A Month by the Sea (4 page)

This was a day of blurred vignettes – mere glimpses of
camp-slums
where malnourished children swarm, of unexpected stretches of empty golden beaches (why were the children not frolicking
there?) and of war-degraded fields where women labour in the midday heat wearing garments prescribed by fundamentalist bullies.

Arriving at the far end of the Strip from Rafah, we paused near the closed Erez crossing to survey the site of Gaza’s vast
Ottoman-era
government building, one of Operation Cast Lead’s earliest targets. There I noted Asef’s (self-protective?) detachment from his birthplace. As a boy he had often visited those offices with his father. Now he seemed to view that shockingly empty bomb site almost as a tourist attraction.

Before the First Intifada in 1987, Israel officially employed some 45,000 Gazan day-workers and an estimated 10,000 more who, lacking permits, could be extra-severely exploited. At least 30 per cent of those ‘illegals’ were adolescents. Permit holders received approximately one-third of the Israelis’ minimum wage. Before the Second Intifada, 30,000 or so workers crossed every day at Erez, a number reduced to 2,000 or less by July 2005, the date of the ‘withdrawal’. Since June 2007 only Israeli-approved VIPs and NGO employees and some urgent medical cases (with the right connections) have been allowed through.

Erez’s grimly militaristic infrastructure includes one passageway for labourers and petty traders and another for the elite. Those neglected buildings and their IDF-ravaged environs seem to symbolise the cruel futility of ‘collective punishment’. At a
pole-barrier
two semi-uniformed, short-bearded Hamas policemen spurned Atef’s attempt to engage them in friendly conversation. Gesturing angrily, they shouted something my companion declined to translate. As he hastily backed, turned and jolted away on a tank-torn surface, I could see figures moving within an IDF watchtower sporting outsize Israeli flags.

Soon we were passing a cluster of abandoned factories, once attached to an Israeli settlement and employing more than 3,000 from nearby camps. Then, briefly, we got lost in territory that would have been forbidden to Palestinians before the ‘withdrawal’.
Our rough rocky track traversed a desolation of sand dunes and war rubble and smouldering mounds of household garbage. Here the most destitute of all Gazans somehow survive, unnoticed, amidst low, dusty bushes that half-hide ragged tents and clumsily contrived shelters – sheets of rusty tin propping each other up, with plastic sacking doors. We overtook a small skinny boy on a cantering donkey – riding bareback along the sandy verge, urging his steed on with his heels, singing loudly, a smile on his face.

‘See him!’ exclaimed Atef. ‘He’s happy! These Negev people don’t expect much, they’re OK in their tents.’

I had to protest. ‘You’re forgetting something – in Gaza they can’t replace their tents or run their herds.’

Atef wasn’t listening. Beyond a long sand dune the border fence had appeared, less than 200 yards ahead, and an IDF jeep had halted to address us through a loudhailer. Atef, looking tense, stated the obvious: ‘We must go back.’ He couldn’t understand the message but it was either a landmine warning or a threat to shoot us if we drove on. All along the fence Gazans are forbidden to use their sparse dunums (1000 square metres) of cultivable land, appropriated by the IDF as a ‘security zone’ – another of its many Orwellian phrases.

Turning towards the coast, we detoured around sand dunes to avoid a Volvo-endangering stretch of track abused by tank traffic. Here were a few shelled ruins, two-storey dwellings semi-encircled by fire-blasted fig and lemon trees. Near one, the family was living in tents donated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Olive saplings, newly planted on their tiny patch of land – overlooked by an IDF patrol road – could not thrive for lack of water but seemed a magnificently defiant flourish. Ten days later I returned to this area on foot, with a new friend from Jabalya camp, and was shown two poisoned wells. The IDF had thrown dead dogs and cats into this more-precious-than-gold water.

As Atef remarked, one can’t readily distinguish between Jabalya town and Jabalya camp (population about 130,000). Both look like places that shouldn’t exist in the twenty-first century. Yet the multitudinous children seemed cheerful enough, as did the old men sitting chatting in their doorways (another reminder of Cuba). However, the generations of men in between – the hopeless jobless, silently slumped wherever there was space to sit – gave off another sort of vibe. These of course were superficial impressions; Atef didn’t like my suggestion that we stop to talk and buy tea from a peripatetic chai-seller aged about ten. ‘They’ll beg if we stop,’ he objected. On my future visits to Jabalya, as a pedestrian, no one ever begged and several people bought me tea.

