A Month by the Sea (13 page)

When Dr al-Zahar complained about ‘relentless Israeli
anti-Hamas
rhetoric’ I could have pointed out (but didn’t) that its own Charter defines Hamas as ‘the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism’ and is generally suffused with a shameful anti-Semitic hysteria. This would have been the moment to ask who (or what) coterie had compiled that Charter. Given its ignorant acceptance of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and a general crudeness of tone it doesn’t read like the sort of document Dr al-Zahar himself (author of twenty-two scholarly books) would have been involved with either as author or adviser. Hence my shying away from the subject; it would be hard to mention something so abhorrent without sounding confrontational and accusing – to what purpose?

Dr al-Zahar wondered if US support for Partition had been strengthened by reluctance to accept into the States those thousands of destitute Jews who settled in Palestine only because the US wouldn’t admit them. Not admitting them was much easier when they had a ‘homeland’ to go to – never mind that it was in fact someone else’s homeland. We agreed that one of the Palestinians’ major handicaps is public ignorance of the conflict’s historical background, starting in the 1880s. And we felt angry together about the widespread misrepresentation of the Occupation as a Problem that could have been solved decades ago but for unreasonable obstinacy on both sides.

Some simple facts seem so trite, banal, almost puerile their repetition is best avoided. Dr al-Zahar helped me to see that in the Palestinians’ case we err by not stating the obvious again and again, continuing to repeat simple facts in simple words instead of
trying to operate on a higher plane where the accretion of
complexities
around the Problem requires language more sophisticated and subtle. Suddenly I remembered a walk with my Nazareth friends across the site of a demolished village, long since hidden by tangled bushes, grasses, ground creepers. From a little distance this place looked like a tranquil corner of the Galilee; its dynamited foundation stones became visible only as one pushed through the overgrowth. In the same way, I now thought, a tangle of arguments, assertions, accusations, denials, definitions, analyses, theories, claims and counter-claims has been allowed to obscure the foundations of the Palestinian tragedy.

I liked Dr al-Zahar’s steady focus on the essentials. After the Ottoman defeat Zionists colonised Palestine with British assistance. The Palestinians were not consulted at any point before the UN vote. Israel exists only because Europeans drove some 800,000 Palestinians off land their ancestors had been cultivating for centuries. In 1967 Israel seized more land. Its military occupation of those territories is designed to complete the Zionist project. There has never been a ‘peace process’. The Zionists always wanted all of Palestine and they continue to play happily with negotiators while building settlements. Israel has a security problem not because the neighbours are nasty but because Zionists forcibly dispossessed a defenceless people. By using IDF terrorism on the West Bank and blockading Gaza, Zionists hope to make life so intolerable for most Palestinians that they will migrate. ‘But we won’t!’ said Dr al-Zahar.

Nowadays all those facts, so obvious and accessible and crucially important, are too often fudged in the mainstream media – even by some of the Palestinians’ friends.

As Dr al-Zahar walked me out to the laneway I thanked him for raising my spirits. He had achieved that not by saying anything extraordinary but by being what he is, a man of such integrity I felt the better for those hours in his company. An elusive quality,
integrity – but you know it when you meet it. And, mysteriously, it breaks down the barriers put up by such issues as homophobia and women’s rights. That evening, having described our meeting in my journal, I ended:

I’m reminded of my 2009 conversation with a Gush Emunim linchpin, in the notoriously hardline settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron. In that case, too, all the barriers went down – undermined by integrity. A memorable encounter, but it belongs in another book.

Access to the Faraj Allah home in al-Nussairat camp is through a passageway so narrow it entraps the granny – a diabetic, immobilised by obesity at the age of sixty-three. (She was born under a lemon tree during the Nakba, as her family fled from Ashkelon.) Nita called a warning greeting as we approached a ragged blanket hanging in a doorless doorway. The two-roomed, earthen-floored concrete shack was windowless and furnished only with bed-rolls, serving as divans by day. Granny sat just inside the doorway, fondling a toddler. Her daughter Tahany, mother of nine, was the most beautiful woman I saw in Gaza, with a sweetness of expression to match perfect features. The room’s only decoration was a ‘martyr’s’ photograph of nineteen-year-old Ibrahim – Tahany’s second son, shot dead three weeks previously.

