A Month by the Sea (8 page)

This tournament consisted of four 30-minute matches and the hundreds of youthful spectators were loudly partisan in a cheerful way. The not-so-young players wore soft shoes and quite often had to pause when the chalk dust aggravated their smokers’ coughs. Kicks now and then rebounded from the walls, one just missing my head, but in general there was something soothingly ritualistic about the slow pace and gracefully controlled movements.

Then I became aware that Mohammed was worriedly reading text messages. When I looked at him questioningly he explained. His fifty-eight-year-old mother was on dialysis and in dire need of a drug at present unavailable. That afternoon the doctor had warned, ‘She may die within 48 hours.’ Now a text had told him of a relevant drugs consignment being held in Ramallah because the donor (or some PA bureaucrats?) didn’t want Hamas to benefit from it. There was nothing to be done, though a mother lay dying. Gaza truly is a prison, not metaphorically but in reality. Had some tragedy befallen my family, requiring my immediate departure, I could not have left the Strip before 2 July.

Mohammed showed me pictures of his son, now aged eight. During Cast Lead the child thought their shrapnel-victim
neighbours
had been killed by flying glass and decided to build himself a house without windows.

The muezzin’s evening summons interrupted the second game.
All shoes came off and, though there could be no washing, both teams formed a line led in prayer by the referee. Mohammed commented, ‘It’s not that all are so religious, this is just the custom and the culture.’ He glanced at Khalil who nodded his agreement. Yet again I heard the argument that ‘the Middle East problem’ does not have religion at its root though it so well suits the ‘
international
community’ (code for the US and its allies) to harp on about Islamic terrorism. Echoing many other Palestinians, Mohammed urged me always to use ‘Zionist’ rather than ‘Jewish’ in relation to Israel’s multiple crimes. In Bologna he had shared a student flat with a Jew who became and remains a close friend. He recalled Palestine’s pre-Zionist harmony and affirmed, ‘We can live together again and we will! Some time in the future, in spite of everything!’ Again he glanced at Khalil who nodded – then added, with quiet vehemence, ‘Support BDS!’ referring to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

Between the second and third rounds all eight teams posed for photographs – with me as the reluctant centrepiece. Minutes into the fourth round the electricity went off, to no one’s surprise. There were disappointed groans but no angry shouts. Matches flared here and there in the blackness and a few ISM torches enabled us to find our way out to the starlit car park. The
tournament
would be completed on the morrow. ‘Gazans are adaptable,’ observed Mohammed. ‘It’s how we have to be.’

As we drove out of the darkened town, candles were flitting like glow-worms through homes lucky enough to have them. Khalil remarked, in his precise, slightly squeaky voice, ‘Isn’t it sad to think how Gaza seemed in 1660. Travellers compared its cultural life and economic importance to Paris.’

I didn’t feel it necessary to reply; he seemed to be talking almost to himself.

Vik’s closest Gazan friend was Mohammed al-Zaim, a tall,
handsome
, elegant intellectual who for some weeks had been helping Tom, a volunteer from the United States. Tom was making a video about a Gazan family and Mohammed suggested I accompany what the Israelis describe as ‘that propaganda network’ – the ISM
video-makers
. (Once back home, ISM-ers try to educate their neighbours about what is really going on in Gaza.)

In 1948 Naser’s newly married grandparents had fled from their home near Beersheva and squatted outside the village of Juhor
al-Dik
, close to what was to become the Erez border crossing. For many years the grandfather laboured in Jaffa, gradually saving enough to buy a patch of land and build a two-storey house measuring 100 square metres. After Israel’s seizure of Gaza Naser’s father had married, found work in a settlers’ factory, lived frugally and by 2001 had acquired three cows, a small flock of sheep and goats and a shed full of hens. All were killed during the Second Intifada when the IDF dumped some of the carcasses in the family’s two wells.

