A Month by the Sea (26 page)

We agreed that there is a comforting inevitability about
binationalism – and here again the Zionists are fleeing from reality. Stridently they complain about anti-Semites scheming to ‘delegitimise’ Israel – though the ‘delegitimising’ has been achieved by their own flouting of international law ever since the State’s foundation. We also agreed, while saying goodbye, that neither of us is likely to live long enough to see binationalism in action – despite M— being my junior by fifteen years.

I sometimes looked for a secluded corner in a café to transcribe a conversation while the exact words remained fresh in my mind. Thus I occasionally came upon young couples, on their own before my intrusion, who momentarily looked guilty and scared. Then, identifying me as an International, they would relax, smile, invite me to join them. By sitting together, drinking tea, they were breaking that 2009 law which forbids schoolgirls to wear jeans and which also bans women from riding pillion on motorbikes, having their hair cut by a male hairdresser and dancing in public with a male. Anyone detected misbehaving so flagrantly would be
automatically
fined by the Internal Security Agency. This is not the sort of ‘independent state’ the Palestinians want. Nor is it the sort of regime Hamas would impose were it not so scared of the Salafists. And the longer the blockade, the stronger that minority gets …

One such encounter took place in the gloomy upstairs room of a large run-down café (all its confectionary display cases empty) on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, overlooking the palm-lined Square of the Unknown Soldier. The young woman, Aida, was an English teacher at an UNRWA school, her friend hopes soon to be earning a living as a photojournalist – not an easy profession to follow on the Strip. He spoke no English and seemed quite put out because this left the female in a position of power … Soon it was time for him to go and when we were on our own Aida immediately reprimanded me for being ‘naked’. ‘The Holy Koran,’ she sternly
asserted, ‘orders every woman to keep every one of her hairs covered.’ We talked on for an hour or more. Aida longed to marry the photographer but for both ‘other arrangements are made’. Had it been possible to leave Gaza they would have eloped: or so they told one another. Among the Palestinians, and especially among the Gazans, one often comes upon these unexpected conjunctions: ‘every hair covered – elopement considered’. Before we parted Aida gave me her grandfather’s name and mobile number and suggested I visit him in Jabalya town because ‘he likes foreign books and the people who write them’.

Much as I detest mobile phones I have to concede that they do simplify life on the overpopulated Strip where it can take a very long time to locate an address. When I showed the
serveece
driver what Aida had scribbled in my notebook he conversed animatedly with her grandfather, Abdel, and mere moments late we found Abdel and his nephew Salem waiting for me on a crowded
pavement
in the heart of Jabalya town.

Grandad was small and pot-bellied with a short grey beard, a high domed forehead, deep-set grey-green eyes, fluent English and an oblique sense of humour. Salem was tall, thin, intense and at first rather shy. They led me through a maze of sunless passageways to a warped, unpainted door suited to a slum dwelling. It gave access to a narrow, unroofed corridor from which an outside stone stairway, long and steep, led to the spacious home where Abdel was born in 1947. His parents had married (aged fourteen and eighteen) in 1938, during the war on Zionism. The family was poor (‘new poor’) and times were hard when so many refugees were driven onto the Strip; Abdel had eleven siblings but six died young. His own nine children were thriving and already he and Mariam had fifteen grandchildren. Mariam was young enough to be my daughter – a bulky woman who can’t ever have been beautiful but made up for that by being gracious and quick-witted and radiating a special sort of matronly charm based on contentment. I had to lie
to her about my meeting with Aida; it had taken place in the UNRWA school, not in a café.

In two pleasing respects, Abdel was slightly unusual. Although Mariam spoke no English he ensured her full participation in our conversation, translating every word. Also, he was as eager to listen as to talk and seemed genuinely interested in my view of things. Aida had been right about her grandad: he did like foreign writers.

The four of us sat in a wide breezy window embrasure and Abdel drew my attention to the bomb-damaged balcony, its new delicately wrought bars made from scavenged steel rods. ‘Gaza is the world’s recycling capital!’ boasted Abdel. Below us lay an oblong of land, two acres or so, uglified by a central bomb crater but still supporting a few olive, lemon and apricot trees and two bedraggled banana plants. Enclosing this space were several other eighteenth-century three-storey houses, all occupied by members of Abdel’s clan. Here I learned two new words –
muwataneen
(a native Gazan) and
mehajera
(a refugee).

