Meet Me in Gaza (23 page)

‘Eid
Mubarak, habibti
,’ she says with a smile.

For the next few hours, we move from one family to the next, carrying out our operation. The families – all of them farmers – say their land is not being invaded by the Israeli military, or by Gazan fighters, and they feel safer now. A few have even started planting spindly orange and lemon seedlings.

‘Our old trees were all destroyed,’ one farmer tells me. ‘God willing, this peace will last long enough for these new trees to give us fruit.’

By early afternoon, we are all beginning to flag. Everyone in our group is fasting, except me, and I can’t bring myself to drink from my bottle of tepid water in front of a dozen thirsty activists. The Gaza paparazzi have long gone. But Samir insists we have one last round of visits to do, along a strip of the north-eastern border known as Siafa, where local Bedouin live. Siafa is usually inaccessible because it lies so far inside the buffer zone. But the
tahdiya
has given us a rare opportunity to visit this remote, cut-off corner. As we drive towards the eastern border, the only vehicle we see is a donkey cart driven by a hunched woman with a face like a windfall apple. As she trundles past, she waves, and the
shabab
stick their heads out of the windows and cheer.

‘You people are crazy!’ shouts the driver. ‘I am from Beit Hanoun and I’ve never come this close to the border in my whole life!’

When he parks the minibus at the end of a faint track, I see a white house a little way ahead, perched alone on the crest of a shallow hill.

‘Now we’ll visit my Bedouin friends,’ says Samir, with another rare smile. He really does remind me of
Ustaz
Mounir.

We stroll up to the white house. Samir leads us through a narrow gate into a courtyard, where two women and a man are sitting on plastic chairs beneath a canopy of dry palm leaves. The older of the two women sees us first and rises to her feet. She’s wearing a long yellow robe embroidered with small white flowers, a scarf tucked loosely around her head and draped over one broad shoulder. She has a gap between her teeth and shining, sun-darkened skin.

‘
Marhaba
, Samir!’ she cries. ‘Eid
Mubarak
!’

Samir introduces us to Manah al-Tarabin.

The other woman and man in the courtyard are Manah’s daughter and son – Sharifa and Sa’ed – both of them shy compared to their exuberant mother. Sharifa giggles and blushes, looking overwhelmed by this boisterous invasion. Sa’ed shakes hands but says nothing, his face closed and sullen. He smiles only for Samir. We present our small gifts and Manah insists on gifting us back; clasping a dagger, she hacks great clusters of ripe red dates from a tall palm tree in one corner of the courtyard, around which an outside staircase appears to be wrapped.

I cannot take my eyes off her. She beckons me up the stairs, onto an empty roof terrace, and we stand there together, looking out eastwards. Maybe 100 metres ahead of us is the Israeli border fence, and immediately behind the fence, a road, presumably for Israeli military patrol vehicles. After visiting the Swailams, I didn’t believe anyone
could
live any closer to the border. I am trying to take it all in, but Samir is already calling for me. I know I have to come here again.

‘Can I visit you another time?’ I ask Manah.

‘Whenever you like,
habibti
!’

We go downstairs. The
shabab
are waiting. When I kiss Manah goodbye, her cheeks smell of sunshine and earth.

Our final visit of the day is to some neighbouring Bedouin, who live in a camp on the other side of this shallow hill, a mere 50 metres from the border. As Samir leads us towards the camp, even the
shabab
are unsettled.

‘This is
too
fucking close,’ Khalil hisses to me.

But like obedient children we traipse after Samir across this open, exposed land, even when he circles around a blackened Qassam rocket lying spent on the ground like a firework. At the other side of the hill, we squeeze through a gap in a fence of wild prickly pear bush, one at a time, recoiling as vicious-sounding dogs begin to howl. Inside, we find a makeshift camp of tents, wooded outhouses, scratching hens and the skin-and-bone dogs yanking at their chains. Samir calls out. There is no answer.

Most of us stand together, feeling uneasy and watched, though we don’t know who is watching us. After a tense couple of minutes, four men appear from one of the outhouses at the same moment, their unsmiling eyes fixed on us. One aims a kick at the nearest dog, which dodges the blow by sinking towards the dust, tail curled under its backside.