From the end of a motor track Mohammed, Tom and I followed Naser along a pathlet between unweeded fields of peppers, squash, some leafy green vegetable and a dunum of ominously dehydrated maize. Naser’s house stands alone, only 400 metres from the border. When the IDF shelled it on 13 July 2010 Naser was living there with his widowed mother, his wife Ghada and their five children. Ghada, sitting outside the door with her two-year-old son, was killed instantly and two visiting relatives were badly injured.

Despite major structural damage, UNRWA couldn’t help because the house had not been totally destroyed. While repairing it as best
they could, the family moved into the village where Ghada was buried. Two nights later Naser woke to find only the two-year-old remaining in the children’s bed. As he was rushing out of his
one-room
shack a neighbour arrived – the missing four had been found in the cemetery, crouching around their mother’s grave shouting ‘Wake up!’ Next morning Naser took the children back to their damaged home, two miles away, where his younger brothers were camping while rebuilding.

In February 2011 Naser remarried – his perceived duty, to provide the children with a step-mother (and no doubt several half-siblings). The original fatal shell had been fired from a tank on a nearby hillock. At 9.15 pm on 28 April 2011, after dark, six more shells were fired from the same place, four finding their target and leaving it uninhabitable. Six adults and the children were then living there. Shrapnel severely wounded ten-year-old Alaa Adin’s head and abdomen; he spent seven weeks in hospital. Shrapnel also penetrated the chest and abdomen of five-year-old Misa, who needed a month in hospital. Naser’s brothers suffered face and leg injuries. An ambulance arrived within thirty minutes, after unusually rapid coordination between the International Red Cross (ICRC) and the IDF. Otherwise Alaa Adin might have died, as so many do when coordination is delayed. (Ambulances rushing to the rescue without coordination are often attacked by the IDF – the vehicle destroyed, the paramedics killed or wounded.)

Approaching the thrice-shelled house, we could see a donkey, a cow and a handsome pony tethered near a stack of hay bales (ersatz hay, more weeds than grass). On the only chair in the roofless hallway sat Naser’s sixty-five-year-old mother – hunched forward, leaning on a stick, her face expressionless, seeming not to register our presence. Naser explained that she refused to leave her home again and slept under the remaining fragment of roof, at the back of the hallway.

Cautiously we ascended the semi-shattered cement stairway to two little bedrooms, one with an intact bauble-decorated dressing table against a half-demolished wall. The children’s mattress on the floor was heavily blood-stained. Beyond the ‘buffer zone’ two army jeeps were visible, trailing dust along the ridge. From the closest watchtower a soldier – doubtless angered by Tom’s filming – yelled through a megaphone before firing a shot in the air. In December 2010 the kitchen opposite had been hit by a solitary shell which just missed the cooking gas cylinder.

At the foot of the stairs we sat on stools of concrete blocks while the brothers boiled a tea kettle on their Primus stove; they were camping beside their mother. Three of her twelve children were dead, another three were being held without charge in Israeli detention camps. As we talked a helicopter gunship flew low enough to stop the conversation and the army jeeps reappeared. Then Tom asked Naser, ‘How can you go on living here, never knowing when the next attack will come?’ Quietly Naser replied that after all his family’s efforts to buy land and build a home no one could intimidate them into moving. This is a Palestinian quality not understood by Zionists, comprised of courage, obstinacy and a calm sort of pride. The IDF have the weaponry, the Palestinians have
samoud
.

Naser was a tall, well-built man, clean-shaven and dressed in his best for the video but looking much older than his years. He began to limp slightly while escorting us back to the taxi; it was parked beside three rudimentary tents holding four single beds donated by an Islamic charity. Here lived most of the family and the two convalescent children sat together on a bed, playing with a string of beads, the scar still visible on Alaa Adin’s scalp. Courtesy required us to wait for Naser’s new wife to brew tiny cups of Turkish coffee with a kick like a mule. As a drone passed overhead, and three more jeeps patrolled the ridge, Naser drew our attention to newly planted olive saplings, replacing a grove bulldozed in
2008. An adjacent bushy patch half-hid the village’s communal beehives. Gazan honey is superb and I was paying the equivalent of £11.50 per kilo in the Rimal grocery store. These villagers sold their harvest, in bulk, for little more than £3 per kilo.

