Meet Me in Gaza (7 page)

‘Is this how you speak to women in Gaza – with no respect at all?
Haram
! Shame on you! If only your mothers – and your fathers – could hear you now …’

I’m really quite enjoying myself. But the posse are staring at me, bug-eyed, their feet glued to the pavement. I take a slow, deliberate step towards them.

‘Now listen to me – don’t you ever dare speak to a woman like this again.
Igliboh
!’

Their jaws hit the ground. And to a boy they all apologise for being so rude.

One morning at the end of January, Hamas blows up the southern Gaza border with Egypt. The operation is well planned, brilliantly executed. Sections of the 12-metre-high fence are detonated one after another until it lies in a concertina stretching for more than three and a half miles. By the time I get to work, just after 8.30 in the morning, thousands of Gazans have already poured across the border into northern Egypt. My colleagues are hanging out in reception, smirking like teenage joyriders.

Shadi struts across reception, beaming about the busted border.

‘You heard the news? Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six
mabrouk
(congratulations) to Gaza! Hamas has suddenly broken the prison walls!’ His smile is radiant as a sunrise.

We try to work. But everyone is too gleeful and we can’t settle at our desks. The impossible has been done and the air is charged with possibilities. We are all nervous, restless and excited. I keep imagining what the atmosphere must be like down at the border – the elated crowds spilling over into Egypt, seizing the day. Gazans are always saying they live in a
sijin,
a prison, and local resentment against Hamas is slowly gathering because for all their firebrand rhetoric, nothing is changing inside this siege. Now, for once, they have delivered.

In the early afternoon, I get a call from Tariq, who I met at the New Year’s Eve
hafla,
when we encountered the masked midget. Sometimes he and I have coffee together in the evening at the al-Deira Hotel. Tariq is a chain-smoker with the body of a rugby player; he works for one of the local UN departments and this evening he too is crossing to Egypt.

‘You want to come with me,
habibti
?’ he asks.

‘I can’t,’ I tell him, catching the reluctance in my own voice. But my colleagues have warned me not to go to Rafah. The Egyptians could start re-sealing the border at any moment, the Israeli military might get involved and the whole thing could burst like a piece of overripe fruit into a bloody clash. I have a job here and am expected at my desk first thing tomorrow morning. I really cannot join him.

Late that evening: a white ear of moon suspended in the black sky. We walk slowly forward, keeping the pace of the crowd. Thousands of us are clambering over the concertinaed fence; the atmosphere is like a huge carnival, the air charged not with anxiety, but laughter and shouting. Round-shouldered old men and women hobble, clutching the arms of youngsters who lead them tenderly, like lambs. Whole families have come out to share the joy of tonight’s walk into another country.

I clamber down from the fence with a little jump and Tariq and I make our way over the wasted no-man’s-land between Gaza and Egypt, past lines of Egyptian soldiers brandishing riot shields, yet passive as waxworks. For the first, and almost certainly the only time in our lives, we walk across a fortified international border without papers. And congratulate each other with tears in our eyes. I had to see this for myself, I just had to.

The city of Rafah is divided between Gaza and Egypt in more or less the same way that Berlin (where I was born) used to be divided between East and West Germany, with houses on each side of the fortified border lying within sight of each other.
¹⁸
On the Gaza side, the houses are so bullet- and mortar-spattered they look pebble-dashed. Some look half-eaten. The Egyptian side of Rafah is smaller, and between the two is the 12-metre-high border fence that imprisons Gazans inside the Strip. But now most of the fence is lying on the ground, buckled and useless as a crashed car.

At the end of no-man’s-land we enter Egyptian Rafah. I have never seen so many people swarming in a single street, so many trucks bulging like obese men, as flocks of worried sheep and goats on rope leads are being driven back into Gaza (Israel has also banned imports of livestock). Cars, motorbikes and donkey carts are stranded in the melee as the crowds push all ways at once. For a moment the sheer volume looks like a mob and really frightens me. But then I see that amid the chaos is some kind of calm; people are helping each other, and often waiting for their turn to move. This is an exodus, not a riot.

