Meet Me in Gaza (9 page)

‘Ah – I see. I’m really sorry.’

‘Gaza is the city of death!’ She enjoys a dark chuckle. ‘Most welcome to our seaside prison camp!’

I start laughing, and so do Sousi and the Smoothie. It’s different for me, I can leave the Strip but they can’t, and this gallows humour is something like local medicine, to relieve the anxiety that constantly charges the air, like low-level static.

Sousi stands up. She has to go now, though it’s still early. She reaches for the black
hijab
lying on the shoulder of the couch and starts wrapping it round her black hair.

‘She has to be home before dark,’ says the Smoothie. ‘The
muqawamah
are always on the street outside her house. If they see her, they’ll want to know why a married woman is out after dark without her husband.’ He sneers.

The
muqawamah
are the local armed resistance, the masked Hamas fighters who prowl the eastern outskirts of the city at night as its self-proclaimed sentinels and protectors. There are a dozen militant factions in Gaza, and some of them hate each other as much as they despise Israel.

Sousi looks over at me and nods.

‘They’re on the road outside my house every night, so I must leave early.’

She kisses each of us goodbye and closes the door quietly behind her.

The Smoothie sits back and lights another cigarette, clearly settling in for the evening. Niveen touches my arm.

‘
Habibti
, why don’t you and I visit Wissam in his TV studio this week and see what the city of death looks like from the sky?’

The view is astounding.

Today’s sky is cloudless, perfect, vast as the sea. Gaza is spread around us like a giant open book. We are standing fifteen storeys above Umar al-Mukhtar Street, smack in the city centre, high enough to see across the entire city over to the shining Mediterranean, yet low enough to appreciate the details. Niveen and I gaze in all directions, like we are drinking Gaza in, or searching for someone who is lost. The streets look ordered and peaceful from here, built in cross-sections with squares in between. Umar al-Mukhtar Street – named after the Libyan ‘Lion of the Desert’ who fought the Italian colonialists until they hanged him in 1931 – appears as wide and tree-lined as a European boulevard.

We look down over the pale, elegant Parliament building in its fine courtyard, and the main city hospital, al-Shifa, sprawling behind it. As our eyes adjust to the panorama, Niveen and I can make out individual cars and donkey carts trafficking through the streets, diminutive figures walking – and, out to sea, a wink of fishing vessels pitching through foaming waves as the sunlight sparkles like summer rain. Beyond our gaze, Israeli warships are out at sea too, patrolling Gaza’s waters day and night. As my eyes move back towards the shore, I can see the modern port, lying slightly south of the city.

The ancient Gaza port was built slightly north of the city, at a site called Anthedon – City of Flowers – where the remnants of Roman columns, villas and a pagan temple can still be found today. Gaza’s coast road stretches from one end of the Strip to the other, bypassing towns, villages, refugee camps and fishermen’s huts dotted along the Strip. Niveen and I try to pinpoint our individual apartment buildings, but get lost in the sunny seaside metropolis planted below.

‘I cannot believe it!’ She shakes her head, pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘I thought I knew my city so well, but I never saw it like this before, so beautiful …!’

Travellers, scholars, pilgrims and kings have all been beguiled by Gaza over the centuries. During the Hellenic era that followed Alexander the Great’s conquest of Gaza, the city was rebuilt and repopulated. It became a citadel to protect the ancient ‘Way of the Sea’ towards Egypt and communities of Arabs and Bedouin tribes settled in and around the city. A great library is said to have attracted scholars and scientists from across the region, including the city of Alexandria. Once again, Gaza prospered.

How I would love to have seen Gaza in these medieval times and wandered its spice- and incense-decked streets, relishing the unwashed, perfumed chaos! Imagine the sites and stories … But now, millennia later, I have an acute sense that I could be looking down on some old-fashioned holiday resort; a rambling, sunny seaside city with a popular beach, arcades, restaurants and bars – the kind of place that families return to faithfully, year after year, like an affectionate old friend.

I wander over to the other side of the large roof terrace, stepping around a wired-up satellite dish. Now my perspective shifts. I see green fields in the distance, stretching to the northern border with Israel, and the barriers that surround Gaza – barriers with watchtowers, like photographs of the Berlin Wall before it was torn apart. I can’t see them from here, but I know there are also large white spheres suspended over the northern and eastern borders with Israel. They look like big white balloons, but they are actually Israeli listening devices, sucking up every sound we make inside Gaza. And on a day as clear as this, you can sometimes see white unmanned aerial vehicles – drones – circling the sky above us, audibly buzzing as they take constant video and stills images. Gazans call them
zananas
(mosquitoes). But they make people here flinch, because some carry lethal missiles.
²³

Gaza – one of the oldest, most isolated and most closely surveilled cities on earth – has always lived under foreign occupation … never been free to choose its own fate. But every single one of its occupiers has, sooner or later, been ousted by the next.

Wissam steps out onto the roof terrace. ‘You like my view?’ He takes off his gold-rimmed aviator shades and blinks in the early afternoon sun. He’s beaming, but the skin beneath his eyes is a shade darker, like he hasn’t had much sleep lately. His office is just a few steps below the terrace and he invites us to come back inside and drink coffee.

As Niveen and I move towards the steps, Wissam says to me, ‘We often film up here, you know. Sometimes we are shooting live footage, panning across the city – and my foreign colleagues are on the phone shouting, “Hey, man, c’mon – where the hell are you?” Because they don’t actually believe this could be Gaza.’

When we leave the TV tower, Niveen and I stand outside on Umar al-Mukhtar Street, not quite sure what to do next, both of us a bit dazed after seeing Gaza from the air. After a few moments she says, ‘Let’s go and drink coffee somewhere and sit for a while. I know a quiet café down by the beach.’