In fact this young man was not a ‘martyr’ (i.e., volunteer/militant). He had never been in the armed – or any other – wing of any organisation. But all Israel’s victims are given this status, however civilian their lives may have been. Most families accept the convention though a few resent it. Several times Tahany repeated that Ibrahim was not a fighter, had never been in any sort of trouble, only wanted to work. His colourful 2´ x 5´ memorial poster was misleading; crossed rifles formed a fringe motif but the beaming youth wore a T-shirt and carried a football.

For weeks Ibrahim had been telling his friends that he couldn’t settle to a life of permanent idleness. (Were Gaza an EU
government
jail, occupations would have to be provided for the prisoners.) But he told no one of his plan to enter Israel illegally, in search of a job. On 20 May, when he was not home by midnight, his parents became anxious; al-Nussairat is not known for its nightlife. At
1.30 his father tried unsuccessfully to ring him. At 1.50 his brother Adel got through and Ibrahim admitted to being near the border. Everyone begged him to come home. Further calls brought no reply and around 3.00 am neighbours reported hearing two artillery shells and ten minutes later many gunshots. Then the police were contacted.

The IDF cruelly postponed their convoluted negotiations with the ICRC and the Red Crescent Society. Not until 1.00 pm was a medical crew allowed to search for the body. The IDF of course knew exactly where it lay – one metre from the border – but they refused to cooperate and Ibrahim wasn’t found until 4.00 pm. By then, according to Awni Khattab, a paramedic who led the search, dogs had eaten most of the abdomen and thighs, inflicting on his stricken family a refinement of emotional torture. Then, inevitably, there were self-torturings – had nobody rung Ibrahim’s mobile, perhaps he’d have got safely over the border …? Nita and I emphatically dismissed that notion. Poor Ibrahim, his only equipment a mobile phone, had no chance of defeating the technology that keeps 1.6 million Gazans imprisoned.

Tahany said, ‘And he only wanted to
work
, he didn’t want to harm anybody.’ She took an envelope from under a divan and showed me four photographs: Ibrahim aged from two to eighteen. She stroked them with a forefinger and said, ‘I’ve nine children, each different, special. People with one or two think if you’ve nine losing one isn’t so bad. They’re wrong.’

Translating this, Nita had tears in her eyes.

Adel, a handsome twenty-year-old, spoke a little English and with Nita’s help voiced strong views on the IDF’s use of
psychological
torture (considered by some to be clinically sadistic). At noon one day, in nearby Khoza’a village, sixty-year-old Mahmoud was ordered by phone, ‘Evacuate your house now!’ His was one of three small houses built some fifty yards apart; married sons occupied the others. He and his wife gathered their few cherished
possessions and took refuge next door with Hussein, whose wife and three children were absent, queuing at an ISI vaccination clinic. At about 2.00 pm a drone shelled Hussein’s house, penetrating the roof but causing only minor injuries because no one was upstairs. The three ‘lucky’ ones retreated, badly shaken, to Mahmoud’s house. An hour later the IDF phoned again, this time ordering Mahmoud to leave his home
within five minutes
. Everyone hastened away from the three houses – but none was attacked. And that sort of thing, said Adel, happens frequently up and down the Strip, playing on nerves already stretched taut.

A seventeen-year-old girl sat close to Tahany, never speaking. Her wedding, planned for that week, had been postponed. Children of varying sizes romped cheerfully; there were no toys in sight. The toddler had left granny and was staring hard at Ibrahim’s poster, taken from the inner room and placed opposite the doorway for my benefit. But the centre of attention was a sturdy
nine-month
-old speed-crawler of infinite charm and energy who paused just occasionally to refuel at the breast. His ambition was to escape into the Great Outdoors, a tiny space between concrete shacks. Whenever retrieved from the doorway he chuckled gleefully instead of yelling frustratedly, then rolled his gleaming eye at everyone before zooming off on his next circuit of the floor, dribbling as he went. Adel, especially, was quite besotted by his hyper-active brother and lamented my being cameraless.

Not all Gazans can afford gas cylinders and this family cooked in a lean-to on a mud-stove built by Father and fuelled by whatever flammiferous substances the children could scavenge. Given so few shekels, and these cramped living conditions, how did Tahany manage to rear such a happy, healthy family? All were neatly dressed, well groomed, well-disciplined and affectionate with one another – while she herself remained unfussed and quiet-spoken, amidst all the to-ing and fro-ing and frequent demands on her maternal inventiveness. To me she seemed a superwoman, one of
many I’ve met among Palestinians. Some experts describe what they observe in the camps as ‘a great waste of human resources’.