‘You all right?’ asks Tariq.

‘Yes, I’m good, thanks. Glad I’m here.’

We want to reach the next Egyptian town, al-Arish, because Tariq has Palestinian friends living there, so we press on down the street. Because Rafah was only divided back in 1978, most of the locals in this Egyptian half of the city are Gazans too.

I haven’t seen anyone who resembles a Westerner – this story has only just ‘broken’ and I guess the foreign press hasn’t arrived on the scene yet. With my short hair and white fake-fur coat, I feel utterly conspicuous. As we attempt to wade across the street – which right now feels like trying to part the sea – one man in all these thousands suddenly stands still, points straight at me and roars something at the top of his lungs. The crowd surrounding him all appear to turn their eyes on me at once and then erupt into guffaws of laughter that bounce across the street towards us.

What the …?

Like a confused child to a parent, I turn to Tariq for an answer – but he’s laughing so much that he is almost bent over double.

When he straightens up, he says, wiping his streaming eyes, ‘That man over there, he shouted: “Look! Even the foreigners are escaping from Gaza!”’

I start laughing too. Tonight I’m a jailbreaker!

Eventually we find a minibus we can squeeze into and start the tortuous crawl south out of Rafah towards al-Arish. Our elation saps as we stare at the crowds and vehicles bottle-necked at the town entrance. My head is throbbing and my lungs sting from diesel fumes leaching out of hundreds of vehicles going nowhere.

Tariq slumps in his seat, which is too small for his big, square body.

‘I’m glad we are here, to see this – but it’s crazy. You know, we Palestinians used to dream of real freedom, our own independent state. And look at us now – blowing up our border to escape for a few days shopping. Pathetic.’

He pushes drooping hair out of his eyes. Tariq came back to Gaza just seven months ago. He was studying at university in the US, and returned here the week before Hamas took over the Strip. He cracks jokes about his own terrible timing. His father is Gazan, his mother comes from the Balkans. I met her once and she told me in her still-strong Slavic accent that she could live with war; people from the Balkans and Gaza, they know how to live with war. It was the imprisonment that was slowly killing everyone, she said; this siege is like sentencing people to a long, slow death.

Tariq has told me that on his way to work, he sometimes has the overwhelming urge to keep driving his car until he reaches the border fence, then crash straight through it and just go out in flames. He lights a cigarette and offers me one, and we smoke because there is nothing else to do. I’ve been too caught up in the thrill of this night for any kind of reflection, but for all its audacity there is something pathetic about this crush; it’s like a mass breakout of prisoners or refugees with nowhere to flee to because nobody wants them. Many are already on their way back inside. Tariq asks a man squashed beside us in the bus why
he
crossed the border this evening.

‘To breathe some fresh air outside our
sijin
,’ he says.

He’s a Hamas policeman. His friend, sitting beside him, is a policeman too – but a Fatah supporter, so he is out of work.
¹⁹
The two of them say they are best friends and have just come along for the ride. They’re going to al-Arish too, then back to Gaza before dawn, because the Hamas guy has to be at work in the morning. Come to think of it, so do I.

The minibus barely moves and eventually the four of us desert it. We start walking out of town and eventually find a Bedouin man with bad breath and a bashed Mercedes-Benz who agrees to take us to al-Arish for a price. Everything has its price.

Al-Arish is a small Mediterranean seaside resort 28 miles south of the Gaza border, on the road towards Cairo – but we all know that checkpoints have been erected just outside al-Arish, to make sure Gazans don’t stray beyond the town. The Egyptian authorities don’t have the resources to rebuild the wall for at least the next few days, but offering sanctuary to Gazans would jeopardise Egypt’s brittle rapprochement with Israel – and the authorities there fear Hamas’s relationship with the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement.

