A Month by the Sea (5 page)

Although Atef had by then been based in Cairo for seven years, his wife’s residence permit cost (unofficially) US$1500. He was adamant that she must never again work though before Mira’s birth she had practised as a physiotherapist. ‘To be a mother,’ he declared earnestly, ‘is for women the
most
important! But for us, two is enough – maybe three if my wife wants it. Some women feel shame not to have many. That’s why we got a baby sister – some women feel old if not pregnant!’ It bothered Atef that father considered nine or ten to be the correct contribution, given demography’s increasing significance on the political scene. I was beginning to take an interest in this tycoon and gladly accepted an invitation to lunch on the following Friday. Politically motivated breeding seemed inconsistent with his semi-Westernised attitudes (that half-arranged marriage!) and his dubious business associates outside the Strip.

I wondered then what could have deterred this devoted son from visiting his family between 2002 and 2011, when his parents’ connections allowed them to travel freely. Palestinian ‘notables’ are notorious for family feuding but surely
that
sort of thing can’t have persisted into the twenty-first century?

Atef regarded Egypt as his second home but had not been out in Tahrir Square and feared a future without Mubarak. If he couldn’t get his US green card he’d try for Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States and on the previous evening he had broken this news to the family. Father then urged him to spend at least a few years in
doctor-deprived
Gaza. Mother tearfully begged him never again to live
abroad. (‘Muslim mothers always want sons staying near, giving them respect.’) Atef’s wife, who dreaded imprisonment on the Strip, vehemently supported her husband. All those cell phone calls had been a continuation of the debate and I now understood Atef’s eagerness to take a day trip with his new friend.

At Erez the same policemen were on duty and unamused by our reappearance. Atef waved cheekily before speeding back to the al-Rimal beachfront for lunch in a long-established and grossly expensive seafood restaurant. He was choosing his live fish from a tank by the entrance when the elderly restaurateur came hurrying to welcome him home with embraces and kisses and exclamations of surprised joy. We were escorted down a short flight of worn flagged steps to an agreeable semi-basement (old stone walls and floors, elegantly plain wooden furniture, neatly ironed napery). Only one other table was occupied and an English-speaking waiter lamented, ‘Since the blockade, business go slow, slow. Shop food costing more, less for us.’ He had worked for several homesick years in a London hotel. Then, ‘I saw Arafat returning with Oslo promises and I said everything’s fine! And it was until it wasn’t! Now I’m feeling a fool, Oslo like a trick to split Palestinians.’

The numerous complex
hors d’oeuvres
came in hand-made clay bowls with an over-supply of oven-fresh Palestinian and French bread – by my standards a substantial meal. Side dishes accompanied the main course and Atef sampled everything but finished nothing. As the table was being cleared – all these delicacies being jumbled together in a dirty basin with fish bones and bread – I asked where leftovers went. Our waiter friend looked perplexed. ‘Is garbage,’ he said. I controlled a surge of rage; Shatti camp (80,000 plus) is scarcely 100 yards away. And my self-control broke down as Atef sliced a large juicy lemon to clean his fishy hands, ignoring the washbasin in the corner. How many obviously vitamin-deficient children had we just seen, none of whose parents could afford lemons?

Atef looked at his watch; it was time to fetch father from al-Shifa hospital, near my luxury apartment. On the following Friday we would meet at 11 am and paddle in the sea before lunch.

When I described our tour to the al-Helous they stared at me for a moment in silence, wide-eyed with horror. Then Khalil asserted that I was lucky to be alive. Atef’s father is among Gaza’s richest men. His Volvo would have been readily identifiable in such places as Jabalya, Rafah and Khan Younis. Atef, as his son, was the answer to a kidnapper’s prayer. I, as an irrelevant passenger, might well have been murdered and dumped by the wayside. Even in 2011 such kidnappings are more common than the outside world realises; Hamas, busy cultivating Gaza’s new ‘orderly society’ image, prefers not to publicise them.

I didn’t know how seriously to take all this. Despite the tragic death a few weeks earlier of Vittorio Arrigoni, a long-term Italian resident of Gaza, kidnapping had never occurred to me – though I had been vaguely tempted, in Rafah, to advise Atef to conceal that heavy gold watch which looked so conspicuous (and rather absurd) on his narrow wrist. The Volvo certainly attracted much attention throughout the camps and had we stopped to talk, as I suggested, we might possibly have been at risk. Yet to me, on Day One, Gaza felt much less tense than the West Bank.

