Meet Me in Gaza (10 page)

‘Do you speak Arabic?’ Mahmoud asks me, in Arabic.

‘Yes, I’m learning.’ We converse in Arabic for a few minutes. I tell him about my recent ‘capsize’ triumph with the local posse of
shabab
and he laughs out loud.

‘You should come and talk to the
shabab
in Jabalya camp, where I live!’ he says. ‘Have you been to Jabalya?’

‘Yes, but just for work.’

‘Here’s my mobile number. Call me when you are free and come up for lunch.’

‘
Shukran
(Thank you),’ I say. ‘That would be nice.’

Jabalya, up in northern Gaza, consists of a town and a refugee camp that lie side by side, like a lumpy old married couple. The town is considered the better place to live, though it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Like everywhere else in Gaza, Jabalya has an epic history of shifting populations who between them have shaped the contours of this land. Jabalya used to be famous for its fertile fields and vast orchards of fruit trees; these days the refugee camp is one of the most densely populated places on earth.

I call Mahmoud a few days later and we arrange to meet at the gas station next to the main
souq
in Jabalya camp. When Muhammad the driver and I reach the gas station, the streets surrounding the
souq
are heaving with traders, pedestrians, taxis and knackered-looking donkeys. The streets are narrower here and the houses smaller; the traffic flows in all directions, and noise ricochets off every surface. People shout, engines backfire and donkeys bray. Muhammad the driver tells me to wait inside the car until Mahmoud arrives. I take my cigarettes out of my bag; whenever I’m waiting for something, or someone, I reach for them now, like a reflex.

‘Louisa, don’t smoke here,’ he says. ‘We are not in the city now. The camp is different.’

‘Oh, OK.’

‘Shit, man, this place is crowded. We Gazans have too many children – like cats!’

‘Or rabbits.’

‘Yes, but we eat all the rabbits!’ Muhammad quips.

I have to laugh. Rabbits are popular in Gaza; families keep battery cages of them in their gardens and courtyards, for the pot. A store at the bottom of my street sells them alongside cages of squawking, stinking hens.

I see Mahmoud approaching and he spots me getting out of the taxi. He’s dressed in sharp black and white again, his hair gleaming and his goatee freshly razored. Most Gazans are well turned out, but there’s something polished about Mahmoud. I wave goodbye to Muhammad and shake hands with Mahmoud.

‘You look good,’ I say.

‘I am a Jabalya dandy!’ he grins.

Mahmoud and I walk through the camp towards his house. When we turn off the main street, the wall of noise falls away. Now we’re on a sandy side street, the walls either side daubed in red graffiti. Small dark kids streak ahead of us in bare feet, shouting ‘Hello, hello!’ A few shout, ‘
Shalom
,
shalom
!’

‘Too many visits from the Israeli soldiers!’ grins Mahmoud. I tell him I get this in the city too sometimes, from kids who think any foreigner in Gaza must be an Israeli. The only foreigners many Gazan children have ever met are Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Mahmoud lives with his family in the south-eastern stretch of the camp. We enter their building via a small courtyard.

‘My family is lucky,’ he says, as we climb the stairs up to their second-floor apartment. ‘We have space in my house. Many families in the camp are sharing one or two rooms between all of them.’

The living room has thin patterned mattresses to sit on. Mahmoud tells me to make myself comfortable and goes off into the kitchen. I can hear him laughing with someone, and clattering in the kitchen, as the smell of meat and herbs wafts under the door. I would much rather hang out in the kitchen, like I do with Saida and her family, but as a first-time guest here, this is my designated place. It’s different with Saida’s family now. I spend time in the kitchen with her mother, Hind, watching as she makes her soups, her
malfouf
and
maftoul.
I love the way that Hind cooks, sniffing the ingredients to make sure they are fresh, flinging them into pots, tasting the dishes with her fingers at every stage, adding more
filfil
, lemon juice or handfuls of olive oil. She is a sensuous cook and an affectionate matriarch. Sometimes when I arrive at their home, Hind calls me into her bedroom where she often rests and I sprawl next to her, laying my head on her bosom like a young child as she strokes my hair.

After a while Mahmoud appears, brandishing a large metal dish in both hands.

