A Month by the Sea (9 page)

Over the past decade, the ISM has assembled a solid body of evidence, visual and aural, proving that in the persecution of Gazan fishermen Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention every day and night. Volunteers often sail with the crews; less often, their own tiny boat (costly to run) joins a fishing fleet. Twice I hoped to sail but on the first morning a mini-gale confined everyone to harbour and on the second morning the ISM boat’s engine resolutely refused to start and was pronounced by an expert to be in terminal decline. This was a big worry; to maintain its independence, the ISM is funded only by its volunteers.

Nabil and Nermeen were uneasy about my wandering alone around Gaza; having spent most of their adult lives in Saudi Arabia they couldn’t adjust to my way of being. Granted, it soon became apparent that as an improperly dressed woman, walking alone, I was hated by Gaza’s fanatics, men quite capable of killing a
non-conforming
relative. Extreme disapproval may be disguised but hatred is unmistakable and looks so loaded have the force of something physical. I thought about the al-Helous’ warning, then decided it would be silly to allow a tiny minority to come between me and the welcoming majority. Perhaps because of their peculiar isolation, the Gazans seemed even friendlier than the West Bankers, even more eager, despite the prevailing poverty, to offer hospitality
– maybe no more than a mug of water but one sensed that the gesture of
giving
was an important assertion of their identity.

Casual heart-warming encounters were frequent. In the Ash Sharqi district, one too-hot forenoon, I rested in the shade of a fig tree, its roots thrusting through the concrete of steps leading down to a bomb site. Rebuilding was being attempted without the aid of machinery. A donkey-cart had drawn rubble from elsewhere to be recycled by four men, two of whom were wrestling with a
300-foot
-long plastic pipe. It stretched from a domestic water main to an improvised concrete-mixer, an ingenious mating of tar-barrels with an old-fashioned bath tub. Quickly little boys gathered around me, then were joined by teenage brothers – all smiling, curious, polite, seeming astonished by my sweat-flow rate. One lad ran into the hosepipe house, then emerged to present me with a chipped mug of water. An impromptu English lesson followed, illustrated with photographs of my granddaughters and dogs.

In a little café near Shatti Camp, on the ground floor of a
half-bombed
apartment block, all the shelves and showcases were bare but a large circular tray of syrupy pastry stood inside the door. As I entered a small girl, raggedly dressed, was buying a takeaway triangle. I requested two triangles and a coffee, and was invited to sit at the one tiny table. The owner and his adult son repeatedly asserted ‘Hamas good, Fatah bad!’ At the mention of Ireland both exclaimed in unison – ‘Bobby Sands!’ They envied me because now ‘no more fighting’. But they were not interested in Gerry Adams’ visit to Gaza to talk about reconciliation. While the Occupation continued they didn’t want to stop fighting. We talked for over an hour and my cup was twice refilled but no payment would be accepted.

At noon one day, as I walked slowly uphill from the port, an elderly man noticed my crossing the road to avail of a high wall’s shadow. He was returning to his Rimal flat and spontaneously invited me in ‘to drink coffee’. His widowed daughter lay on a
divan watching al-Jazeera in a large comfortable living-room
overlooking
a garden ablaze with flame-of-the-forest. Majda’s husband had been killed in the 2007 conflict, less than a year after their marriage. A yellow Fatah flag flew on the balcony. She was a jobless though highly qualified teacher. Gaza’s overcrowded schools work in two or three daily shifts, some classes starting at 6.00 am, but no one had enough money to pay enough teachers … An older brother lived in Stockholm, was married with two sons and had invited his father to visit – even sent a return ticket. But so far it had proved impossible to get either a Swedish tourist visa or an exit permit from Hamas. A younger brother, Yousef, soon joined us and Father urged me to stay to lunch. He looked incredulous, then peeved, when I explained that I eat only at breakfast time but would be happy to drink more coffee while the family lunched. Yousef was a tense twenty-four-year-old chemistry graduate hoping to migrate to a Gulf state. But because Hamas likes to punish Fatah families he, too, might be refused an exit permit.

Mrs Halaweh’s invitation was equally spontaneous. We met on the beach where this great-grandmother was supervising the aquatic gambols of five-year-old twin boys. They were bright-eyed and bouncy and already confident swimmers but impressively attentive to great-grandmaternal directives. Mrs Halaweh, another Rimal resident, went bareheaded – a loud statement. She invited me to drink coffee on the following Friday when the twins’ UNRWA-employed parents would have the day off and we could enjoy a tête à tête.