‘Gazan people make the best of things,’ continued Atef. ‘They go on living like they were in a normal country. They have weddings, play with kites, go to the beach, pretend it’s OK. Israel bombed our electricity plant in ’06 when the World Cup started. My father told me everyone invented different ways to watch –
many
ways! Same with tunnels, through so much dangerous sand. Gazans are good for inventing things.’

Jabalya camp is famed for its militancy and boasts (a contested claim) that the First Intifada began here, on 9 December 1987, following the deaths of several workers in a collision with an Israeli driver near Erez. Within a day the uprising had spread throughout the OPT and it continued for more than six years. A memorial to the crash victims in a local cemetery is said to be worth seeing but Atef jibbed at trying to find the way, inching through streets blocked by carts and traders’ stalls.

Instead we drove towards the Karni crossing, another militaristic monument visible from the Strip’s central road and approached across treeless farmland strewn with war litter. At this crucial crossing all goods entering Gaza from Israel, whatever their origin, must be inspected by Israelis. No imports are allowed by air or sea or through the Rafah Gate. Therefore Karni’s closure or malfunctioning leaves
Gaza economically paralysed – not that it can ever be nimble. After the 2005 ‘withdrawal’, Karni was open for 222 days but on 166 of those only a quarter of the truck lanes functioned for limited hours. From June 2007 closure was total for a year, until the ceasefire brought about intermittent openings. Meeting no traffic, we assumed a closure – this, after all, was Naksa Day. Soon we passed a few more recently shelled houses; in the smallest, two men were struggling to repair a shattered gable end. Noticing us, they paused to shout advice. We would do well to keep away from Karni, the squad now on patrol were looking for trouble.

‘We go to Rafah town,’ decided Atef.

Back on the coast road – the sea dancing brightly a few yards away, the sandy roadside vegetable fields densely green – I marvelled at the absence of any building. That evening Nabil explained: an acute shortage of fresh food made it essential to protect this fertile stretch where native Gazans maintain an ancient tradition of using morning dew to supplement an ever-dwindling water supply. Those few miles reminded us that Gaza, when normally populated, had its own sort of tranquil beauty.

Turning inland, we drove through a few camps on the wide bisecting roads built to Sharon’s orders, causing the destruction of some 2,000 homes – mere shacks, of course, but to their occupants they were homes. In 1971 the Zionists were keen to abolish ‘refugee’ status and they rented land compulsorily from Palestinian landlords for 99 years. Then they offered the minimum of basic construction materials to any family willing to build themselves new homes and surrender their UNRWA card. I was to visit some of those families during the weeks ahead. By now many thousands have left the camps.

Around Deir al-Balah groves and avenues of tall palms soften the camp’s bleakness. Then a dirt track winds through Israeli settlement remains, tons of weed-fringed rubble interspersed with rows of white plastic tunnels.

‘When I left,’ said Atef, ‘Palestinians walking here got shot.’ He remembered regularly driving past on the Area B road to visit his grandparents in Khan Younis. The settlers’ sapphire swimming pools, emerald lawns and spreading shade trees were clearly visible to thousands of their water-rationed neighbours (as is now the case on the West Bank). If Gaza has indeed become a ‘hotbed of fanatics’, why be surprised?

Initially Israelis hesitated to move into the Strip; wherever they built, camps would be close. Then, in 1978, the Zionists, calculating that a settler presence would be useful, began to unofficially encourage (illegal) settlement. They could help to keep the maritime border with Egypt under surveillance and to disrupt inter-camp communications, thus frustrating any attempt to establish a
Palestinian
state on the Strip. By 2005 8,000 settlers lived in twenty farming and military units; Israel had appropriated 25 per cent of the territory of Gaza and 40 per cent of the arable land. The disproportionate cost of that occupation provided one motive for the ‘withdrawal’ – soon to be followed by the planting of 30,000 new settlers on the West Bank.

In Rafah as in Jabalya, city and camp have, to the outsider’s eye, merged into one homogeneous deprived mass. The combined population is around 100,000 and the Volvo could advance only jerkily along broken streets heaving with people. The majority were children or adolescents, statistics come alive. Rafah has a reputation for ‘militancy’ and UNRWA records that since the beginning of the Second Intifada the IDF have demolished more than 1,700 Rafah houses, forcing 17,300 people to ‘re-locate’ – but to where …? Atef didn’t know and was shocked by this information. He now admitted that many Gazans studying abroad are unaware of – even indifferent to – events back home.