‘
Kabsah
!’ He lays the dish on the low table with a flourish.
Kabsah
is not fiery, but a delicacy of rice inlaid with fried almonds, onions, sultanas and herbs, served with seasoned fried meat. We tuck in and as soon as the rice cools a little, we abandon our spoons and just use our fingers, scooping the rice up with warm flatbread, too happy eating to talk.

Finally, stuffed, we slump against the cushions and grin at each other. A young woman comes into the room to take away our plates, then brings us coffee. Mahmoud thanks her and she smiles at my Arabic as she disappears back into the kitchen.

‘Let’s go; we can drink our coffee outside,’ he says.

We carry our cups down to the courtyard, now lying in half-shade, and settle ourselves on white plastic chairs. Out on the streets I hear rasping car engines, people shouting to each other and an ambulance siren wailing like a lost child. Mahmoud has a narghile water pipe and starts filling it with the molasses-coated, apple-flavoured tobacco I smell wafting from café doorways across the city.

‘Are there many dandies in Jabalya?’ I ask him.

He looks up from his tobacco stuffing, throws back his head and laughs.

‘We have dandies
and
dancers here in our
zift
refugee camp,
habibti
!’

Mahmoud is 24 years old. He used to work with the Palestinian Authority (PA) Presidential Guards, aligned with the Fatah movement, Hamas’s political opponent and enemy. After its takeover of Gaza, Hamas sacked all Gazan policemen and security personnel in the pay of the PA. Like thousands of other PA employees, Mahmoud still receives his salary, but cannot go back to his old job. The PA still pays thousands of salaries in Gaza; it wants to keep its redundant staff on side, fears them drifting towards the arms of Hamas, especially in the camps, where the movement is strongest. But Gazans are, by necessity, innovators and these days Mahmoud has several different jobs. He works as an interpreter and also at a local youth centre; he makes short films about life for young people inside Gaza; and he helps out with a local dance troupe based at the youth centre.

‘The work at the youth centre is the best,’ he says. ‘We make sure all the boys and girls spend time together, and they dance together too. You know, we always remind them that there is nothing wrong with boys and girls mixing for fun. The day Hamas stops us working like this, then I will leave the centre for good.’ He exhales a thick ribbon of white smoke, wipes the mouth of his pipe with a tissue, then offers me the pipe. ‘I can’t always speak my mind about these things here in the camp because I have to live here too,’ he says, his voice dropping. ‘But I want to tell you something, and I want to ask you something. OK?’

‘OK.’ I coil the narghile pipe on my lap, like a striped serpent.

‘We get a lot of foreign visitors here, especially delegations who come to Gaza just for one or two days. Often they come to Jabalya camp – because it has a very bad reputation, so of course they want to see it. And I meet with them because I live here and I speak English. But they always want to see the worst things here. They are like this’ – he mimes someone shooting photos, one after the other, his index finger pressing an imaginary shutter button – ‘“Look! Look! See over there: something terrible or broken or ugly. Snap, Snap, Snap, Snap!” So tell me, Louisa, why do these foreigners always concentrate on what is
zift
? They always want me to tell them how
zift
things are here. And if they send me an email after they leave, they just want to know about the
zift
situation. Only what is
zift.
What about us and our dreams?’

‘What
are
your dreams?’ I raise the striped pipe to my lips and inhale.

‘My dreams? To be free to walk along the beach with my girlfriend and hold her hand without people watching and talking; and to get married for love, and live in a house with soft lights from lamps – not these strips of bright white lights we all have in our houses, like prison lights. I dream of living in a place where I can really relax and not always have to talk or even think about the fucking
zift
situation.’

He sits upright, his eyes bright with smoke and righteous anger.

‘Other people’s
zift
situations are always fascinating,’ I say.

Before I came to Gaza, I watched a lot of TV footage about the Strip – it was mostly presented as bombed-out ruins filled with masked
jihadis
, veiled women, scowling mullahs and weeping children. I never expected to be living in a neighbourhood like al-Rimal – which has an elegant local French Cultural Centre – or to be drinking coffee in an arabesque seafront hotel like the al-Deira. These places are exceptions, but they are not mirages. The Gaza streets are dirty, sometimes filthy, but they feel reasonably safe to walk. Hamas is cracking down on its political opponents – literally – but has also made the streets much more secure and popular new cafés are opening up across the city centre. There are chronic shortages, overcrowding and poverty. But Gazans are not starving and there are pockets of family wealth here too. Last week, for instance, I paid a visit to the Gaza Equestrian Centre, where well-heeled parents pay $200 a month for their children to learn the pleasures of horse riding and show jumping.