Tahany and Adel urged us to stay for lunch: soon Father would be back from his camp co-op job (a fruit-growing co-op; Gaza is famous for its strawberries). I would have liked to spend much longer with this enchanting family but Nita’s time was limited. On realising this, Tahany sent a couple of children to a shop (I later discovered) to buy two plastic boxes in which to pack delicious rice and vegetable lunches for Nita and me. A variant of Mohammed and the mountain: if guests won’t stay for a meal they must take it with them. Before we left, I arranged to visit again on the following Friday afternoon when Father would be back from the mosque.

As our taxi bumped through Bureij camp we heard bouts of sustained shooting. According to the other passengers, trouble had started at sunrise when the IDF moved 200 metres into the buffer zone. There they levelled wide areas under crop, a brutal loss for the farmers concerned who had already risked their lives to plant those seeds and were being kept off the scene by irregular random shelling. Next day, we heard the IDF withdrew at sunset and no casualties were reported (apart from the crops).

The al-Tarabin home in Rafah camp – two-storeyed with a patch of back garden – was minimally furnished and unwired for electricity. We were received in an empty living-room by
seventeen-year
-old Yazan, handsome and charming and head of the household since 7 April, when his thirty-eight-year-old father, Saleh, was killed with two friends, twenty-five-year-old Mohammed and
seventeen-year
-old Khaled (Yazan’s classmate). The three (all civilians) had been stunt-riding on Saleh’s vintage motorbike at the former Gaza International Airport, one of the Strip’s few open spaces. At about 4.00 pm, ten artillery shells came from the nearby border and moments later two helicopter gunships opened fire. Mohammed and Khaled were killed instantly, Saleh lay bleeding on the ground for two hours while the ICRC and a Red Crescent ambulance
tried frantically to start negotiations. At 6.00 pm a brave group of despairing neighbours (all civilians) risked approaching the bodies without IDF authorisation. At once a shell killed twenty-year-old ‘Obaid al-Soufi. Fourteen others, including five teenagers and a paramedic, were seriously wounded. By then Saleh had bled to death and ‘Obaid’s family couldn’t reconcile themselves to the idea that their son was ‘wasted for nothing’.

Haia appeared then, carrying a baby and followed by her six other children who sat in a silent row against one wall, staring at the stranger. She was a tall, heavily built thirty-six-year-old with a chronic eye infection – caused by too much weeping, said the doctor. Her hands trembled as she filled little tea glasses and she hadn’t slept normally for two months. The most tormenting thing, Yazan explained, was the image of Saleh slowly bleeding to death because no help was allowed. The paramedics said he would certainly have lived but for ‘negotiations’.

Haia came from the West Bank and had no family on the Strip; her mother lived in Tulkarm and now longed to be in Rafah. Since the day after Saleh’s murder she had been trying doggedly to get an ‘emergency permit’ to visit, with little hope of success. The phrase ‘on compassionate grounds’ has no meaning for Israeli officialdom. Mother and daughter spoke daily on their mobiles – a costly routine, subsidised by a rich man in Tulkarm as part of his
zakat
, his charitable duty as a Muslim.

The children reflected their mother’s distress. During the summer holidays Saleh often took them all to Gaza’s most beautiful beach, near Khan Younis and previously reserved for settlers. Now they didn’t want to go, they missed him even more when remembering the games they used to play together. Apart from that, the three girls – aged thirteen, fourteen and sixteen – couldn’t go to the beach (or anywhere else) without an adult male relative; and Yazan had inherited his father’s truck-driver job. Nita caught my eye and made a soothing gesture. She could guess what I was thinking –
‘How outrageous that a girl old enough to be married can’t take her younger siblings to the beach!’

Haia beckoned us into the larger room where big cardboard cartons, with childishly written name labels, were stacked in corners; improvised chests-of-drawers. High on one wall, facing the window, hung a triple ‘martyrs’ memorial’, photographs of the murdered men wreathed in Koranic quotations with no hint of militarism. Then we were led out to the yard and a shed door was unlocked to show us the shelled motorbike – a sinister contortion of metal, scarcely identifiable for what it was. Saleh had been very proud of it, said Yazan. Trying out new stunts was his hobby. As we were leaving, Haia embraced me, began to sob and said I reminded her of her grandmother who had white hair and didn’t wear the hijab.

A private taxi took us to our next destination; it was off the
serveece
routes and involved culture shock on a seismic scale.