As he tears along rough roads with no headlights on, the Bedouin’s Mercedes bucks like a horse. When we eventually reach al-Arish it’s very late and Tariq and I are exhausted. But the Bedouin has mentioned a hotel with a bar in town and Tariq’s thirst is now almost as great as mine. We easily find the hotel – a square monstrosity on the main street – and invite our two new policemen friends along for a drink in the bar. Which turns out to be a plush red circular salon with long drapes, frilly pouffes and two uniformed waiters who both look about 12 years old. But there is beer and gin behind the bar – and they even have ice! I ask for a gin and tonic, and when the boys look at me blankly, I just slip behind the bar and mix it myself. Tariq has a beer. The policemen both drink Egyptian-style Coca-Cola. We raise our four glasses and drink a toast to freedom, giggling about this ridiculous luxury just down the road from our
sijin.

It is much too late to talk politics, but I can’t resist asking our police escort how they became such good friends, given that one of them works for Hamas and the other for Fatah.

‘We are from the same village,’ says one of them. ‘We have always been friends and we never talk about politics.’

‘Palestinian politics is poison,’ says the other. ‘They want us to fear and hate each other – just like the Israelis want us to hate and fear each other. But I think for myself. That is the only freedom we’ve got in Gaza.’

When we leave the bar, the policemen bid us goodnight. They’ve seen what they came here for and are going back home now.

Hours later I wake up in the pink bedroom of a young girl who has been shunted to another bed so that I can sleep in hers. For a few seconds, I forget about arriving here after the bar and being welcomed by Tariq’s friends. Instead I look around, bleary-eyed, trying to recall where the hell I am. Then remember that this is Egypt, not Gaza, and I should be at work now. I call the Centre and whine about having a bad upset stomach, saying hopefully I will be well enough to come to work tomorrow.

‘It is probably the drinking water,’ says Joumana, who is so sympathetic and concerned – even offering to pop round to see me on her way home – that I feel slightly queasy afterwards for lying to her.

Our hosts are Gazans who settled in al-Arish before 1978 and they like life here. It’s busy in summer, quiet in winter – and not occupied by Israel. They are delighted to see Tariq, who’s one of the extended family. He’s in good spirits this morning, teasing me about calling in sick at work and joking that Gaza is so small, one or both of us is bound to see someone we know here. We share a late breakfast, then all stroll down to the beach for some Egyptian sea air. The beach – the main attraction here – is a long stretch of clean, pale sand, washed by clear shallows that gift good bathing and fresh seafood. We wander slowly along the sand towards a local café.

I pull off my shoes and paddle just for the pleasure of it. The water is cold and my toes tingle. I feel like I’m on holiday; last night seems an unreal, and surreal, experience. Right now I don’t have the words to describe it, even to myself.

Cities are besieged when belligerent forces want to beat the local population and their overlords into submission. After more than 3,000 years of invasions and occupations, Gaza is a veteran of sieges. When Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, arrived in Gaza in 332
BC
during his conquest of the Persian Empire, he expected the city to fall quickly or else to send advance notice of its surrender, as other cities en route to Egypt had done. But Gaza had a secret weapon: a charismatic, statuesque eunuch called Batis, who was a daring and resourceful military commander. Batis defiantly hired Arab mercenaries, rallied local Philistines, Persians and Arabs to gather weapons, food and water and prepared the city for siege. Its slightly elevated hillside position gave the Gaza stronghold a great advantage, and the city was also protected by a high wall that Alexander’s troops found impossible to penetrate.

The siege lasted more than two months, during the height of summer. Alexander was wounded twice as his troops tried over and again to breach the Gaza City walls. Reeking, rancid and half-crazed with thirst as the local wadis (riverbeds) ran dry, his troops became murderous. Finally, on their fourth major assault, they broke through the walls into Gaza and unleashed bloody carnage, slashing and slaughtering some 10,000 of the men inside until the walls were crusted with their black gore, raping and enslaving women and children, and sacking the city of its treasures, including its troves of perfumes and spices.