A native Gazan, born into ‘old money’, Mrs Halaweh had no time for either Hamas or Fatah. When she was young, women didn’t have to swim fully clothed and wine with a meal was taken for granted. Her photo albums held scores of Brownie black-
and-white
snaps, as sharp as the day they were printed, showing bathing-suited Gazans of both sexes posing beside picnic hampers and ballroom dancing on floodlit platforms laid across the sand
below what is now the al-Deira Hotel. In those good old days, under Egyptian military rule, it seemed the Strip was becoming ‘civilised’. The biggest album held all the studio portraits, from infancy to graduation, of Mrs Halaweh’s children: six sons, three daughters. The twins’ paternal grandfather, I noticed, was himself an identical twin.

Suddenly my hostess let her anger off the leash. Egypt’s exit had allowed ‘those Mujamma people’ to infiltrate. She hadn’t been able to counter their influence, had seen how their grip tightened, until now her grandsons wouldn’t let their wives go bareheaded and her own granddaughters wouldn’t be seen in public without a
thobe
and didn’t
want
to be free. That was what most upset her. In the ’70s and ’80s her grown-up daughters had resented the Mujamma’s bullying and scorned the Islamists’ perverting of Koranic texts. Now their children, as young adults, believed in those perversions, felt it would be sinful to break the rules – sinful
and
unpatriotic. Only by being ‘faithful to Islam’ could the infidel be defeated and the Occupation ended. ‘But
I’m
faithful to Islam!’ declaimed Mrs Halaweh. ‘Every Friday I go to the mosque, I keep the Ramadan fast – but I’ll never wear the
hijab
and
thobe
!’

My hostess was of course exaggerating; not all young Gazans are as broken-spirited as she considered her grandchildren to be. Many students admitted to me, sotto voce, ‘We’d like to live normal.’ Also, The Strip has a hard-working though low-key branch of The Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development which valiantly runs a Gender Resources Centre. In December 2010 they produced a harrowing report, ‘Testimonies from the Gaza Strip’, which stated that ‘The practice of violence against women in the Gaza Strip is based on man’s belief that violence is the suitable tool to control women’s behaviour. Practising violence is not only limited to housewives or uneducated women, but also extended to working and educated women’.

Not for many years have I visited a crowded place as tourist-free as Gaza beach, where I was seen as an object of interest, a stranger to be offered help and hospitality. When I paused to rest, people soon gathered around me, curious and welcoming, the small children enchanting – playful and affectionate, neither shy nor pushy, never begging.

At intervals high wooden platforms are manned by lifeguards who also serve – said my Fatah friends – as Morality Police, looking out for couples who behave improperly (e.g., hold hands or lean a head on a shoulder) and for men who bare their torsos or women who bare anything but face and hands. As I sat one forenoon on the bottom rung of a platform’s ladder a large jolly family ‘kidnapped’ me, insisting on my lunching with them in Shatti camp. Hanaa was a wiry little septuagenarian great-
grandmother
who long ago had worked for UNRWA and acquired a smattering of English. She introduced me to all her companions (three generations, both sexes) and my later efforts to remember and pronounce those ten names caused much merriment. As we strolled towards Shatti the usual interrogation brought the usual reactions; deep sympathy because I live alone, an inability to believe that I do so by choice, an insinuation that Allah may be punishing me for not marrying and having a quiverful.

Shatti is an asphyxiation of more than 80,000 very poor people confined within an area allotted to 23,000 in 1949 (and even then space was short). Because Cast Lead left so many homeless (again!), thousands must now endure the worst living conditions I have ever seen. People shelter below and behind jagged lengths of corrugated iron, shreds of carpet, ragged curtain fragments, sheets of cardboard nailed to half-burnt door panels, battered plastic trays inscribed ‘Adam Hotel’. In most such shanty-towns, sections of motor vehicles are conspicuous but in blockaded Gaza every ounce of metal must be recycled. Spatially this camp forms an integral part of Gaza City but it has its own distinctive aura – and
not only because of sewage problems. Incongruous CCTV cameras are mounted high on gable walls at several alleyway junctions, seeming to mock the destitution all around. Quite a few of the Israeli assassins’ ‘high-value targets’ live in Shatti where the Strip’s grim contest (Informers v. The Rest) is at its most stressful. Only in this camp was I asked (once) to show my passport, by a burly, black-uniformed, black-bearded security officer who scowled at me and told Hanaa she must do a détour – foreigners are forbidden to enter certain alleyways.

