A Month by the Sea (7 page)

Three rather stressful days later I escaped from the tentacles clutching a fistful of dollars.

On the evening of 11 June I was visiting a Beit Lahia family when news came through of the death of their fifty-year-old friend, Mohammed Sha’ban Mohammed Eslemm, who had been wounded in his own home on 15 January 2009 as Cast Lead was drawing to an end. That 2,000 pound bomb killed twelve people, including six members of the Eslemm family; its target was the Hamas Minister of the Interior, then being sheltered by the Eslemms. I remembered sitting in my Balata room reading the
Ha’aretz
account of Said Siam’s assassination. A former teacher and founder member of Hamas, he had topped the poll in Gaza in January 2006 and gone on to become an extremely effective Minister of the Interior, largely responsible for the rapid restoration of law and order in 2007. The IDF flaunted him as their second most important Cast Lead ‘trophy’. The first was Sheikh Nizar Rayan, ‘eliminated’ on 1 January 2009, together with his four wives and nine of his children. Mohammed Eslemm had been transferred to an Egyptian hospital on 24 February 2009 – then on 29 May 2011 to an Israeli hospital, where he died.

My friends were relieved to hear of Mohammed’s death. ‘He had suffered too much,’ Sari said quietly.

Amira and Sari shared a small top-floor flat with two married sons and their families; both homes (near the buffer zone) had been bombed in 2010. We were sitting on the child-free roof where Amira grew pots of herbs for sale in the street market.

Sari had been among the 415 Hamas activists deported by Israel to south Lebanon in December 1992. Throughout the OPT this was seen initially as a brutal blow to Palestinians in general and Islamists in particular. The expulsions followed a series of Hamas attacks on Israeli personnel, calculated to secure Sheikh Yassin’s
release; he had been jailed in 1991. Hamas’ campaign backfired – but so did the Israeli expulsions. In Palestinian eyes, these came to look like a panic reaction – said Sari – and for the first time made Hamas seem a possible political alternative to Fatah. Also, the Lebanese year drew the exiles close to Hizbollah who gladly provided military training ‘more advanced than anything we had before’. When the Islamists were allowed home, because of international pressure, ‘we had a welcome back like we were a winning army!’

Meanwhile Amira had been coping with six children under twelve and she remembered the 1992–94 years as one long
nightmare
. Then, partly as a result of the Second Intifada in 2000, economic conditions rapidly worsened throughout the OPT and, as Israel continued to expand its settlements, Arafat’s support dwindled. Factional violence on the Strip increased when the PLO failed to persuade Hamas to join its ranks and pick the fruits of the overt (Madrid) and covert (Oslo) peace processes.

During this period of internecine bloodiness informers
proliferated
and in 1994 Amira’s brother Riham was executed by
al-Majd
, a special intelligence unit set up by Sheikh Yassin to detect and punish collaborators. The family was never given proof of Riham’s guilt but Sari said there was no reason to doubt it. Sheikh Yassin, being a wise and just man, made sure that all al-Majd recruits were well-trained and responsible. A Palestinian informer’s shame stains his whole clan but almost always his immediate family is helped by ISIs and on the very day of Riham’s killing his widow and seven children were ‘adopted’ by three ISIs.

On the West Bank I twice heard informers being shot close to my pad and I listened to a few debates with Internationals about the ethics of such executions. Happily no one ever sought my opinion. Under Israeli military rule collaborators are responsible for incalculable suffering, property loss, injury and death. One can’t condone these executions but neither could I bring myself
to condemn them where the alternative of life imprisonment is impractical. Every society abhors informers. I vividly remember, in the 1940s, two grey-haired maiden ladies moving from a distant county to my home town in rural Ireland and being identified, in whispers, as the relatives of an informer recruited some twenty years earlier by the Black-and-Tans. An aura of horror surrounded these unfortunate sisters of a man who had betrayed his own – for
money
!