When Samir steps forward with our Eid greeting, the men stare him down. A stream of thin small children run from one of the tents, then stop dead, and they stare too.

We are not visitors, but trespassers, and right now it feels like this could all go very wrong.

Khalil clears his throat, opens up one of the boxes and begins to hand out presents to the children, who push and shove each other forward. The first gift goes into the cupped palms of a girl who could be anywhere between 6 and 12 years of age. Skinny and stunted-looking, she clutches the earrings without even looking at them, as though they will be snatched straight back off her. Backing into her own space, she holds them up to the light and begins to jump up and down, screaming, ‘I have a present – I have a present!’

Her joy ruptures the tension. Women begin to emerge from another tent. We all begin to smile. But the children’s delight is tempered by their parents, who accept their gifts with reticence. Few words are exchanged between us and the Bedouin’s faces never lose their wariness. I cannot begin to imagine their lives, at this jagged edge of Gaza. I ask one of the women where the border with Israel is, and she walks a few of us to the other side of the camp. We stand on a small sandy tussock and witness for ourselves the breath-catching closeness of the Israeli fence. We can actually see the rooftops of an Israeli town just across the border.

‘
Yehud
,’ the woman points at the red-and-white roofs, meaning the Jews are over there.

‘It is Sderot City,’ says Samir.
⁴³

As we walk back into the camp, he says to me, ‘Everyone’s life here in Gaza is hard. But these people: no one understands what they go through, no one visits them. They are forgotten.’

I think he is referring to all the families that we’ve seen today, but especially these Bedouin, who inhabit a small, separate, isolated world. I don’t know anything about the Gaza Bedouin and have never heard other Gazans talk about them.

‘Can we come back after Eid and see your friend Manah?’ I ask him.

Samir nods. ‘She has already told me she wants you to visit.’

Over the next few weeks, Samir and I go back to Siafa several times to see Manah and her family. Manah has a lightness, a joyousness about her that is infectious. We laugh a lot together. She has a second daughter, called Abir, the kind of young woman that my mother would call ‘strapping’, who is often out tending to the family’s small herd of sheep. Manah has lived on this piece of land for thirty-five years now; yet these sheep seem to be the family’s only source of income, apart from a grove of lemon and olive trees. I never figure out how they actually make enough money to survive. I do, though, quickly learn that they have no electricity in their home, or running water. Manah never mentions a husband, and I never ask, sensing that whoever he is, or was, he has long gone. Once a week she hitches her donkey to a cart and trundles off to the Beit Hanoun market, but she and her daughters spend most of their lives in and around the small world of their hilltop home. Only her son, Sa’ed, comes and goes, sullen and nearly silent whenever I see him, seeking only the company of Samir.

After seven months in Gaza, this is the quietest place I have visited. No cars, rowdy neighbours or people in the streets. No planes or helicopters. Noise is such an essence of Gaza life, it is the texture of calm that I crave these days, and here the silence feels like a quiet tide.

‘What was it like here before the
tahdiya
?’ I ask Manah one afternoon as we sit drinking very sweet mint tea.

She smiles, flashing her crooked white teeth.

‘It is better here now.’

‘And before?’

‘Before the
tahdiya
?
Aayy
!’ She gives a loud howl that makes me flinch, holding her hands in front of her and shaking them as though she has just burnt her fingers; another local gesture of fear.

‘They [the Israeli military] used to fire rockets and bombs from planes and helicopters – and the
zananas
– terrible! We would run from the fields.’

She mimes covering her head with her arms, like the brace position you adopt as a plane hurtles towards the earth.

Sometimes, when Manah and her daughters are talking, they use words I don’t understand, words that don’t sound at all Arabic to me.

‘What language are you speaking?’ I ask her another afternoon, as we sit in her sunny tranquil courtyard.

‘Our Bedouin language,
habibti
,’ Manah winks.

Bedouin, ‘those who inhabit the desert’, are an ancient tribal culture of Arab nomads and camel breeders who traditionally lived in camps of extended families, called
ashiras
, presided over by a local sheikh. Some Bedouin women used to ink their faces with distinct blue tattoos, but these can only be seen on very elderly female faces now. A minority of Bedouin cling to their traditional semi-nomadism, but the vast majority have been pushed into squalid settlements in Palestine and Israel, and left to quietly rot. In pre-1948 Palestine, some 90,000 Bedouin were scattered across the southern Naqab desert (also known by its Hebrew name, the Negev) in eight tribes. Manah and her family are from the al-Tarabin tribe.