Many of the Gazans I meet – and not just the wealthy and privileged – expend most of their energy on making their own lives worth living. On the face of it, Gaza is not quite as
zift
as I expected. But just beneath the surface I can feel livid strains of anxiety and fatigue, from years of chronic uncertainty and fear. Compared to many conflict zones, the death toll here is low. But I have never met such weary people in my life. I say all this to Mahmoud.

‘We are not animals or victims; we are ordinary people who want to be allowed to live and breathe,’ he says in response. And we leave it at that.

I wander over to the other side of the small courtyard in my bare feet, to a small bush of red roses, and squat down to smell their tentative perfume.

‘Do you have to go back to the city now or can you stay here for the afternoon?’ asks Mahmoud.

‘I’m free all afternoon.’

‘Shall we go to the youth centre and watch them dancing
dabke
?’
²⁶

We wander back though the sandy streets, where the dark-skinned, barefoot kids are still running around, and then cut through the crowded
souq
. Above the boisterous din I can hear another ambulance wailing. More women are veiled here and more people stare at my uncovered short hair. Some scowl at me and my shoulders tense. It’s the first time I have felt any personal hostility here. Mahmoud leads me out of the
souq
into a narrow alley, then into a two- or three-storey whitewashed building. As we climb the stairs, we can hear pulsing music and feet thumping the floor. We reach a wide landing. Mahmoud walks to the far side, pushes open a door and gestures for me to follow him.

Inside, a long line of teenagers, boys and girls, are flowing across the floor, laughing and clapping as they buck into the air, like unbroken young horses. The boys kneel, the girls sweep forward, then dart away, looking back over their shoulders at the flushed boys looking back at them. They whoop and cheer and stamp and blaze with life. Mahmoud and I stand just inside the door, grinning at the dancers, and each other.

‘See!’ he shouts over the pulsing music. ‘Boys and girls having fun together in a
zift
Gaza refugee camp!’

A Saturday afternoon towards the end of February. I have just finished work for the week and am in a taxi, on my way to the vegetable market at Souq al-Zawiya to stock up on fresh food. Saida and I were going to do our shopping together, but she called to say she was working at home because finally they had electricity and so she could finish off a report for work. I decided to shop alone. But Muhammad the driver seems reluctant to drop me off in the old quarter.

‘Why you want to go shopping here?’ He frowns as we pull up at the busy crossroads beside the
souq
. ‘I can take you to a good fruit store in al-Rimal and drive you back home afterwards.’

‘I like this
souq
.’

‘But how you will get home?’

‘I’ll take a public taxi.’ I am referring to the yellow, six-door Mercedes taxis that Saida and I take all over the city together.

Muhammad gives me a reluctant nod. As I open the door, he adds, ‘Be careful. You know you can call us for a car if you have
any
problems.’

Muhammad is reminding me to be careful because of the recent threats to kidnap foreigners inside Gaza. The Army of Islam – a militia of pumped-up thugs, led by the Doghmush clan, who kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston last summer – were rumoured to be on the look-out for another hostage.
²⁷
When the first threat was issued, a few weeks ago, staff at the Centre insisted I take a taxi everywhere and did not walk outside alone at all – just to be on the safe side. On the first day, I felt a brief thrill of fear. But it dissolved into tedium as I went from my apartment into a taxi to the Centre, then into a taxi back to my apartment, for more than two weeks. Until the threat was dropped from ‘high’ to ‘moderate’ in the daily UN security bulletin, my colleagues even accompanied me to the Metro Supermarket on the corner of my street whenever I went shopping.

Clans, each made up of hundreds of interrelated local families, used effectively to rule Gaza. Before the Hamas takeover, the previous Fatah-dominated government – the Palestinian Authority (PA) – courted the clans because they wanted to use their local power bases to police the Strip. PA officials hired clan members and as these unaccountable, armed-to-the-teeth local militias prowled the streets, they fed on Gaza’s civilians like vultures on carrion. The clans became Gaza’s kings of
fawdah
, or chaos, extorting, murdering, kidnapping and bullying until they were rich and feared and despised, because in the money-changers’ eyes of the clan leaders,
they
were the law inside Gaza.