellow, six-door Mercedes taxis that Saida and I take all over the city together.

  Muhammad gives me a reluctant nod. As I open the door, he adds, ‘Be careful. You know you can call us for a car if you have any problems.’

  Muhammad is reminding me to be careful because of the recent threats to kidnap foreigners inside Gaza. The Army of Islam – a militia of pumped-up thugs, led by the Doghmush clan, who kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston last summer – were rumoured to be on the lookout for another hostage.27 When the first threat was issued, a few weeks ago, staff at the Centre insisted I take a taxi everywhere and did not walk outside alone at all – just to be on the safe side. On the first day, I felt a brief thrill of fear. But it dissolved into tedium as I went from my apartment into a taxi to the Centre, then into a taxi back to my apartment, for more than two weeks. Until the threat was dropped from ‘high’ to ‘moderate’ in the daily UN security bulletin, my colleagues even accompanied me to the Metro Supermarket on the corner of my street whenever I went shopping.

  Clans, each made up of hundreds of interrelated local families, used effectively to rule Gaza. Before the Hamas takeover, the previous Fatah-dominated government – the Palestinian Authority (PA) – courted the clans because they wanted to use their local power bases to police the Strip. PA officials hired clan members and as these unaccountable, armed-to-the-teeth local militias prowled the streets, they fed on Gaza’s civilians like vultures on carrion. The clans became Gaza’s kings of fawdah, or chaos, extorting, murdering, kidnapping and bullying until they were rich and feared and despised, because in the money-changers’ eyes of the clan leaders, they were the law inside Gaza.

  Now Hamas has struck back hard, warning the Doghmush, the Hellis and the Abu Hassanein clans, and others, that their days of lording it over the Strip are over. Hamas police stand on every corner of the city, and though many locals despise their ideology, they have welcomed the new law and order that has secured the streets. Even the Doghmush, always the most hard-faced of the clans, have a whiff of desperation about them these days. The police have already torched half a dozen Doghmush apartments, and if the Army of Islam does carry out its threat to snatch a foreigner, Hamas will no doubt butcher them.

  But even though this latest kidnap threat is probably grandstanding, I know I am vulnerable going out on my own like this. I always wear long sleeves and trousers and a modest neckline, though I don’t cover my hair. But I have yet to see another Westerner walking the streets here. I’ve only seen them sitting inside white UN four-wheel drives. That knot in my guts twinges whenever I set off alone. But I have to wander around, otherwise I won’t see anything.

  Pushing through a narrow side street into Souq al-Zawiya, I immediately see and smell the fruits, meat and spices on display. This stretch of the souq is dominated by fruit traders, now flogging leftover crates of oranges and strawberries – the season for both is nearly over – but further along, the men are mainly selling vegetables. The meat section, with its stinking cages of half-bald hens, is somewhere in the middle. Herb and spice stalls are dotted in between, along with stalls selling pots, pans and other household bits and pieces.

  I’m always drawn to the spice stalls and their opulence of seeds, powders, dried flakes and leaves. I stop at one now, to buy another bag of sage leaves to infuse my tea, plus a stub of ginger, a crimson spice powder called sumac (which Saida tells me has a delicate lemony taste and is especially good with chicken) and, as an after thought, some black peppercorns. The stallholder scoops them loose from the tub with a wooden ladle, pours them into a small plastic sac and seals it with a quick knot. He asks where I come from.

  ‘Scotland,’ I say.

  ‘Ahhh, Scotlanda – Braveheart!’

  We laugh. Every country needs its heroes, real or imaginary, usually an amalgam of both. Braveheart is very popular here (though I doubt many people know that his real name was William Wallace). But Che Guevara is beloved, his name and profile plastered in red all across the city, his hooded
eyes staring down at the Strip as though he can save Gaza from the Israeli occupation and from itself.

  The stallholder wants to know if I like Gaza. I say that I do – the people are friendly and the food is good. He gives me an indulgent smile. Then, like the businessman he is, he asks if I would also like to buy some za’atar, a blend of crushed thyme, oregano and marjoram, to eat with bread and olive oil. Gazans do love their spices.

