Meet Me in Gaza (17 page)

My Gazan friends do not shy away from rocket talk. We have had many evenings in the al-Deira Hotel discussing the pros and cons of Gazan militants firing rockets at Israel. The al-Deira is a haven where we don’t see Hamas operatives – not in uniform anyway – and people seem to talk quite freely here.

I’m quite black and white about the rockets: I think they are provocative and do nothing but give Gaza a bad – or worse – name. And Gazan civilians, especially those in the flashpoint border areas, pay a horrific price for what local militants do. At the beginning of February this year, a teacher at another Beit Hanoun school was killed while walking across his crowded school yard to begin morning classes. The Israeli military had spied Gazan fighters nearby; they launched a missile, missed the fighters and blew the teacher to pieces in front of his students.
³⁷
But in spite of such horrific cases, my local friends – including those whose families live in and around the border areas – are more ambivalent about the rockets. They stress that it is a myth the Israelis merely ‘respond’ to Gazan rocket fire. The Israeli military fire missiles, and bombs, into Gaza at will, claiming this is in defence of their ‘national security’ as though this is a one-sided privilege.

‘The rockets are a message to Israel that they can’t just stamp over us,’ argues one of my friends. ‘It is ugly, but it’s resistance. We have this
tahdiya
now because Israel has been forced to negotiate with Hamas – because Hamas resists the Israeli occupation.’

The
tahdiya
has just been confirmed: it will begin at dawn on 19 June. But no one inside Gaza is holding their breath. They have, literally, been here before.

‘My family lives in Shaja’iya, right up by the border,’ another friend tells me. ‘I’ve seen fighters by the local school yard: they use it for cover. I have to tell you, I really have mixed feelings about it. I wish they didn’t use the schools, but people here don’t confront them because without the rockets Israel will just do what it wants with us. The rockets are a warning to Israel that we will not lie down.’

‘And the children who get killed …?’

‘Louisa,’ she says, ‘do you really believe that if Gazan fighters stop firing rockets, then so will Israel?’

Just a day or two before the
tahdiya
is scheduled to begin, Samir walks into my office at the Centre.

‘
Marhaba
. I have the video for you.’ He brandishes a USB stick.

‘
Marhaba
, Samir. Would you like a coffee?’

He shakes his grey head, says he doesn’t have time to drink coffee. I take the USB stick from him and upload the video onto my computer. Samir scribbles something on a scrap of paper lying on my desk.

‘The film is very short,’ he says. ‘This is my number. Call me if you want to visit Beit Hanoun again; I know everyone there.’ With a brief nod, he walks out again.

I press Play, sit back in my chair and reach for my cigarettes. The film opens with a grainy shot of the ground. The cameraman, Samir, is running; I can hear him panting as the camera jerks up and down. Then I see people running in and out of that scrubby field in Beit Hanoun, screaming at each other. An ambulance screeches as a man sprints towards the camera, a dark bundle in his arms, howling at people to get out of his way. Just behind him is another man, his eyes wild with terror, and in his arms this second man is brandishing a leg – a child’s leg that has been torn from the child’s body. As he runs, the man raises the leg up until he is holding it against his chest. Now that he’s almost level with the camera, I see the terror speared inside his eyes, and then I know that he is the father of one of the boys whose body has just been ripped apart because never before have I seen such wild animal terror in anybody’s eyes. The camera speeds over the road, though a gap in the wall, and races across the scrubby field, zigzagging towards the buckle trees at the back, zooming between yellow earth and blue sky. And when it comes to a stop, the body of Abdul lies crumpled in the scoop in the ground, his belly imploded, like a small dead bird.

I wake just as darkness is retreating and dawn begins to finger the long lace folds of my bedroom curtains. Nestled warm and soft in my bed, I know that, whatever time it is, I don’t have to get up for a while yet, can just lie here drifting in my sea of sleep. The neighbourhood is quiet; even the belligerent cockerel down the street is still dreaming. I roll over, grunt, then remember – the
tahdiya
begins at six this morning.