Not all Bedouin are black like Manah and her family, and communities of black non-Bedouin still live across Palestine. Some trace their roots to neighbouring north-east Africa, especially Sudan; others to a tribe of black Muslim Arabs, the al-Salamat, who settled in the Hijaz region of western Arabia bordering the Red Sea. As trade and migration flowed through the Mediterranean, and along the ancient Way of the Sea through Gaza, so North African traders, Muslim pilgrims and members of the al-Salamat tribe journeyed back and forth through Palestine, and some inevitably stayed on.

Rheumy-eyed old Palestinian Bedouin also tell stories – passed down through generations of tribes – of young African children being kidnapped, or purchased in markets, and brought to Gaza to live with Bedouin as their young slaves. Only prominent Bedouin families, so the story goes, owned and traded the
abid
, or slaves, and by the same accounts remnants of slave labour lingered until the late 1950s in a smattering of remote Bedouin
ashiras
.
⁴⁴

Manah welcomes me fiercely into her small, isolated world – but she has no time for her Bedouin neighbours down the hill.

‘Those ignorant people! Been at that camp thirty years and will only mix with their own kind, no one else,’ she says, dismissing them with a flick of her hefty hand.

There are thousands of Bedouin living across Gaza; some are in the cities, many on the outskirts, and there are several established Bedouin villages. Poor Bedouin families, though, are mostly confined to squatter camps, and treated by many Gazans, especially liberal city-dwellers, as social outcasts, and backward petty criminals who’ll do anything for cash. I have often seen Bedouin families riding their rickety donkey carts down Salah al-Din Street selling scraps of firewood, scavenging bits of scrap metal, or herding their goats in the shallow sandy hillsides surrounding Khan Younis. The only people in Gaza, it seems, who have fewer visitors than the Swailams are these Bedouin.

I have my small secret world inside Gaza too, these days. I am still having a fling with Sakhar, the silver-maned lion I met at a UN party a few months back. His tenth-floor apartment is just a few minutes’ walk from where I live and we always meet at his place, discreetly. Our affair is no one else’s business. We enjoy cold beer in his lounge, with its sea view, and go to bed early, or lie in his big jacuzzi-style bathtub with its endless hot water.

‘You UN guys are spoilt!’ I tease him, and he laughs and flicks soapy bubbles at me.

Many of the expat UN staff stationed in Gaza have done other ‘hardship postings’ in places like Darfur, and say they cannot believe the seafront, air-conditioned luxury of their Gaza accommodation. They don’t get out much though; despite the
tahdiya
, they still have to travel round in armoured vehicles and can visit only a handful of local hotels that have been vetted, like the al-Deira. They are not allowed to visit any private homes either, which is why Sakhar never stays at my place.

‘Why do we get on so well, you and I?’ he murmurs into my ear late one night.

‘Because you’re an oddball and I’m a misfit,’ I reply, and we lie back on the pillows and laugh out loud, because we both know there is truth in it.

In the mornings, we always leave his building separately. I ignore the looks from the armed Gazans half-heartedly patrolling the front door of his building. I don’t want to care what they think. I’m happy.

But then Sakhar goes on leave. He is gone longer than I expect and when he does return, a few weeks later, he is still charming and affectionate, but a little distant, and he stays later at his office in the evenings so I don’t see him quite so much. Something has changed. I don’t ask what happened while he was away because I’m not sure that I want to know.

One morning at the beginning of November, the Centre director calls me into his office and tells me that he is sending me to a conference in Brussels. The flight is tonight. So I need to go home early, pack and make sure that I reach Erez before the crossing closes this afternoon. The director was meant to be going to the conference himself, but cannot secure a permit to leave Gaza. I, on the other hand, only need to telephone the Palestinian District Coordination Office (DCO) and inform them that I’m leaving Gaza today. Ironically, getting out of Gaza is much easier for me than getting back in.