  One of the reasons that Alexander the Great laid siege to Gaza back in the fourth century BC was his desire to control the lucrative international spice trade, of which Gaza was a key hub. Spices were being traded across the Arab world before history was recorded, and as an ancient crossroads spanning three continents, Gaza became a vast international spice market and caravanserai. The peppercorns I have just bought are an everyday household item here, though not a great favourite with Gazans. But pepper – by far the most popular spice in the history of the trade – and other spices, like cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, were branded as decadent ‘must-haves’ of the ancient world. And from the early days of the trade, raconteurs wove incredible stories about the perils of harvesting spices. Most of the tales were sheer colourful nonsense – but they thrilled customers and knocked up the price, and the kudos, of exotic spices.

  It was from the brimming warehouses and heaving ports of Alexandria and Gaza that vast quantities of spices, perfumes and incense were shipped across the Mediterranean to Western Europe. Incense was considered a sacred spice, as it soothed angry gods of all persuasions. From at least the third century BC, Arabs rode camel caravans from the south-eastern tip of the Arabian peninsula to Gazan souqs like the one I’m browsing right now – along the legendary Frankincense Trail.

  Frankincense and myrrh are both gum resins. They are harvested from shrub-like trees that still thrive in the Dhofar region of southern Oman, the world’s richest frankincense garden – and in the mountains of neighbouring Yemen, where these precious shrubs are so grasping, they have been known to grow straight out of solid rock. Omani and Yemeni farmers still harvest frankincense the old way – gouging deep, thin ‘wounds’ into the bark and peeling away narrow strips that bleed a milky liquid, which solidifies on contact with the air, forming resin ‘tears’ that are slowly dried out in the sun.

  Back in the third century BC, merchants would descend on Dhofar and southern Yemen in the spring and autumn, when the frankincense harvest was ready. These merchants were Minaeans, one of the ancient Yemenite peoples who transported incense across Arabia by camel. When they had bartered hard, the Minaeans loaded up their beasts and set out north-west along the Frankincense Trail. Avoiding high mountain passes that harboured feuding tribes and throat-slitting bandits, they followed an inland trail roughly parallel to the Red Sea coastline, which then led them through the Rub’ al-Khali, ‘Empty Quarter’, an ocean of sand and shifting, orange-red dunes stretching for some 250,000 square miles across the southern Arabian peninsula. The Minaeans also passed by pre-Islamic cities like Ma’rib and Timna, where they were obliged to pay hefty local ‘spice taxes’.

  The ancient Roman philosopher, Pliny the Elder, recorded the distance between Timna and Gaza as sixty-two days by camel. The entire Frankincense Trail – from Dhofar to the port at Gaza – was some 2,100 miles, more than two and a half times the length of Great Britain. But for the Minaeans, men as dry and unyielding as the Empty Quarter, it was well worth their while. Myrrh, and especially frankincense, were literally worth their weight in gold; every temple and wealthy home across Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Jerusalem and Rome required these precious resins to please their gods.

  The vast majority of spices, apart from gum resins, originated far east of the Arabian peninsula; but frankincense was so cherished that poets wrote that all Arabia exuded ‘a most delicate fragrance’, and sailors on the Red Sea were rumoured to be able to catch its astringent scent from offshore breezes. It was not only spices that the Arabs traded; merchants made fortunes from selling olive oil, wheat, fish, wine – and Gaza traded heavily in slaves as well. But the majority of Gaza’s international trade was over land, not by sea, and the overland incense trade was still going strong when Gaza was conquered by the Romans in 63 BC. At that time, some 1,000 camels were arriving here every month, each weighed down with sacred spices. Frankincense was so plentiful in Gaza that these ancient, narrow streets must have been awash with the stuff. Maybe even pungent old Souq al-Zawiya was fragrant, back in those days.

  I walk on through the souq, passing a crippled old Bedouin lady selling small bunches of fresh mint for a shekel (15 pence) each, and buy one from her. Just ahead of me is the al-Umari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza. As a non-Muslim, I cannot go inside, but an open side door offers me a glimpse of a spacious, light sanctuary, with a vast wall-to-wall carpet – smooth, flat and emerald as a bowling green. Running along one side of the mosque is the local gold market: just one narrow passage of bare-bulb-lit stalls, where fat men with bloodhound jowls and eyes like coal sell gaudy Jordanian gold to hard-bargaining mothers for their daughters’ dowries. The gold market has an atmosphere all its own, like the Hammam al-Samara Turkish baths, which are literally just across the street. This old quarter of the city is built, like Gaza itself, on an ancient crossroads.

