A Month by the Sea (20 page)

US strategists describe this sort of skulduggery as ‘a managed transition of power’. The
New York Times
noted that Mrs Clinton had to abandon her plan to give a ‘significant’ speech in Alexandria lest it might further enrage those many supporters of the military who believed the US had gone over to the Muslim Brotherhood. An odd illusion: General Tantawi and the Military Council knew that Egypt would continue to receive an annual military subsidy of $1.3 billion, plus an extra $1 billion aid package to get them through ‘the transition’.

The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) is disconcerting. Behind high walls oil money has created another world, seemingly not part of the Strip – yet its ideological power-house. On a clean, orderly, tastefully landscaped campus stands an assemblage of soaring buildings (much concrete, more glass), some stark and severe, most incorporating classical Islamic embellishments that don’t quite come off. The overall effect is of an ultra-modern factory complex – perhaps pharmaceutical? Here young Gazans are programmed to be ‘correctly’ Islamic and each building’s design caters for segregation. Males and females enter the campus by different gates, enter the library and other facilities by different doors, relax in rigidly demarcated areas of the litter-free, well-watered grounds where lawns are green, flowering hedges delight the eye and
herb-beds
delight the nose. A bilingual guide-booklet explains:

Off campus, there’s an ever-present danger: young men and women might talk to one another as they do at Birzeit and
An-Najah
universities on the West Bank. However, on my several visits to IUG the students invariably looked cheerful and busy. In surroundings so utterly unlike the rest of the Strip they may well feel this is their share of that ‘normal’ world seen daily on TV and YouTube. The abnormality of IUG, by twenty-first-century standards, they seem not to resent. I asked Anwar about this. Dryly he replied, ‘For most of them, the programming works.’

When the PLO denounced President Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel a vengeful Egypt closed its universities to Palestinians, prompting the Muslim Brotherhood to found IUG in 1978. At first it was under PLO control, then came an urgent need to seek funds from abroad – through the Mujamma. This meant a not-
so-gradual
assertion of Islamic influences; Mujamma student groups ousted the nationalist/PLO candidates in student council elections, often using violence or the threat of violence. Thereafter the quickening pace of religious revivalism, throughout the OPT, debilitated Palestine’s liberation movement. In January 1980 the Islamists, having lost an election to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) council, were further enraged at the suggestion that the secular/nationalist al-Azhar college might be expanded to rival IUG. A long-bearded mob set out to burn the PRCS office and library in Gaza City, pausing en route to wreck alcohol-selling cafés and video shops. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers sat watching the mayhem from parked jeeps. When Gaza’s military governor, Brigadier-General Segev, was later challenged about their inactivity he blandly replied, ‘Our enemy today is the PLO.’

At that date the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal was to wean Palestinians off secularism in their daily lives and off nationalism in their political thinking. By the beginning of the First Intifada it was firmly in control of IUG and all Gaza’s cinemas and purveyors of alcohol had been closed.

IUG’s ten faculties provide 55 undergraduate programmes, 40 postgraduate programmes and eleven higher diplomas. Sara Roy has described it as ‘arguably the most visible expression of social penetration through institutional means’. She points out that by now it has educated thousands of religious leaders for Gaza and (until the blockade) the West Bank and hundreds of civilian leaders for most sectors of Palestinian life. Yet for all its brave face (listing international honours won by professors and links with foreign universities) it must limit coming generations if they hear
the same message from home, mosque and university. The founders of Mujamma/Hamas, who all studied abroad, were better equipped to confront European and American antagonists and make the most of foreign friends. One postgraduate male student told me, ‘You’re wrong about independent thinking, it’s not correct Islam. We’re not allowed to argue with parents or teachers.’

IUG’s security is much tighter than the Department of Foreign Affairs’ – one doesn’t stroll in casually, as to an Oxford college. Two armed men guard each narrow entrance and on my first visit Deeb had to escort me. When I paused on the pavement to hide my white locks beneath a
hijab
borrowed from his wife the
bushy-bearded
sentries glowered at the brazen infidel. Uncovered, I (aged eighty!) would have been refused admission.