The news from Syria was unsettling many Gazans and my friends felt concerned about Khaled Meshaal, Yassin’s successor and a long-time exile from the OPT, for years based in Damascus as head of Hamas’ Political Bureau. Sari then told me about the extraordinary events of October 1997, when Mr Netanyahu, in his first term as Prime Minister, ordered Meshaal’s assassination during his residency in Amman, Jordan. Meshaal was already seen as one of Hamas’ most talented young leaders. It’s not nice to bomb or shell the resident of a friendly state, so two Mossad agents, bearing stolen Canadian passports, chose to spray poison on their target. When caught in the act they were arrested and Meshaal was rushed to hospital. As he lay there, his recovery uncertain, an angry King Hussein did a deal with Netanyahu. In exchange for an effective antidote, and the release of Sheikh Yassin and several other prisoners, Mossad’s dudes would be freed. Soon after, Sheikh Yassin visited his friend, Meshaal, in hospital and found both the King and Arafat there to greet him. Then he was helicoptered to a Strip vibrating with cheers and enveloped in banners. These celebrated ‘the Sheikh of the Intifada’ – pictured beside Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ most efficient bomb-maker, known as ‘The Engineer’, who had been assassinated in January 1996. Sari later showed me the spot where Ayyash switched on his mobile and died. He had been given it by a collaborator.

For Hamas the Israelis’ inexorable assassination campaign had been far more damaging, politically, than Cast Lead – or so Sari
reckoned. Between 2002 and 2004 the IDF ‘took out’ most of their senior leaders – and any of their family and friends who chanced to be with them when the missile struck. In July 2002 a one-ton bomb dropped on Salah Shehade’s Gaza home killed the target and fourteen of his relatives. Nine months later Ibrahim
al-Maqadmeh
was eliminated and five months after that Ismail Abu Shanab. His successor, Mohammed Deif, survived a shelling but was permanently maimed. The following year, in March and April, Sheikh Yassin and his second-in-command, Dr Abdel Aziz
al-Rantissi
, were the targets. Ahmed Yassin was paraplegic, confined by a childhood accident to a wheelchair, and the missile struck early one morning as he was being pushed home from his
neighbourhood
mosque.

In January 1996, when the first post-Oslo elections happened, the imprisoned Sheikh Yassin wrote regularly to his followers, advising them to take part in the voting. For some years he had been considering a prolonged truce during which Hamas,
converted
into a non-violent political party, could work to dismantle Oslo from within. In 2000 he sought a ten- or fifteen-year truce in exchange for a genuinely independent Palestinian state in the OPT (as distinct from the crippled creature born of Oslo). Again, not long before his death he looked ahead to the IDF’s 2005 ‘
withdrawal
’ and suggested power-sharing with Fatah on the Strip. A leader so persistently focused on ‘peace with justice’ could only be a serious embarrassment to governments having a very different agenda. The Bush administration openly approved of the murder of Hamas’ top layer.

Unlike the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Black September, whose deadly militancy kept the Palestinian cause in the world’s headlines during the 1970s, Hamas has never advocated or defended attacks on third party countries or their nationals within Palestine. No such scruples inhibit Israel from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists or any other third parties
deemed undesirable. By now senior Mossad and IDF officers feel free to boast in media interviews that Israel has made assassination ‘internationally acceptable’. Their reasoning seems to be that a crime committed often enough is somehow drained of criminality.

When I first met Gaza’s International Solidarity Movement (ISM) team they were still in a state of shock and none mentioned their murdered comrade, Vittorio Arrigoni (‘Vik’), of whom I had heard much over the past few years from mutual friends. Born in 1975 in a small town near Lake Como, he was a freelance journalist, an uncompromising pacifist, a fervent binationalist and defiantly brave – ever ready to take risks in defence of Gaza’s farmers and fishermen. He had spent the 2005 Christmas season in
Ben-Gurion
airport’s lock-up and been several times beaten and wounded by the IDF though they knew he was permanently on medication for a chronic heart condition. The
Jerusalem Post
repeatedly denounced him as ‘an enemy of all Jews’.

Every week Vik rang his mother, then mayor of Bulciago, and on 12 April she rejoiced to hear that after an 18-month absence he was planning a holiday. At once rumour blamed his apparent kidnapping on a hitherto unknown Salafist gang calling themselves Tawhid-wa-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). They were said to be guaranteeing his release within thirty hours (by 5.00 pm on Friday) if Hamas freed the Salafist Sheikh Abu Walid al-Maqdas and his two sons (detained a month previously). A brief YouTube video showed Vik bruised, bloodied and blindfolded. Early on the Friday morning police searchers found his body hanging in a derelict house in northern Gaza.

