Meet Me in Gaza (31 page)

‘The Jews want to kill us all! They attack us every day, people are always frightened. In the war, my house was destroyed. You’ve seen the helicopters and the F-16s – you never know when they’re going to come back again. So we have to protect our people …’ He goes on about how ‘the Jews are going to come back and finish off Gaza – God alone knows when. But they will.’

I am shattered and just want my bed now – but can’t resist asking if he thinks Hamas can still protect people in Gaza.

‘Look – you see these streets,’ he says. ‘We make new laws and now there is security on these streets – no
fawdah
[chaos] like before. But we are trapped. The Jews are strangling us. They have the power. I just want to get out of here. Where do I want to go? Anywhere – just out of this prison.’

I sleep late. After eventually dragging myself out of bed, I take a tepid shower and wander outside. I need to buy provisions. My first stop is the Metro Supermarket at the bottom of my street. When I step inside the supermarket, my eyes bulge at the sight of the shelves stuffed with brand-name goods, everything from nappies to Coca-Cola, bars of European chocolate to plastic bottles of ketchup – genuine Heinz – in a dozen varieties.

‘What’s going on here?’ I say to the man behind the till.

‘
Marhaba
– where have you been? It’s very different here now, eh?’

‘Where does all this stuff come from – the tunnels or from Israel?’

‘Israel. They are letting many things in, the situation is better now. Gaza like New York!’ he says in triumphant English.

I buy a week’s worth of provisions and the prices are like New York too.

I thought only a handful of people knew I was back. But my phone keeps ringing and I keep bumping into old friends on the street. Laden with provisions, I eventually head back to the apartment to eat and rest, and to call Shadi. But before I have a chance, he calls me.

‘Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six welcomes back to Gaza!’

‘Where are you?’

‘Outside your door!’ he cackles.

Cigarette between his stained fingers, he greets me with his lopsided grin. I’m utterly delighted to see him. I have a present for him, of course – a bottle of his favourite – and a carton of red Gauloises.

‘Come on, we are going out,’ he says.

We head off in the-best-in-the-West.

‘I cannot believe this wreck is still on the road,’ I exclaim.

‘Even the best-in-the-West has been missing you!’

He takes me to a new place, an open-air café with terraces of tables and chairs set in the garden on a fresh green lawn. It’s called the Galleria.

‘You know, my friend owns this café, but I am like the boss here,’ he brags as we sit down. ‘I come here every night; this is where all the artists meet, the activists and the internationalists too.’

We spend the evening drinking lemon and mint juice, smoking and catching up. The last time I saw Shadi was in a rowdy downtown Dublin bar. In this radical change of scene he’s still the same Shadi, still restless as the sea. His
jawaal
never stops ringing. I tease him about his grey hair, which is now longer and tangled, and looks quite wild. He is smiling, but looks unhealthy, and for the first time he talks about leaving Gaza.

‘You know my brother lives in Norway and now there are many Gazans over there. Maybe I will take the family to live there next year, if we have the chance.’

I cannot imagine Gaza without Shadi.

Other people come over to say hello and some of them join us. Many of the Gazans that I know are political animals; they tell me they feel their communities are lost, shattered into fragments by these years of siege, the internal political conflict between Hamas and Fatah and the Israeli occupation that has become the status quo.

‘We need new civil society leaders to guide us,’ says one man, who has been a human rights lawyer for many years. ‘Our society, it’s all broken. Our collective interests have been taken over by self-interest. We are – I am sorry to say it – broken and selfish, focused on personal power; each man out for himself. This political situation is destroying Gaza – all of Palestine. We have to find another way to move forward together.’

But Hamas has been closing local civil society organisations across the Strip, except for those it directly supports.

There is still a contingent of international activists living in Gaza, including the Free Gaza movement. Some are here tonight, including Vittorio, the swarthy, pipe-smoking Italian who roared at the Israeli navy when we went out to sea with the fishermen. Vittorio was arrested by the Israeli navy while out at sea with some local fishermen at the end of last year, and deported. But just a few months later, he was back inside the Strip. He joins us too, tapping his pipe on the table, and tells me, his voice growling from rough tobacco, that he’s planning to leave Gaza soon for a break in Italy. But Vittorio never will leave Gaza: a few months from now, he will be kidnapped, taken to an empty Gaza City apartment – and strangled with a telephone cord by Gazan men who will demand the release of Salafists in Hamas jails, and who want to humiliate Hamas by showing them there is still
fawdah
on the streets. Many Gazans, including Shadi, will weep and grieve, shamed by his murder.

Another of the activists asks if I want to go and pick olives with them in Beit Hanoun as the harvest is just beginning. They are leaving early tomorrow morning. I really don’t feel like getting up at the crack of dawn, but manage to heave myself out of bed and go to meet them. They’ve hired a minibus and we trundle up to Beit Hanoun, where Samir, who runs the local community initiative, is waiting for us.

‘Louisa, welcome back to Gaza!’

Samir looks the same, too – those intense burning eyes; that serious smile. He has organised the olive picking, of course, and arranged another entourage of local press.

A group of us walk out of Beit Hanoun, along a track leading towards the Israeli border. I realise we are heading in the direction of the row of white cottages where the Swailams used to live. As the border looms, I can see the local landscape has changed: groves of spindly orange and olive trees have been planted, their leaves refract the light. There is a small nursery of saplings waiting to be planted. This land is being refarmed, regenerated, regrown. The last time I walked here, more than a year and a half ago, this whole area seemed to have been stripped bare, but now it looks like the farmers are slowly returning.