It was exactly four years since the ‘Five Day War’, Hamas’ easy though bloody defeat of Fatah’s uncoordinated forces – armed and funded but not well-trained by the CIA. During Shatti’s brief bursts of fighting a rocket-propelled grenade penetrated Ismail Haniyeh’s modest breeze-block house, injuring no one. The damage was soon repaired and Hanaa proudly pointed out that the Prime Minister’s family home has not since been ‘improved’. The message was: Hamas leaders don’t get rich quick. Fatah of course say otherwise, in voices trembling with rage.

Within this maze of alleyways we had to concentrate on not dislodging people’s laundry. The Palestinians are sticklers for personal cleanliness, however repellent their environs, and even in Shatti water is somehow found to wash garments and space is found to dry them. But they must be guarded; here village standards of honesty cannot be expected to survive.

As a solo foreigner, I was quite a novelty; the various
international
organisations who have been ‘studying camp conditions’ for the past half-century (rarely taking action to alter them) usually travel in groups with local handlers. Therefore cheerful excited children followed us in droves, rushing forward where there was space to stare up at me intently before – ‘What is your name?’ Throughout Gaza’s camps the general level of juvenile high spirits and friendliness is remarkable. However, on the fringes of any such crowd one sees the others – some maimed, some
crudely scarred, some physically sound with all the pain in their eyes.

Hanaa and her family of sixteen lived in three small stifling ground-floor rooms all clean and tidy. (Granted, tidiness in not a challenge when possessions are so few.) They cooked on a gas ring in a lean-to and shared a lavatory with three other families.

When we arrived Hanaa’s first-born, aged fifty-eight, was trying to sooth a whimpering three-year-old with earache; this boy was his fifteenth child, the fifth by his second wife. Cast Lead had taken his two oldest sons and a daughter-in-law. He believed those three died because the IDF delayed negotiations with a Red Crescent ambulance. That morning the beach-going party had left him in charge of a vast pot of rice (Shatti’s ‘New Man’) and now four pairs of hands quickly prepared an equally vast salad and luncheon was served in traditional style – the menfolk and the guest eating first.

Afterwards, while fruit shopping with the children, I noticed how much lower prices were here than in Rimal. Beside the greengrocer’s stall, on a comparatively wide laneway, stood a very fine horse enjoying a nosebag. The care lavished on many Gazan horses delighted and surprised me. Obviously hours of regular grooming were lavished on this glossy scion of some noble Bedouin line. His cart was not quite empty of its vegetable load and one of my companions hastily collected wilted sprigs of parsley from crevices.

As we drank tea, Hanaa asked me to visit friends of hers who had been grievously affected by Cast Lead. In 1949 the Elmadhoun family didn’t need to register with UNRWA; from Jaffa they had brought enough cash to start a small business and eventually to buy a ramshackle but roomy house in the Old City. A foreign visitor would cheer them up.

I like the Old City with its remnant of a fifteenth-century covered souk (mostly demolished by British bombs in 1917), and its potters who conserve ancient techniques, and its Hammam al-Sumara which was
renovated
(mark you!) by a Mamluk governor in 1320 and still uses wood-fired boilers. The sixteenth-century al-Omari mosque – closed to infidels – is said to be built on the site of a temple to the Philistine god Dagon. The church of St Porphyrius was always locked so I couldn’t see the tomb of this fifth-century Bishop of Gaza – reputedly a valiant defender of Christianity in the Holy Land which probably means he was another Byzantine bad egg. In 1967 the IDF looted this church for the benefit of Jerusalem’s museums and the Strip’s tiny Greek Orthodox
community
can’t afford to repair the damage done by repeated Israeli attacks. In 2006, in reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s anti-Islam remarks, the exterior was defaced by angry Muslims ignorant of Christendom’s East/West split.

Whether in a vehicle or on foot one has to move slowly through the narrow streets around Palestine Square. Crosscurrents of shoppers, hawkers and porters flow this way and that between hundreds of small, tunnel-dependent stalls and bigger lock-up stores. Many Rimal residents distrust this noisy, smelly,
multi-coloured
scene; they feel safer on the quiet streets of ‘developed’ Gaza where it’s hard to believe that the Strip is one of our planet’s most densely populated areas.