Tahdiya
means ‘period of calm’. There have been many
tahdiyas
in Gaza – like punctuation marks between the storms of wars and occupations that have battered this land over the centuries. When Julius Caesar’s carousing and hard-bitten military general, Mark Antony, married Cleopatra, the vengeful, venal queen of the Egyptian Ptolemies, circa 37
BC
, he bequeathed her a whole swathe of land including Gaza as a wedding gift, and from her bloodstained hands the territory of Gaza was swiftly passed on to that insatiable brute, Emperor Herod. The English historian Gerald Butt describes the Roman Empire’s greatest triumph as ‘the bringing of peace, helping to create a second great Hellenistic age in which men could travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other without hindrance.’
³⁸
But over in Judea, the Romans were culling the Jerusalem Jews. In the year
AD
135, soldiers of Emperor Hadrian butchered half a million Jews during the Bar Kochba revolt, leaving the pitiful survivors to starve or to rot slowly from their putrefying wounds. Hadrian – whose wall once marked the limit of Roman Britain – renamed the entire territory of Judea as ‘Palaestina’, after the Jews’ ancient enemy, the Philistines. Jews were transported down to Gaza to be sold in the busy slave markets for handsome profits.

In Gaza the Roman era was a boon, a golden time when the city and its surrounds flourished alongside its burgeoning land and sea trades. At the end of the fourth century, Palestine became part of the Eastern Roman Empire – Byzantium – and the Eastern Orthodox Christians swept into Gaza. Two hundred years later, while the Prophet Muhammad was receiving revelations from God, the Persians swept through Palestine and briefly invaded Gaza. As Zoroastrians – worshippers of the creator, Ahura Mazda – the Persians despised the Christians. They ravaged Gaza’s churches before they, in turn, were cast out by the Roman emperor, Heraclius, who briefly returned Palestine to Byzantine rule.

And so Gaza was tossed from one empire to the next, like a small gold coin, as invasions, occupations,
tahdiyas
, power struggles and the inevitable eruption of some new bloodthirsty empire followed on from each other, like concentric circles of history.

When I reach for my little clock on the bedside table, it says 5.50
AM
. The
tahdiya
starts in ten minutes. Will it last? Right now I don’t care, I just want to go back to sleep. As I put the alarm clock back on the bedside table, I hear a deep, now familiar, boom strike the earth. Then another and another – until all I can hear is the pounding of bombs. The Israelis must be striking northern Gaza. I wonder if the Gazans are at it as well.
³⁹
Now the bombing is louder and more furious – waves of strikes. I think of farmers like the Swailams, and families in Beit Hanoun, and the knot in my guts contracts, the pinch making me wince. I can’t sleep through this bloody racket, so I just turn over and lie on my back, thinking not of England, just this mirthless drama playing out around me. Sometimes Gaza feels like a theatre where all of us – Israelis, Palestinians, expat journalists and human rights workers – have our ascribed roles in an unending script that the rest of the world is bored of watching.

When the bombing stops, I check my alarm clock again: 6.00
AM
exactly. But I might as well get up and have a coffee now.

There’s a small secret. If you know it, then it is possible to carry on. In order to live in Gaza, you must create your own secret world […] which contains you and those like you; those who carry small dreams

Soumaya Susi, Gaza poet

That first morning of the
tahdiya,
I arrive at the Centre early for work. I don’t know what to expect, but there are press releases and reports for me to edit, and correspondence to write, and somehow things feel almost the same as the day before. But of course they are not the same; if anything, my colleagues are a little subdued this morning; as though everyone is waiting to see whether this
tahdiya
is real or just imagined. But it holds all day. That night, the skies are clear and the dawn is quiet.

As the first few days of the
tahdiya
pass – and hold – Israel allows fuel to trickle back into Gaza, a surge of cars return to the roads and the greasy reek of engine-choked cooking oil begins to lift. On the streets the atmosphere shifts a shade, into a tenuous fragile calm. Both sides are holding their fire.