In 2005 the ‘withdrawing’ IDF declared a ‘free-fire’ buffer zone, some 500 metres wide, on Gaza’s side of the border. After Cast Lead this was extended to a kilometre or so, encompassing 30 per cent of the Strip’s cultivable land. ‘Free-fire’ means Israeli soldiers can shoot, without warning, any who venture into the zone. Of necessity many Gazans take this risk and among farmers and rubble collectors the death toll has been high. ISM-ers regularly accompany such families and remain close to them all day, making random murder less likely. The international reaction to the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall (ISM-ers killed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003) affords foreigners a degree of protection.

The Strip’s ISM-ers, like their West Bank comrades, also support the weekly non-violent protests held at strategic points. In northern Gaza a talented group of activists organises Tuesday demos not far from Erez. ‘Local Initiative Beit Hanoun’ also run educational and cultural events; they attribute their high energy level to memories of a November night in 2006 when an artillery shell killed nineteen sleeping Beit Hanounians. On that occasion the IDF apologised – ‘a faulty target device’, the shell had been aimed at a nearby rocketeers’ base.

One Tuesday morning I joined the ISM-ers. We were first at the meeting point on the northern edge of Beit Hanoun outside a bombed Agricultural Research College where a lone donkey wandered through the rubble finding a weed here and there. Within the next hour
serveeces
delivered a few score young men and a dozen young women, several carrying megaphones. Sitting in the limited shade of a crumbling wall I talked to a petite
twenty-year
-old wearing jeans and a carelessly tied hijab. At intervals she stood up to shout – ‘I hate non-violence!’ With relish she
mentioned the previous week’s casualty, a young man kneecapped by IDF forces from a watchtower.

Eventually the ‘Local Initiative’ minivan arrived, driven by an older man with an air of authority. He distributed yellow jackets and supervised everyone’s possessions – apart from megaphones and flags – being stowed in the van. Then our noisy, flag-waving march, led by three brothers carrying a sheet-sized banner, straggled down a rough slope, past a noisome smouldering garbage dump, along a laneway between prickly pear hedges – now within sight and earshot of IDF watchtowers. Our chanting became more defiant as we crossed a field of thorny scrub brightened by a tall weed with golden flowers – land no longer cultivated, so many local farmers had been shot. As we stood in a line on a long ridge of earth, some 500 metres from the fence, there was no reaction: nothing and no one moved on the army road or in the
watchtowers
. My companions began to look a little foolish and turned up the volume on their taunting chant – apparently calculated to provoke a response which could later be rightly described as ‘excessive’. Soon we retreated – more slowly, in small groups – and Tom teased me. This anti-climax was all my fault: seeing an ancient female International, the IDF chose to hold their fire.

On the West Bank I had felt uneasy about certain ISM-ers and other Internationals who seemed too eager for angry confrontations to ‘enhance’ their video albums. Sometimes I wondered – do these set-piece protests, often attended by small groups of sympathetic Israelis, achieve anything? The publicity generated has slightly benefited a few communities but such demos can’t Stop the Wall – or halt house demolitions – or curb settler outrages. Since 2008 they have been organised by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC) which since October 2009 has been receiving from the PA a monthly subsidy of 50,000 shekels – adding up to US$125,000 annually. However, I felt no such reservations on the Strip, where the ISM-ers I met were protecting fishermen at sea
and farmers in the buffer zone – an enterprise very different from ‘professional’ demonstrating.

As we passed the reeking garbage, tons were being loaded into three metal trucks (Second World War models) for transport to – where? Nobody knew. Perhaps to be dumped offshore because Beit Hanounians had complained about the fumes.