Atef rang next morning, sounding confused and embarrassed. We couldn’t meet on Friday, there was some complication about his driving licence – of course we must meet again sometime but he couldn’t say exactly when. Days later I heard on the grapevine (Gaza’s rich class is very small) that his reckless behaviour had earned ‘a severe punishment’. I longed to know what that entailed but felt it would be impolite to ask. I’ve always lacked the essential qualifications for investigative journalism. We never met again.

During the Nakba (the ‘Catastrophe’) of 1948, following the UN Resolution to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs, almost a quarter of a million Palestinians took refuge on the Strip and Egypt’s King Farouk foresaw them fleeing into his territory should the Zionists grab Gaza. Therefore a boundary was set on 24 February 1949, between two new entities: the State of Israel and the Gaza Strip. To ensure Israel’s security, the Arab League (no friend of the Palestinians, then or now) authorised Egypt to install a military administration in Gaza. In contrast, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan. Benny Morris has commented on the various new borders: ‘In great measure, and especially around the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they followed no natural topographical contours. Often they abruptly severed Arabs from their land and kin. A few villages were even cut in two …’

Under Egyptian rule, Gaza’s modernisation, begun in Mandate times, gained momentum. Newly built cinemas showed the latest Cairo films and traditional home-centred celebrations were replaced by jolly café gatherings, or by music and dancing on the beach. Like their contemporaries in Cairo and Beirut, young Gazans discarded the
galabiya
and the
thobe
. Rich Egyptians swarmed in to enjoy
tax-free
shopping, safe swimming off a smooth, 20-mile-long beach and seafood restaurants with snob-value. From Egypt’s universities hundreds of middle-class students brought back Nasserist dreams and cared nothing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Revival, then appearing on the Strip but being driven underground by the military administration.

In June 1967 Israel’s victory in the Six Day War discredited Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism (socialist and secular). Soon
young graduates were coming home from Egypt all fired up by the writings and sermons of leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, men like Sayyed Qutb – executed in Cairo in the late 1960s for ‘preaching sedition’. They could see only one way forward: an unquestioning acceptance of Allah’s will, as revealed to his Messenger in the seventh century
AD
. Modernisation was out. Qutb’s successors fixed the ‘infidel’ label on all leaders, including Arafat, who allowed their followers to be corrupted by
Westernisation
in any of its insidious forms.

When resistance to the Zionist take-over burgeoned on the Strip, Major-General Ariel Sharon, then CO Southern Command, launched a year-long ‘anti-terrorist’ operation. In January 1971 hundreds of the refugees’ frail, family-built dwellings were levelled to make way for military roads. Sharon used the Druze Border Police as his crack troops; they celebrated their arrival by shooting dead twelve Palestinian civilians rash enough to ignore ‘Halt!’ commands. Another of the General’s favourite units was made up of Arabic-speaking kibbutzniks, disguised as Palestinians, who could mingle with the Gazans and detect ‘terrorists’. They were ordered to execute their captives promptly. When Ziad
al-Husseini
, the Strip’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader, killed himself on 21 November 1971, Sharon boasted that resistance had been eliminated at a low cost: 100 or so Palestinians killed, 700 or so imprisoned. To an extent, his boast was justified. For several years Gaza remained politically subdued, its activists focusing on religious reform.