On one cousin’s roof a yellow Fatah flag fluttered but I soon realised that Abdel’s branch of this clan lived above the fray. Another branch, however, stubbornly supported an old plan, no longer much discussed, to transfer at least half of Gaza’s
mehajera
population to the West Bank. Some of Jabalya camp stands on clan land, leased to UNRWA. Abdel was firmly pro-
mehajera
. In his view, throughout the Strip, Palestinian disunity had yet again made bad worse. An undeniable truth. In Shatti camp I heard many bitter criticisms of the PA’s Oslo-era decision to build a luxury hotel on nearby government land that should have been used to ease Shatti’s appalling congestion.

When I arrived an anaemic twenty-year-old (Hoda, Salem’s daughter) was wearing a sleeveless blouse and shorts and cuddling the first great-grandchild, an enchanting eight-month-old-girl with a mass of raven curls and hyacinth-blue eyes. Then came a warning shout: two male cousins were arriving. The baby was
dumped in Grandma’s lap and Hoda hastened away to don a loose, calf-length, printed cotton prayer-gown incorporating a
hijab
, the garment women wear when praying at home (as they mostly do). This comfortable hot-weather attire can no longer be worn out of doors – say the Salafists – because it might blow around, showing too much. Towards noon Salem and the cousins excused themselves: it was prayer time. As they went Abdel smiled at his wife, then said to me, ‘Younger folk are more devout than us – or should I say “we”?’

Uncountable small children were all the time darting to and fro, most looking rather anaemic yet none lacking energy. A triple bed, strewn with lavishly embroidered cushions, took up half the floor space and on it a ginger-and-white kitten slept soundly when not being played with, roughly though affectionately, by a six-year-old boy suffering from an eye defect. One lid drooped uncontrollably and Abdel was struggling to get him to an Israeli hospital for corrective treatment. Mariam observed that it was inherited; there were several other cases within the clan. One might have expected this highly educated family to be wary of consanguinity – but no. As Abdel tried to clarify who I was meeting, or was about to meet, he mentioned one cousinly marriage after another. For Aida (the mating she hoped somehow to avoid) a second cousin had been chosen.

Over the next pot of coffee Suzanne joined us, Mariam and Abdel’s first-born, the forty-year-old mother of Aida and eight others though her husband had been in a wheelchair (a botched spinal operation) since adolescence. (This couple had been greatly helped, Aida told me at our next meeting, by the al-Wafa
workshop
on sexuality for patients with spinal injuries.) Suzanne was holding Sawsan by the hand, an eight-year-old daughter,
scared-looking
and white-faced with elfin features. She had been severely traumatised when the family home was smashed to rubble by one massive bomb. The whole family was sheltering then in an
UNRWA school and none was injured. But the youngest, aged five and a half at the time, had been unhinged by the loss, within moments, of their home and all their possessions including hens, a donkey, a cat. The donkey was always hired out during the ploughing season and those few extra shekels had made what Abdel called ‘a Micawberish difference’.

Suzanne angrily compared the international media coverage then being given to the captured Gilad Schalit’s five-year imprisonment without visitors and the ignoring of almost 8,000 Palestinians imprisoned without visitors in Israeli jails. (Only one jail is in the OPT, where West Bank relatives can occasionally visit.) Two of Suzanne’s brothers-in-law (her husband’s sisters’ husbands) had been in Israeli jails for more than three years – without a visit. None of their family or friends could get a permit to leave Gaza. During an IDF incursion into Rafah town both had been arrested in their homes, detained for 95 days in an interrogation (torture) centre, then tried and sentenced by military courts but never treated as POWs. The IDF had vandalised several Rafah homes that night, kicking TVs, computers, fridges, ripping upholstery, smashing kitchenware, scattering food all over floors before urinating on it. Throughout the West Bank I had heard many similar stories and in some cases seen the ‘morning-after’ evidence as families wept over destroyed possessions they couldn’t possibly afford to replace.

Abdel said, ‘The IDF is a very sick institution. Maybe we shouldn’t blame individual kids. They’re taken out of the
schoolroom
, processed in a dehumanising machine, injected with fear and loathing of Palestinians. I hear people say, in another way
they’re
victims.’