On Sunday 28 December 2008 Israel marked IUG’s significance by totally destroying the Science Labs building and the Engineering and Technology building. Within moments, 74 research centres, containing a wide range of complex and delicate appliances and apparatuses, lay beneath hundreds of tons of concrete and metal. Nothing could be salvaged. Prince Torkey Ben Abdul Aziz and the Islamic Bank for Development had invested US$15 million in this equipment. The academic careers of a majority of IUG’s 20,000 students had also been wrecked or at best severely disrupted. I can think of no better recruitment ploy for the Qassam Brigades, Islamic Jihad et al. Nine other buildings were partially destroyed but have been more or less restored.

When Deeb as a male could go no further Suhair appeared, an English-speaking member of the administrative staff whose beauty was equalled by her self-assurance. She wore a special badge authorising her to enter male territory and led me to the vast crater where once had stood the multi-storeyed victims of Israel’s fanatical (and ultimately self-destructive) aggression. No trace of rubble remains; all has been reincarnated in scores of
camp homes. The photographs taken next day are painful to look upon, even for an outsider.

Suhair gave me a leisurely conducted tour of the campus, starting with a 1,000-seat conference hall where – the guide-booklet tells us – ‘IUG conducted Graduation Ceremonies annually to complete the happiness of students among their family and parents. About 29,000 students have been graduated since 30 years of
establishment
.’ This building is perfectly suited to adaptation as theatre, concert hall, debating chamber – all forbidden activities.

Dr Moheer, Dean of the new Medical School, entertained me generously in his large, expensively furnished office on the top floor of a rather pretentious edifice. Finishing touches were being put to enormous rooms – reminding me of nuclear power plant control centres – where international video conferences would be held and other esoteric cyberspace capers could take place to outwit the blockade. (Or so I was told.) Hi-tech lecture halls and sophisticated labs were about to go into action. In some corridors high quality furniture was being unpacked and giveaway sand trickled out of those crates. For the unpacking of one small parcel two elderly, excited professors came panting upstairs. Only they could do this job. Expectantly we waited, until a boring little machine appeared – for the medical genetics department, price US$58,000.

To me this exuberant spending, within a cat’s spit of extreme poverty and overcrowding, felt inappropriate. The medical school’s fancy design seemed shockingly wasteful; given such extravagance, is it not hard to beg convincingly for more funding? I reckoned the electronic pencil-sharpeners summed it all up – one attached to the edge of each desk.
Too
Gulf State …! On the other hand, if
oil-sodden
princes and bankers have so many surplus dollars why not spread them around by employing armies of construction workers and buying incalculable quantities of construction materials – even if the end product does look excessive to someone who thinks in tens rather than millions.

The campus’s purdah quarter has a conventual tinge because of all the
hijabs
and
jilbabs
. Even the traditional Palestinian flowing gown (the
thobe
, often exquisitely embroidered) doesn’t satisfy Shari’a fashion demands. Instead, women students must wear the
jilbab
, an ankle-length coat of uniform design, high-necked and long-sleeved, fitting closely around the wrist. The approved
jilbab
is black; just occasionally a rebellious young woman ventures out in milk-chocolate brown which makes quite a loud statement. Many poor students receive clothing vouchers, donated by one of IUG’s oily patrons and only valid for the purchase of
jilbabs
and
hijabs
. As someone abnormally heat-prone, I found it personally
uncomfortable
merely to see these unfortunate women going about the streets in temperatures up to 38°C. All those with whom I commiserated assured me they were used to it, didn’t suffer; yet I noticed that indoors, when their homes were male-free, they wore the infidel summer garments one saw hanging in all markets – including tanktops and very short shorts. The wide availability of such fashions must mean a high percentage of Gazan women appreciate them.