The café she takes me to is at the southern edge of the city, just beyond the modern port. It’s a truly ugly building, the outside walls pasted in cracked seashells, but it is right next to the beach, with an unbroken view of the Mediterranean. Niveen knows the owner, a portly man also called Muhammad, who greets us both like friends. We choose a corner of the café terrace, a little sun-trap, and he goes off to make the coffee. We seem to be the only customers.

Niveen and I sit gazing out to sea. We both light up cigarettes and neither of us exchanges a word until Muhammad returns with our coffees, two glasses of water and an ashtray. He leaves us to it and we sit in silence again. But it’s a nice, easy silence and I feel no need to break it. I just rest in the sun, enjoying the view, the salt-tinged air on my face and the strong, cardamom-scented coffee. I suddenly feel very relaxed.

‘My husband loved the sea,’ says Niveen.

I look over at her after a while. She is gazing ahead, with a soft, sad expression on her face. I don’t reply because I am not sure who she’s talking to right now.

‘When I was young, I wanted to marry an ex-prisoner and give myself to my country. My husband was eleven years older than me, and when I met him he had just been released after seventeen years in jail in Israel. Sarah, my daughter, was born in 1987, the year after we married – and my son Fadil was born the year after that. Fadil was just a few months old when the Israelis came back for my husband. He was still an activist in the PFLP (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and they kept him in Israeli administrative detention for six months.
²⁴
And for that half a year I did not know if he was dead or alive. Afterwards, they sentenced him to five years, and I visited him in jail every month for those five years. So hard, so humiliating! We women would get up at 2
AM
and hope to be at the Israeli jail by 10
AM
for the visit. Yes … those years were hard, and the visits were hard, and when he came out of jail it was hard too. I had dedicated myself to working and studying, so that I could provide for our children while he could not. When he was released, I had my own identity and agency as a Gazan woman, and we were both different people.’

She shakes her head and lights another cigarette, still gazing ahead, and her voice picks up again:

‘Other Gazan women, you know, they blamed me for being ambitious and not giving my attention to my husband. When I was accepted to study my Masters in the UK, I took Sarah to live with me, and Fadil stayed here with his father. Afterwards, when we came back to Gaza, my husband treated me very badly. I asked for a divorce, but he threatened to take the children away and eventually I gave in, because I wanted to keep my children. So we stayed married and I learned to manage the situation because I had to – and then he
was
ashamed. He bought me a small piece of land outside the city and planted yellow roses there for me because I love yellow roses.’

She sighs. Traffic rumbles along the street behind us. The waves break.

‘Four years ago, a university in Wales offered me a place to study my PhD. I took Sarah with me again. My husband understood this time. But while we were in Wales he had a heart attack. He was on our land and he died right there, next to the yellow roses. But we couldn’t reach Gaza in time to bury him because Erez was shut. And that’s why my daughter hates Gaza and why she will never come back here. Because she loved her father, and the Israelis prevented her from burying him.’

‘So where is she now?’

‘In Cairo. Studying. My dream is to go back to Wales and finish my PhD and take my children with me, so we can live together as a family again.’

We look at each other. Niveen smiles, but her face looks weary and a little haggard.

‘But at least I could visit my husband when he was in jail,’ she says, ‘not like our women now. You know, the Israelis have prevented them from visiting their men in jail since Hamas took over.’

Every Monday morning, a crowd of some 200 women gather in a courtyard just outside the Gaza City office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The women clasp photographs of their husbands, sons, brothers and a few daughters, all of them prisoners inside jails in Israel. More than 900 Gazan men, and 4 women, are in Israeli jails, and since the Hamas takeover, Gazan families have been denied all rights to visit them.
²⁵
I went to the vigil recently with one of my colleagues, and one of the women there told me she has not laid eyes on her son for six years now. But like the rest of this silent flock, she returns to the courtyard every Monday morning to take her place, clasp the photograph of her son and wait.

Early spring arrives, the days get longer and more foreign visitors start arriving; most of them are journalists, aid workers, or foreign delegates on fleeting two-day visits. My landlord, Abu Ali, has a few small apartments in our building that he rents out to the handful of foreign visitors who are free to roam the city like me. The majority of expats inside Gaza work for the local United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and are confined to their offices and compounds and a few security-vetted venues like the al-Deira Hotel.

On the streets, people stare at me and I stare back. Women and children stop me on my way to and from work and ask me to take off my sunglasses, just so that they can gaze up at my blue-grey eyes. When I got here, I presumed most Gazans would have dark skin, dark hair and brown eyes. Many do, but others are blond and pale, there are blacks too, a smattering of redheads with blue-green eyes, and I’ve even seen one or two albinos. Gazan people reflect roots extending back to so many different places – the Middle East, Europe and Africa; they are Arabs and Christians, Bedouin, refugees and immigrants. Just a quarter of the local population can trace their families’ origins to within the modern Gaza Strip.

On my way to work one morning, I bump into a white-haired gentleman on the stairs. He’s a foreigner wearing a faded denim cap studded with a dozen silver badges and his brown face is creased as a paper bag. He looks like an old sea dog. Coming down the stairs just behind him is a young man, a Gazan. We step outside into the sunshine and introduce ourselves. The white-haired guy is an American photographer called Skip. The young man beside him is Mahmoud, his interpreter. Mahmoud has short, tight black curls and a goatee beard and is dressed as though on his way to a business meeting.

Skip suddenly snaps his fingers; he’s left something in his room. He turns around and trudges back upstairs.