The driver speculated about the airport killings – perhaps yet another case of ‘collaboration gone wrong’? Someone with a grudge against one of the dead men’s clans fingering them as terrorists? Or the IDF misinterpreting information? Or simply an informer so frantically in need of IDF cash – maybe for a good purpose, like buying medical care abroad for a dangerously ill child – that nothing else mattered and lies were invented. Gaza’s blockade creates unique exigencies. And Israel’s ‘war on terror’, with its heavy dependence on buying information from within a grievously impoverished population, has inevitably led to some degree of moral degeneracy. As she translated, Nita emphasised that all this was no more than speculation, though sufficiently grounded in past events to be noted. She was meticulous about my ‘getting the facts straight’.

Outside a metal double gate, set in a long, fifteen-foot-high brick wall topped with razor-wire, Nita startled the driver by saying ‘Stop!’ This was an unexpected vision on the outskirts of a Gazan village and he waited, looking curious, while Nita dealt with an
electronic device. When nothing happened he laughed and made some teasing remark which provoked her to bang on the metal. Moments later we were admitted by a young manservant who eyed me suspiciously. Ahead rose the Oslo-era home of a notable family which had prospered during that brief boom. It was very large, incorporating pinkish stone, brownish marble and garish stained glass. The architect had come under the influence of many styles, discordant when combined. We were led across a wide
palm-fringed
courtyard, its centrepiece an elaborate fountain unlikely ever to spout again. An abundance of crimson and yellow shrubs flowered in tall, bulbous pottery jars. Many balustraded steps led to a wide, tiled verandah furnished with well-crafted wooden benches – uncushioned. When the bereaved mother joined us, wearing a wondrously embroidered Palestinian traditional gown, she called for the standard plastic garden chairs. Then she welcomed me in English – kissing me on both cheeks, as is not the custom – and I guessed she was used to meeting foreigners.

Our hostess’s composed cheerfulness surprised me, less than two months after the shelling of her twenty-five-year-old first-born and his comrade – members of a Qassam unit which had just fired a home-made rocket into Israel. The family hadn’t known of his activism, had treated as a morbid hobby his lifelong obsession with weaponry and the resistance movement. (Masks are
multi-purpose
.) He worked in his father’s thriving business; not all martyrs are seeking to escape from misery to Paradise.

Looking through three family albums we saw the toddler with his water-pistol and the primary schoolboy always wearing realistic military gear, surrounded by an extensive collection of weaponry and brandishing a wooden AK-47. One chilling picture showed him, aged nine, standing threateningly over a small brother, pressing a pistol to his temple. ‘This is how he wanted to be with Israel,’ explained his mother. But one had to suspect that without a resistance movement this young man would have been elsewhere,
seeking ‘action’. His mother may have been better able to conceal emotion than the camps’ bereaved, but her cool detachment
disconcerted
me. And I didn’t feel it was contradicted by the shrine in the basement.

Dainty slippers were provided before our hostess led us into a vast circular space, almost mosque-like, with multi-coloured light pouring down from a stained-glass dome fifty feet above. Slender marble pillars rose on either side and low carved archways led to who knows what other splendours. Scattered about were divans and coffee-tables and inconsequential solid sideboards that surely came from nineteenth-century Germany – all looking like
doll’s-house
furniture in this unhomely space. Ahead, beyond a high archway, we glimpsed a sweeping double staircase – then were led along short vaulted corridors and down several flights of steps to the basement, cool and well ventilated and big enough to house half-a-dozen camp families. Yet it seemed to be unused, apart from the shrine at one end – virtually a chapel. A triptych ‘
altarpiece
’ stood on a long table supporting four large vases of irises and a display of the martyr’s possessions – toy weapons, a massive Lego tank and other military vehicles, football boots, boxing gloves, surf board, laptop, cell phone, an al-Aqsa University briefcase, watch, worry beads and framed school certificates showing how well he had done in all his exams. The 10´ x 6´ triptych should have been spotlit but the electricity had gone off (hence the hiatus at the gate). The central panel depicted a lightly bearded, heavily armed Qassam officer in full uniform with a white dove (butterfly-sized) perched on his right forefinger and another on the tip of his rocket while a third (full-sized) flew above his left ear. These, explained our hostess, symbolised the resistance fighters’ longing for a just peace. The side panels showed masked volunteers setting up and firing imported (rather than home-made) rockets. At both ends of the table/altar stood flags bearing the insignia and mottos of the Qassam Brigades. Before going on our way we each received a large
glossy poster from the pile kept under the table for presentation to worshippers.