In 1973, when a group of young Gazan graduates established
al-Mujamma
’ al-Islami (Mujamma for short), the Israeli military governor on the Strip noted, ‘Mujamma is not a problem.’ Sheikh Ahmed Yassin led the Mujamma preachers, urging Gazans to join in a ‘restorative jihad’ to strengthen and purify Islam. The Zionist oppressors were not yet a target; guiding Muslims back to ‘the true path of Islam’ had to precede liberation. (Or driving them back:
from the outset fanatical offshoots favoured physical intimidation.) The secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was then gaining stature, globally, as a guerrilla movement but Mujamma angrily denied its right to exercise political control, either within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) or throughout
al-Shatat
(the Palestinian Diaspora). The Islamists also denounced Darwinism, thus siding with the most pernicious Christian
fundamentalists
. They were not trained theologians – so a venerable philosopher told me, when I visited him in his al-Azhar University office. (Gaza’s al-Azhar, not to be confused with Cairo’s.) Mujamma’s fundamentalism, said my learned friend, might be described not as a movement to reform Islam for the sake of all mankind but as a frustrated protest against a system (
Westernisation
) seen as belittling Muslim traditions while exploiting Muslim workers. To this extent, as the philosopher observed with a chuckle, Mujamma adherents and PLO leftists had more in common than either was allowed to recognise by their leaders.

On the positive side, Mujamma had inherited from the
Brotherhood
various Islamic Social Institutions (ISIs) set up in the 1950s, despite Egyptian repression, to help Gaza’s disadvantaged. In 1978 the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) administration registered Mujamma as a charity, to the dismay of those Israelis who saw its anti-Westernisation stance as anti-Semitic. From 1979 to 1981 Brigadier General Itshak Segev governed Gaza and commended Sheikh Yassin’s tireless work for the poor, who were consistently neglected by the PLO’s self-serving representatives. In 1980 Segev arranged a consultation for Yassin with Israel’s top surgeons but the Sheikh’s spinal injury (caused by a childhood accident) was found to be irreparable.

To cater for Gaza’s fast-growing population more than 100 Mujamma-run mosques were built within a decade, funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. These became (and remain) central to the daily life of the poor in most camps, villages and urban districts.
In the run-up to the First Intifada in 1987, when Palestinians rose up to protest at the occupation of their territory by Israel, certain preachers were alarmingly inflammatory and from their Friday prayers youthful mobs emerged to taunt the PLO as ‘atheist’ and ‘Communist’. At the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), opened in 1978, lecturers who taught evolution were bullied into dropping the subject. They had no one to defend them; by then some 15,000 of the PLO’s nationalist/socialist followers had been imprisoned in Israel’s remote desert camps. During the early ’80s, in defiance of the Mujamma leadership – which prided itself on maintaining order – many mobs ran amok, burning and smashing cafés, video stores, hairdressing salons, cinemas, liquor stores, libraries, billiard clubs, boutiques and bookshops. Meanwhile IDF troops stood around, watching. Israel’s tolerance for this anarchy has been likened to US support for Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet Mujahedin: another case of what the CIA calls ‘blowback’. These rampages shocked most Gazans, whether Mujamma, PLO or unlabelled. Yet the contrast between the PLO’s endemic embezzling and the incorruptibility of the ISI’s Mujamma officials enabled Islamism to retain the loyalty of Gaza’s deprived. Mujamma might lack trained theologians but few of its members ever forgot Allah’s views on honesty.

In 1984 Sheikh Yassin was arrested for the first time and charged with demanding an end to the Occupation and setting up a militant cell (Hamas in embryo). His thirteen-year sentence shrank to one year through a prisoner exchange but he was forbidden to resume his chairmanship of Mujamma.

On 9 December 1987 the first Intifada started in Jabalya in Gaza and a fortnight later Hamas was born.

In 1993 Hamas condemned the Oslo Accords as ‘a heresy that will lead to the surrender of Muslim lands to Jews’. Edward Said agreed, reproaching Arafat for signing ‘the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’ and foretelling the Second Intifada as an
inevitable consequence. However the PLO’s compromise won international approval and lavishly increased funding. By the
mid-’90s
most Palestinians, throughout the OPT, had made plain their aversion to any further violence. It was time to put militarism aside, Hamas realised, and concentrate on non-violent community building. As Professor Ali al-Jarbawi of Birzeit University often points out, ‘Hamas is a
very
pragmatic political institution.’