An al-Azhar student wearing a Freedom Flotilla T-shirt overtook me and introduced himself as Mehat. He talked of Vik, recalling that in 2009 a US right-wing website had issued death threats against the ‘Jew-hater’, giving details of how to find him. In exchange, I recalled Juliano Mer-Khamis’s reference, when I spoke with him a few months before his assassination, to death threats from Salafists within Jenin camp – thugs who reviled him for running a ‘mixed’ theatre group. Mehat feared for all ISM-ers, given the resurgence of extremism in Israel, in the US and among Palestinians themselves. Unlike NGO employees, ISM-ers are not controlled by bosses attentive to advice from wimpish
governments
. They can take risks when compassion seems to demand courage rather than prudence – and so they have their own ‘martyrs’. Mehat also spoke of his (and Vik’s) close friend Sharyn Lock, who worked 20 hours a day as a paramedic throughout Cast Lead, sometimes riding in ‘uncoordinated’ ambulances. Her understated record of those 22 days (
Gaza Beneath the Bombs
, written with Sarah Irving) must surely become the classic account of Israel’s shame.

Our rickety
serveece
paused in Beit Hanoun’s centre to pick up three youths and a Canadian woman volunteer who sat on Mehat’s lap in the front passenger seat. Now the taxi was comically
overloaded
– everybody sitting on somebody else – and soon our survival seemed to me rather unlikely. Rebel songs were played, all the Gazans loudly joining in, and the driver often took both hands off the wheel to conduct an imaginary band as we dodged through the Strip’s erratic mix of horse and motor vehicles. Mohammed
later remarked that such episodes of reckless jollity are part of the Palestinians’ coping mechanism.

When Alexander conquered the Strip in 332
BC
, Gaza’s port had long served as one of Persia’s most important harbours. Now it is a sad, stagnant place, the nearby luxury hotels seeming to mock its dereliction. Pairs of Hamas naval policemen sit outside a hut by the wide gateway, not needing to look vigilant. On the opposite walls graffiti artists have painted portraits of Vik, for years among the most daring escorts of Gazan fishermen. On various occasions he was arrested at sea, wounded, imprisoned, deported. When I wore my commemorative T-shirt the police cheered.

Strolling around the almost-deserted harbour, I noticed numerous small bullet-holed fishing vessels. One sun-blackened grandad wore a short ragged beard and a ravelling woollen cap on tousled grey curls. He spoke basic English and pointed to a dismantled engine belonging to his son – a father of nine, dependent on fishing. The engine had been badly damaged within the three-mile limit; repairs would cost 3,000 shekels – an unattainable sum, unless the hard-pressed al-Tawfiq Fishermen’s Co-op could help. Yet grandad assured me that not all Israeli sailors are bad, some treat you fairly … I often marvelled at this willingness, on the part of older Palestinians, to give Israelis their due – if earned.

Gaza’s 40,000 or so fishermen are not refugees, therefore don’t qualify for UNRWA support. Yet the blockade has reduced them to destitution. Their average annual catch used to be around 3,000 tons, now it is less than 500. Families who were earning about £350 a month, before the Second Intifada, now earn less than £80. The traditional deep-sea fishing in international waters has been illegally forbidden by Israel. Boats must keep within a six-mile limit – often diminished, in practice, to three miles. Israel’s navy is even more blatantly aggressive than its army if it even suspects the limits
have been crossed. Nets are ripped to bits and explosives often used to disperse a shoal as crews make to draw in their catch. Boats are regularly rammed – or all lights may be shattered, causing the craft to drift off course. This can provide a pretext for arresting the crew, destroying their equipment and impounding their vessel.
Water-cannon
are a favourite weapon, their load of foul liquid (sewage or some chemical brew?) causing nausea, headaches and rashes. Naval trigger-happiness is so common that by now gunshot wounds are almost taken for granted as an occupational hazard.