When the weekend comes, for once I have nothing planned; as though the
tahdiya
has given me the luxury of idleness. I wake early as usual, pad into the kitchen in my bare feet to make coffee, drink the first cup out on my shaded balcony and take the second back to bed. Here I read and daydream until sated with rest, then rouse myself with a tepid, salty shower, enjoying the slow beat of having nothing to do. I don’t actually spend a lot of time in my apartment these days. For breakfast I have pomegranates, which are now in season – great thick-skinned fruits the size of boxers’ fists. I slit them open, scooping the juicy ruby seeds out with my fingers into a bowl, and devour them with Israeli yoghurt and spoonfuls of local Gazan honey. My spacious apartment is silent, the surrounding streets ripple with low noises. I wonder how long this peace will last and what real difference it will actually make to life inside these stagnant walls.

I’m writing my journal when Saida calls.

‘
Habibti, ta’lli
– come to our house for lunch this afternoon.’

‘OK,
habibti, shukran
.’

I often have lunch with Saida and her family at weekends. We eat mid-afternoon, round the kitchen table, feasting on a steaming mound of
mahshi
(aubergines stuffed with rice, meat and vegetables), one of Hind’s favourite dishes. When I mention the
tahdiya
, Hind says
Inshallah
(God willing), it will last, but only God knows.

Saida says, ‘We will see,
habibti
, this is Gaza,’ and she stands to clear away our plates. Her gesture tells me this
tahdiya
means almost nothing, yet.

Afterwards, the five of us – Hind, Saida, Maha, their brother Muhammad and I – watch Arabic music videos in the bedroom that Saida and Maha share. When Hind goes to pray, Maha stands up too, yawning that she’s bored of watching TV. Shooing Muhammad out into the hall, she starts to dance from one side of the bedroom to the other. I have never seen her dance before. She’s loose-limbed as a cat, lithe, confident and graceful.

‘Come on – dance with me!’ she demands, extending her arms towards Saida and me.

By now I know some Arabic dance moves, but when I attempt to join in, Maha just rolls her eyes. ‘No – not like that!’ She is a teenager, after all. As she gives me an impromptu dance lesson, Saida watches, her quiet smile growing, until the music lifts her from the cushions too and the three of us shimmy across the room together, as Maha sings aloud to the music. I’ve danced at a lot of mixed parties in Gaza, and quite a few weddings where men and women dance separately – but this is something different. Spontaneity is rare here, where people spend their lives glancing back over their shoulders.

Saida is laughing, her hair loose round her shoulders. For once she looks carefree. Despite her close-knit family, she has often told me that she pines for her friends back in Ramallah, and for her sister Alla’. She finds Gaza lonely.

‘I don’t have many friends here now,
habibti
, apart from you,’ she has said more than once. ‘I have been away too long, I don’t fit in now.’

Usually she holds herself in check and just carries on: stoic, respectful, dedicated to her work, her prayers and her family – but not very joyful. I’ve never seen her as carefree as she is right now, arms and fingers outstretched, her whole face smiling, lost in the music.

Maha ties a scarf round her hips, then mine. As she tries to teach me ‘the shiver’, a shimmering vibration of the hips, Saida cracks up laughing. By now the three of us are raucous and aroused. Suddenly a loud rap at the door, then a fierce push, and Hind stands in the door frame, scowling like an enraged queen.

‘
Khalas
! (Enough!)’ She berates us for making such a racket, especially on a Friday when people should be praying. As a new song kicks in, we three stand still, scolded into silence. But suddenly Maha and Saida get the giggles and they catch their mother’s eye. Hind gives a loud, head-tilting tut, but a smile is breaking across her angry mouth. She glances back over her shoulder and as though having reassured herself no one else is around – for her husband is still at the mosque – she steps lightly over the threshold into the bedroom, clicking the door shut behind her. With a mischievous smile I have not seen before, Hind slowly kicks off one slipper then the other, moves into the centre of the room, spreads her big arms wide open and begins to sway her hips.