By then ISIs had proliferated and were doing much to relieve the Strip’s multiple miseries. The unscrupulous Israeli/US-led vilifying of Hamas (shamefully backed up, since Oslo, by the Palestinian Authority (PA)) presents these charities as a ‘front for terror’. In 2003 the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs circulated a report entitled ‘The Exploitation of Children for Terrorist Purposes’. It claimed:

Many outsiders seem unaware of the deep roots, within
traditional
Islam, of ‘social institutions’ linked to a Muslim’s duty to donate to the needy a fixed percentage of his income. With an obstinate sort of blinkered cynicism, most English-language commentators present all ISIs as an integral part of the ‘terror’ machine. Yet Hamas’ political/military leadership has never had close relations with individual ISIs, though obviously their steady support for the whole system burnishes their image on the Strip – and elsewhere. (The ISIs are so autonomous and diffuse one can’t refer to them as a ‘network’.)

The best analysis of this contentious issue comes from Sara Roy, a US Jew and senior research fellow at Harvard, whose intimate knowledge of the OPT (especially Gaza) extends over the past twenty-five years. She writes:

Islamic social services organisations typically

• had no (political) ideological criteria as conditions for access to Islamic social services, or for membership in Islamic social organisations;
  
• evinced no desire or intent to create a strictly Islamic society or to implement any Islamic mode;
  
• desired greater practical cooperation with the Palestinian government, itself reflecting an openness on the part of the Islamists for better state–society relations and not an attempt to challenge, alienate, or sabotage state authority; and
  
• prioritised professionalism over ideology.
  

On Day Two I walked indirectly to the beach, at first along wide streets carrying light traffic. The pavements were ankle-deep in fine golden sand, many of the office blocks, engineering works, stores and restaurants looked either partially used or abandoned. Years ago normal business life came to a halt and while the blockade continues no one is going to invest in Gaza. An occasional shop offered meagre stocks of Egyptian junk food. Commercial animation was confined to al-Majdal Street’s busy roadside stalls, loaded with cheap Chinese goods. I was to discover that a specific item – not seen for weeks – could appear all over the city with
sudden abundance when one importer’s order had just come through a tunnel.

Most Gazans are monolingual but keen to help a stranger. When I asked the way to the beach by miming swimming two amused men directed me down a long, slightly sloping passageway between tall slummy tenements – the edge of Shatti camp. Then, from a low embankment, I could see Ashkelon’s tall factory chimneys smoking a few miles away to the north, in Israel. It was two and a half years since I’d walked along that unwelcoming beach on a cold windy Sabbath morning – I remembered gazing gloomily at Gaza, not believing I could ever clear the bureaucratic barrier.

Here I gave thanks for the relief of a frisky breeze off the Mediterranean. Below me children played on a poisonously littered shore – untreated sewage flowing into the sea, domestic garbage heaped around chunks of people’s bombed homes. The municipality tries hard with limited resources but in many districts overpopulation defeats it. Mopping my sweaty face I strolled towards a wannabe café: a bent tin sheet propped on unequal lengths of half-burned spars with three battered plastic tables under two torn beach umbrellas. Five men sat staring at a patrolling gunboat, looking jobless – a look difficult to describe but easy to recognise. Ersatz coffee was served with a glass of water. Stupidly I had neglected to acquire coins and while a youth was seeking change the oldest man insisted on paying my bill. In Gaza ‘Where from?’ is always the first question and, as in most countries, being Irish is an advantage. Three of those men had had their little boats confiscated and done time in detention for fishing beyond the Israeli-imposed limit.

We were joined by a slim youngish man, an UNRWA teacher who told me in halting yet vivid English how impossible it is to manage fifty 10-year-olds with ‘everything not enough’ – especially when half a class may be traumatised long-term. He taught at his old school in Shatti camp, his birthplace. He himself had had a
good education in the ’80s, before UNRWA funding dwindled and pupil numbers soared. In his view, the rich native Gazans think refugees are dirt but don’t dare say so. He showed me pictures of his five children (aged two to nine) and advised me, as I went on my way, to buy a sunhat.

A half-hour walk took me back to Rimal, to the shoal of seafront hotels spawned by Oslo: the al-Deira, the Grand Palace, the Adam, the Commodore, the Palestine, all equipped with generators to evade the daily Gazan reality of prolonged power cuts. They survive now on expense-account guests such as UN agency and
international
NGO delegations, and foreign and Palestinian ‘humanitarian’ teams who collect statistics to be carefully collated at considerable expense for sponsors powerless to use them. Those visitors’ favourite restaurant is the Roots Club, where one meal costs more than a Shatti couple’s monthly food supply.