Salem, by now back from the mosque, said, ‘Maybe all armies do this sort of thing but we notice it more where all are clamped together, in our Holy Land.’

Suzanne, sitting with Sawsan on her knee, was uninhibited about arguing with Father. She, too, spoke excellent English. ‘Those kids
choose
to be processed! They could do jail for a month or pay a fine. And the officers who send them out to hunt us and persecute us, they’re no kids! And the politicians who reward the officers with big jobs when they retire – are they kids? If they’re all sick, they’re sick the way Hitler was and no one makes excuses for him!’

At that moment some mischievous local jinn decided to provide the foreign writer with raw material and, as lunch was being served, a very loud thump shook the floor and made everyone jump. (Except me: I don’t react to sudden loud noises, which probably means there’s something radically wrong with my central nervous system.) Salem hurried to the little annex bathroom, added in the 1950s and jutting over the garden. He couldn’t open the door: half the ceiling had collapsed. I recalled then my visit to the cartography department, in Gaza City’s labyrinthine municipality building, where I was told that most structures on the Strip, however outwardly unaffected, have in fact been weakened by Cast Lead and are liable to show the strain as time passes.

That thump made poor little Sawsan scream in terror and cling frantically to Suzanne as though she were trying to return to the safety of the womb. When at last she had been soothed, all fourteen of us settled down on the inner room floor to eat from piled communal platters. Then Salem voiced a widely held suspicion – Cast Lead’s air attack had been so extreme because the US-donated GBU-39 bombs, weighing 250 pounds and reputed to be ‘smart’, needed testing in 2008 and were not quite suitable for ‘
humanitarian
interventions’ in such places as Kosovo and Libya.

I had long since given up trying to sort out relationships within such extended Palestinian families, a task greatly complicated by generational overlap, given so many early marriages in families of ten and twelve – leading to anomalies like a three-year-old being uncle to a twenty-year old.

Our luncheon party had an unusually high incidence of English speakers: Abdel, Salem, Suzanne and two young men (Mariam’s
nephews, I think) who were doing ‘Teach Yourself English’
computer
courses and looking forward with determined optimism to the day of their escape from the Strip. Abdel failed to foster their optimism by focusing on the birthrates disparity. ‘As a Zionist state, Israel must fade away. It’s the dying kick of European colonialism. Zionists still hope they can do like Europeans in North America – demoralise us, drive us into reservations, make us dance for tourists. Or work for slave wages in their friends’ business parks.’

Salem intervened. ‘Islam protects us – they can’t turn Palestinians into alcoholic slaves! We’re sure to win, with Allah behind us. That’s why we listen when our imams praise many children. Most governments back Israel, our hope’s in numbers.’

‘Demographics will solve it,’ agreed Abdel. ‘We’ll outbreed them in Israel as well as the Territories. That’s why they offer low rents and taxes to bring Diaspora Jews here. Anything to keep numbers up! Those Oldies will soon die but Zionists hope children and grandchildren will visit and think, “This is where we want to live!”’ He paused and looked at the two young men. ‘
Demographics
go slowly! For now we must be patient, accepting our destiny.’ To which Mariam added, ‘Ownership of Palestine has changed many times over the millennia and the Zionists will follow the Crusaders!’ (Give me a shekel for every time I’ve heard that ‘Crusader’ analogy and I’ll be a rich woman.)

When I complimented Abdel on his English he laughed and said, ‘I finished my education over there – golden stone, not red brick!’ He lamented having almost no access to new publications but now he and Salem were planning to overcome the effect of the blockade through some antics in cyberspace way beyond my comprehension.

My mentioning binationalism brought the reaction I had come to expect in such company: a reluctance seriously to consider it. Zionism’s perceived invincibility creates this blockage –
not
Palestine
’s obduracy in the struggle for independence. My companions
had no nationalistic aspirations left; they saw the two-state solution for what it is. They also scorned ‘President’ Abbas’s application for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood, at that date a fresh bone of contention. Abdel wondered, ‘How can you have statehood without a state?’ This ploy was soon to be exposed by Guy Goodwin-Gill, Senior Research Fellow at All Souls, as a bit of legal/constitutional nonsense. But damaging nonsense, leading the politically naïve Palestinian masses down yet another garden path. We marvelled then at a startling phenomenon: on this ‘statehood’ issue each of us was completely in agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Obama administration, AIPAC and the Quartet.