I wonder what the Swailam family are doing. All I know is that old Abu Jamal died during the war, apparently of old age, and that the rest of the Swailams are living in Beit Hanoun town and have never returned to their land.

I see a man with a sun-weathered face sitting beneath the shade of an awning at the side of his field; he looks at peace.

When we reach the trees where the olives are being harvested, a small crowd of local farmers have gathered and spread black nets around the base of their trees to catch the warm, dusty olives as they fall.

‘Things seem to be a bit better here,’ I say to Samir.

‘The situation is still difficult,’ he says, ‘but some of the farmers have come back, so we are here to support them.’

He never says that the situation is good, just varying shades of difficult.

‘What about the Swailams – have you seen them?’

I can see the rubble of the Swailams’ row of white cottages from this grove of trees. But there’s no sign of life, or growth, on their land.

‘Their houses, and their well, it was all destroyed during the war. They don’t farm here any more,’ he says.

The grove where we’re working is near the edge of no-man’s-land. I look over towards the Erez crossing: the tunnel with the torn tarp roof has been replaced by a cage that stretches across no-man’s-land, connecting the two sides of the crossing.

We work for a while, then most of us slump under the shade of the trees to rest. Except for the farmers and their sons, who keep working away in the sun-pulsing heat. These are tenacious men who have returned to their destroyed fields to replant them, over and again. Theirs is such a quiet, powerful act; not like the Gazan fighters still sometimes flinging their impotent rockets towards Israel, then scuttling back home. Empires and occupiers may come and go, but ordinary people’s love for, and connection to, their land has the deepest roots of all.

I have to leave the olive harvest around midday because I’m meeting a friend back in Gaza City. Wiping my sweaty, dirty hands on my trousers, I wave to Samir, the farmers and the activists and stroll back towards the road. As I pass the sun-weathered farmer still sitting at the side of his field, he hails me and asks if I would like a glass of water. I sit in the shade beside him and he hands me a cup filled from his well.

‘We are trying to replant our garden,’ he says. ‘God willing, we will have orchards here again.’

He used to be a Fatah bigwig, he says, but these days he has retired from useless politics and prefers to tend his fields in peace.

‘I stay away from Hamas and their spies; they don’t come up here.’

Locals murmur that Hamas is recruiting local spies. Last night I heard people in the Galleria joking that there are two kinds of
zanana
inside Gaza these days: the unmanned aerial drones in the sky, and local Hamas informants with their ears to the ground.

I ask if the farmer knows anything about the Swailams. They have haunted me at times since I left Gaza and I can’t imagine how they are surviving now. The old Fatah chief gives me the Gaza shrug.

‘Only Jamal Swailam sometimes comes up here, I never see the rest of them.’

We sit and smoke a cigarette together and look out over the fields. I’ve always appreciated Gazan farmers’ brevity of words. Just as I am thinking that it really is time to leave, a man cycles past slowly on a bicycle that looks much too small for him because he is overweight, almost bloated. But as the old chief raises his hand in greeting, I realise who this is.

‘Jamal!’

I charge towards him. Jamal dismounts from his bicycle. We shake hands.

‘How are you?’ I demand.

He stands silently, shielding his eyes from the sun. Then says, ‘We lost everything in the war … Now we live in the town. There is no money, the Israelis destroyed our house, our land, our well. We have no water so we cannot grow anything now.’

I look at his bloated face and can’t think of anything to say.

Jamal dips his hand into the basket on the front of his bicycle and pulls out a small, hard guava. He presses it into my hand. After meeting Jamal, I call my old friend Tariq, who still works for the UN. I ask if he knows anyone who can help Jamal gain access to his land and maybe rebuild the well. I know the UN has assisted some of the neighbouring farmers. Tariq says he’ll see what he can do. If the UN cannot help, then maybe, he says, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) can.

Two days later Tariq calls me back.

‘
Habibti
, I’m sorry but the ICRC couldn’t even go onto his land. It’s too dangerous. He is too close to the border, they cannot help him.’

I remember the tired, defeated look in Jamal’s eyes.

‘Doesn’t the UN here have a local job creation scheme?’

‘Yes,’ Tariq says with some uncertainty.

‘Do you think they can find some paid work for him?’

‘OK, look, I’ll see what I can do,’ he says.

He calls me back the next afternoon.

‘
Habibti
, I asked about work for Jamal. That job-creation scheme: the only available work they have is as a road sweeper earning $8 a day.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No,
habibti
, I’m sorry. There is still no other work.’

It is good to be back inside Gaza, seeing my friends, and my colleagues from the Centre. But it is different this time in so many ways, especially the sad, flat atmosphere and the festering resentment against Hamas – who are still keeping tabs on me. Whenever I go up to Beit Hanoun or down to Rafah, my friends receive unwelcome phone calls from Hamas security, demanding to know who I’ve been visiting. (One afternoon I realise I’m being followed; but the plain-clothed spook behind me is such an obvious tail, I find it quite funny. Eventually bored with my meandering, he cuts across my path and asks a few inane questions about what I am doing in Gaza, etc. Then he scarpers.)

Hamas is tightening restrictions on women’s lives, torturing political opponents, harassing youth workers, local human rights activists and independent journalists – anyone who does not obediently tow their political line – and morphing into the paranoid Islamic bully that most of the outside world always said it was. I barely hear anyone say a good word about them. People criticise them in hushed voices. ‘Of course I like Hamas!’ one of the al-Deira waiters tells me when I ask him how things are going. Then, dropping his voice, he mutters, at a volume only I can hear: ‘Now we are frightened of them, you know.’ Gaza, for me, has become a more sombre and resigned place. I miss the friendly
fawdah
that used to permeate these streets.