Suhair made much of the fact that 62 per cent of IUG students are women. (A common statistic in Islamic universities elsewhere.) Was this not proof of equality? Similarly, Dr al-Zahar – looking smug – told me his wife had been a teacher before the IDF broke her back, and their first daughter was an engineer, the second a teacher of English, the third an accountancy student. I was not impressed. The Islamist emphasis on equality of educational opportunities, and women’s freedom to practise in the professions, can confuse the issue for newcomers – and soon one realises it is meant to do just that.

Rather meanly, I asked Suhair why IUG segregates its students. Promptly she replied that an Englishwoman (name forgotten) has
proved
(sic) that ‘coeducation is bad because girls are more intelligent than boys and when they learn together boys resent this and disrupt the girls’ work’.

‘That may be,’ I replied, ‘but it’s still a pity they can’t relax together when not learning.’ Whereupon Suhair changed the subject, informing me that IUG takes no fees from handicapped students and ‘all coming from poor families get free books and materials. Also the government tries to help us. We’ve internship arrangements with the Department of Industry for engineering students and with Finance for accountancy students. But that help is very little. Most of our graduates, with good qualifications, have nowhere to go.’

Before I left Suhair agreed to meet me at the entrance, to escort me past the sentries, whenever I returned to spend time in the library.

That evening I read through the IUG guide-booklet and learned that ‘the Library Services hold over 100,000 printed items, and vast quantities of materials in many other electronic formats’. Also –

What sort of unhinged person will hatch out in this incubator?

Subsequently I spent long sessions alone in IUG’s library, the most agreeable building on the campus. Like An-Najah’s newish library in Nablus, it is short of books because too much was spent on the building. (Some West Bank UNRWA schools are short of teachers and equipment for the same reason.) There was little new stock; at the time most volumes dated from the 1990s or before. Beside the few ‘English’ shelves, I met Jannath, taking notes for an essay on Jane Austen. Afterwards we walked together down the long corridor to the women’s entrance and I began yet another ‘Women’s Rights’ debate. Jannath fumbled around my argument that the Islamists’ ‘Gazan traditions/local custom’ smokescreen deserves to be mocked. The grandmothers of contemporary students – and their mothers as teenagers – were free to go bareheaded and
bare-armed
, wearing short skirts, if they so wished; the fact that many preferred customary garb is beside the point.

‘But now,’ said Jannath, ‘traditions and customs have changed!’

‘Quite so,’ said I. ‘Changed by whom? And why?’

Jannath laughed, then invited me to visit her in Jabalya on the following Friday morning. She wrote her address on something interesting – the top flap of a cigarette packet. Could it be that she was a secret smoker?

On 15 January 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, I had taken a minibus taxi from Ramallah back to Nablus and on the way we heard al-Jazeera radio reporting attacks on four Gaza City hospitals. When I looked around at my fellow-passengers’ faces they variously showed anger, disgust, contempt and what can only be described as incredulous horror. One man recalled that in the Lebanon, in
2006, some of Israel’s worst war crimes were committed on the eve of their withdrawal. And he recognised that Cast Lead must end before President Obama’s imminent inauguration.

One of those four targets was the deservedly famed and honoured al-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation Hospital which in 1979 began as a nursing home for the destitute aged left without family. By 1995 it had become the Strip’s first and only in-patient rehabilitation centre, dealing with head and spinal cord injuries and other neurological afflictions. It collaborated with Israel’s Tel Hashomer Hospital and with a number of relevant Norwegian NGOs; IUG trained its physiotherapists. In 2008 it was at last able to expand – just in time for the IDF to target it with eight artillery shells which completely destroyed the men’s ward and did so much damage all patients had to be discharged. Since my arrival in Gaza I had heard al-Wafa mentioned a dozen times, with gratitude and affection, by the most disadvantaged people on my visiting list. And now I had been given an introduction to its Director, Dr Khamis Elessi.