During the ’90s Atef’s father held a business permit and took his eldest son on several trips to Israel and the West Bank, places beyond the reach of most Gazans. Atef remembered Nablus as
‘a great city, very old and famous with many rich men’. He mentioned the name of his father’s closest Nablus associate, a man reviled throughout the Casbah and Balata for selling cement to the Apartheid Barrier builders. ‘We stayed with that family,’ Atef recalled, ‘in a big new house high on a mountain. They liked all Oslo plans but they didn’t like Arafat. I think now they’re liking Mr Fayyad [PM of the PA]. It would be good if he could come to help Gaza.’

Atef had his own positive memories of the Oslo period when the Strip’s cities and camps were freed of IDF patrols and at last Gazans were allowed to build and his father’s construction company prospered. But such uncontrolled expansion leads away from shared prosperity, a lesson Ireland has recently learned. The Second Intifada ended this boom and abruptly destitution threatened the majority, even before Israel’s blockade caused complete economic collapse.

In 1998 Atef had attended the ceremonial opening of Gaza’s Yasser Arafat International Airport, an Oslo spin-off on the
outskirts
of Rafah. His father had been lucratively involved and preened himself when the foreign press described it as ‘state of the art’. Four years later Israel bombed it ‘back to the stone age’ and Atef felt curious about the site’s present use. Predictably, a
pole-barrier
thwarted us and its pair of policemen, sitting under a fig tree munching falafel, forbade us access to this ‘restricted industrial zone’. We could see only a few bombed houses and low sand dunes extending to both borders – Israel and Egypt. Atef looked startled when I surmised that the ‘industry’ in question was arms related. Most tunnel-transported goods come above ground in public in broad daylight. But there are exceptions.

Atef then announced, ‘I want to make a statistic.’ By this he meant that we would drive non-stop from Rafah Gate to Erez and see how long it took. From my point of view that frivolity was almost worthwhile. Hearing that the Strip measures 140 square miles doesn’t have the same impact as being driven its full length
in one hour and fifteen minutes while realising that at its widest point one could
walk
from sea to fence in less than two hours.

All morning Atef’s mother and wife had been phoning him – both in argumentative mood, judging by the length of the conversations and the
controlled
impatience with which he replied. However, during our drive north he talked affectionately of his family, originally from Jaffa (now in Israel) and slowly being
dispersed
throughout the Arab world. He was the twenty-eight-
year-old
eldest of eight. Next came a sister who had just graduated as a dentist and was to marry in September; she would then migrate to Abu Dhabi leaving grief-stricken parents behind. In Abu Dhabi she must work unpaid for a year while gaining experience (no doubt treating hand-picked patients) and this her father bitterly resented. A twenty-five-year-old engineer brother, as yet jobless, was to marry a month hence and Atef invited me to the wedding. It would cost about 40,000 shekels though the guest list had been pared down to 300: not excessive, given the size of Palestinian extended families. A twenty-three-year-old sister, a fledgling psychiatrist, was to be married the following year when her fiancé graduated from medical school; she would be migrating to Alexandria. Atef quoted his father: ‘Daughters are guests, must be well treated because soon they’re gone forever!’ (to my ears an ambivalent sentiment, tying in too neatly with the concept of ‘female as property’). Two brothers attended a private university in the Yemen where courses had recently been suspended until the fighting stopped. A brother and a ‘baby sister’, aged eleven, were still at school. Both would be sent to foreign universities; father reckoned Gazan degrees are now of questionable value, so severe and various are the restrictions imposed on the Strip’s four universities.

Atef himself had married the daughter of another Gazan tycoon. ‘It was half arranged,’ he chuckled. ‘Our parents arranged four parties in Cairo to make us meet. Like they hoped, we then fell in love. They didn’t know about my Canadian girl, teaching at the
American University – very clever but against religions. She wanted marriage and it became sad. She couldn’t see why a Muslim can’t marry a woman not converted. She thought I’d stopped loving her and that wasn’t true. She cried when I said her sort of Western love can’t come first. It would anger all my big family – so many people angry and upset if I’m selfish! This is not the way good Muslims live.’