  Half an hour later, my arms are weighed down from bulging plastic bags and my shopping is done. I emerge back onto the main street, turn right and walk along a short pedestrian lane to the corner where the yellow Mercedes public taxis stop to pick up and drop off passengers. Men are selling vegetables and fruit out here on the street too – but also shawarma, baked sweets dripping with honey and rolled in pistachios, and hot, sweet coffee. Women browse arm-in-arm with their friends as smoke rises like incense from food stalls. Men, women and children smile at me and I smile back.

  I know there are extremists in Gaza, and not just the Doghmush clan. Pockets of Salafists in the southern Strip espouse ancient Islam, Shari’a law and jihad, and some of them have a violent hatred of Westerners.28 One of the first times I walked alone in a quiet street in the city centre, a man hissed at me so that I would see him openly masturbating; and when I flinched, he laughed and bared his teeth like a dog. Since that bad start, though, I have experienced very little harassment on these streets. I feel fine about taking one of the yellow public taxis because all that I’ve encountered here today has been friendliness. But tensions are tightening. The rumours that Israel is about to launch another military operation are circling, like the zanana drones in the skies.

  great night for a party!

  The bombing starts a few days later, on a Wednesday afternoon. Israeli spokesmen in suits and narrow ties appear on television, claiming that Palestinian terrorists have smuggled long-range rockets, like Katyushas and Grads, into Gaza through the tunnels and that Israel is ‘responding’ to the situation with a military operation in order to disrupt terrorist infrastructure inside the Strip. The prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, states that Hamas will respond to any Israeli attack. Israel has bombed Gaza almost every day since I arrived here nearly three months ago.

  I spend that Wednesday evening alone in my flat and try to watch TV. But the reception is garbled. Zananas are patrolling the skies and they disrupt transmission, so the newsreaders look warped on the screen and they sound like staggering drunks. I turn the television off and attempt to start reading. But then the electricity cuts out. Cursing, I reach for the matches and candles that I keep within reach on the table. Now I can hear bombs pounding. Three missiles strike somewhere close to my apartment, each one a stomach-clenching thump. I hear a helicopter in the sky. I can’t help myself – I want to see what’s going on out there, so I step out onto my living-room balcony, my back pressed hard against the wall. There is smoke everywhere, a helicopter hovering above. It emits a brief flare of red lights and what sounds like machine-gun fire. I feel an electric surge of pure fear and reverse back inside, my heart pounding out of control. This calls for emergency measures. Feeling my way a
long the walls into the dark kitchen, I open the fridge and fumble inside the melting freezer, where I keep a bottle of vodka. I twist off the cap, take a good swig, then another one. I don’t want to feel anything right now.

  Saida calls me: ‘Habibti, are you OK? The situation is terrible. Listen, open your windows a little. If there’s a big explosion near you, the pressure can break all the glass and I don’t want you to get hurt.’

  Her voice, usually so calm and measured, is faintly shrill. She’s truly scared, and so am I. But we both pretend we are feeling all right, and this will soon be over. When we’ve finished talking on the phone, I take a candle into my bedroom, pull the curtains apart and open the windows a little. In between explosions all I can hear is zananas buzzing in the sky like giant wasps.

  At work the next morning we sit at our desks because we have jobs to do and because there is nothing else to do but work. We’re safe enough here, in the centre of Gaza City. The Israeli military have been targeting Hamas government installations around the city centre, but in this assault – branded as Operation Winter Heat – they are pounding a district called Izbat Abed Rabbo, east of Jabalya camp in northern Gaza. No one knows exactly how many people have been killed, but the death toll is rising slowly like a sea-tide, amid rumours of a full-scale Israeli invasion of the Strip.

  By early afternoon we are all loitering around reception, most of us smoking. I’d presumed my colleagues would all be used to these attacks, battle-hardened and emotionally numb by now. But it’s quite the opposite. The atmosphere is tense and sad and very quiet. Only Shadi breaks rank, mocking the Apache helicopters that swarmed around the city last night.

  ‘That was nothing, habibti!’ He waggles his cigarette at me. ‘You wait till they bring out the F-16s! When we hear them whistling above us, then by sudden we are in six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six tons of BIG trouble!’ Everyone within earshot laughs, including me.