Hamas then allowed the circulation of misleading information, to spare Vik’s family. This fabrication was believed by many – including me, until an ‘insider’ friend reported the facts. Vik, ignoring sound advice, had gone to that house voluntarily and
been murdered by a Jordanian who, as the police approached, killed himself to avoid arrest. This essentially unIslamic action (suicide bombers are
martyrs
) prompted much speculation about the real motive for Vik’s murder and the identity of those behind it. Of course there were mutterings about Mossad. Could this well-publicised crime, coming only eleven days after the West Bank assassination of the film director Juliano Mer-Khamis, have been calculated to unnerve the foreign supporters of Freedom Flotilla II, due to sail to Gaza in July? A few of my Fatah friends insinuatingly recalled that Vik’s blog had more than once openly criticised Hamas – e.g., ‘Since winning the election they have deeply limited human rights by trying to impose hardline Islam.’ Responding to those friends, I deplored this ill-considered
judgment
; one can’t reasonably blame Hamas for Salafist influences percolating through on the Strip.

In August 2009, during the Rafah mosque siege, a Syrian imam proclaimed Gaza to be an Islamist caliphate. Hamas had long been patiently negotiating with this fanatic, seeking to lead or push him towards moderation. Therefore the five policemen who entered the mosque, hoping to end the siege peacefully, were unarmed. They died beside the imam when he blew himself up and in the chaos that followed Hamas killed twenty-four of the ‘caliphate’s’ adherents. The subsequent discovery in the mosque of hundreds of suicide vests, packed with
Israeli
explosives, generated another swarm of speculations.

Vik had long since been granted honorary Palestinian citizenship and Gaza’s Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, telephoned
condolences
to Vik’s mother. During mourning ceremonies in Gaza City Dr Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas’ co-founder and elder statesman, condemned ‘this awful crime against our friends’ and during similar ceremonies on the West Bank Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas addressed the crowds. It would have pleased Vik to see this spontaneous surge of grief uniting so many Palestinians. Meanwhile a Salafist minority,
tiny but shrill, continued to jeer at Italy as ‘an infidel state’ and to accuse Vik of having spread corruption by encouraging men and women to meet in public as independent individuals.

On 14 June the ISM team invited me to a commemorative five-
a-side
indoor soccer tournament at the Rafah community centre where Vik had spent so much time coaching boys who for lack of space could never play normal soccer. This centre, in a cleverly converted factory, is another example of Gazan energy, ingenuity and fortitude. It will take a very long time to blockade these people into demoralisation.

At sunset, in a vast first-floor chamber, we joined a dozen men around a banquet-long table overlooked by tall showcases crowded with trophies won during the past half-century: cups, bowls, urns and trays, all engraved and embellished. The only other woman present was a fiery young Anglo-Egyptian ISM-er, famous for subduing Israeli naval officers. Handshaking became incessant as sporting (and other) notables continued to arrive from all over Gaza. Many men eagerly enquired about my compatriot, Caoimhe Butterly, a great friend of Vik’s, whose courage as a paramedic working throughout Cast Lead won’t soon be forgotten. Everyone received a T-shirt depicting Vik above an Arabic inscription and below the crossed flags of Italy and Palestine. The notables spoke emotionally and at length – until suddenly a piercing whistle signalled the start of the tournament.

In a hangar-like hall, tiered seating for 1,000 rose on one side above a chalk-marked soccer pitch (also marked for netball and volleyball). I found myself in the front row beside Mohammed, born in Rafah camp in 1973. He had graduated in Italy but ‘at the start of the Second Intifada I wanted to be with my family’. He was proud of his wife who, having tasted freedom in Italy, refused to wear the hijab or jilbab. ‘She’s maybe the only Gazan woman so
brave in these times! Though not brave enough to wear a swimsuit.’

On my other side sat Khalil, with whom I had already talked several times at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). A small, slight, middle-aged man, he was pale and fine-featured and abstractedly cold in manner – perhaps a cover-up for the sorrow and frustration felt by all such workers throughout the OPT unless they are simply ‘in it for the money’ (which can happen). The PCHR is a rare and precious source of reliable information about contentious events on the Strip. Unreliable information comes by the truckload.