Meet Me in Gaza (34 page)

‘On the beach.’

I can already feel our conversation coming to a close. I don’t want to embarrass him. But there
is
one more thing that I want to know about him.

‘Excuse me, but what’s your job?’

‘I am an accountant.’

A religious accountant from Gaza who performs acrobatics on the beach. You really couldn’t make it up.

This final story is not the last one that I heard in Gaza; it wasn’t like that at all, of course. Whenever people told me their stories I wrote them down in my notebook, to be rearranged later in some kind of order. But this story belongs at the end. So for now let’s assume that I heard it during my last couple of days in Gaza, as I was packing my bags and saying my goodbyes.

Abu Baha lives with his wife in a neat bungalow with a well-tended garden, just outside the centre of Gaza City. He is the uncle of one of my old colleagues from the Centre, and has agreed to tell me his story of fleeing from the Negev desert to Gaza in the summer of 1948, in the violent wake of the creation of the state of Israel.

When I arrive at his bungalow, I find a small elderly man, dressed in a well-cut beige safari suit. I greet him in Arabic and he replies in English as perfect as that of Umm Nidal.

‘I was an English teacher for many years,’ he says, by way of explanation, leading me into a lounge with low, soft-looking armchairs. We settle down. Abu Baha clears his throat and begins to speak.

‘I am a Bedouin, my family is from the al-Tarabin tribe in the southern Negev. I was born in 1939, in a
beit shar,
a wool house: it’s our traditional black Bedouin tent, always made of black wool because the sun is so strong it will spoil and fade any other colours. My birthplace, Wadi al-Baha, means ‘the Wadi of Pleasure’ because of the small yellow
baha
flowers that covered it in the springtime. Wadi al-Baha was 13 kilometres [8 miles] north of Gaza. I took my first steps there, just outside our
beit shar
. My father was Sheikh Hassan Jouma al-Farangi. He was a farmer, and my family grew wheat and barley and maize. We had a camp with two other Bedouin families and my father looked after all of us because he was the sheikh. Our tents faced east towards the sunrise; they were divided into a section for the men, and the women’s section next to the kitchen.’

Abu Baha is smiling, relishing his own story. I’m smiling too. I feel like I have waited a long time to hear this story, and want to savour every detail.

‘My mother was called Basma,’ he continues. ‘Her name means “Smile”. At home we saw her smiling face, of course; but whenever she went outside my mother covered her face with a mask of gold, and she wore silver beads on her headscarf and down the front of her black dress. When I was very young we had blacks working with us, you know – men who had travelled with my father from the north of Africa. They lived with us as shepherds.’

The stories that I’ve heard about Gaza’s Bedouin are knitting together, becoming clearer and closer. I sit back against the cushions, eyes wide open, and really listen.

‘When I was 5 years old, I went to the local school. There were fifteen of us in one classroom, all of us boys. My father wanted me to go to school because the only thing that he read was the Holy Qur’an. Three years afterwards, I moved to the big school in Beersheba, 35 kilometres [22 miles] away. It was 1947. Our teachers at the school were Palestinians and we Bedouin boys boarded at the school. We learned all the subjects, and at night we dreamed of being genius enough to go and study in Jerusalem!

‘My first year at Beersheba was when the troubles started between us [Palestinians] and the Jews. I remember that when we finished school for the summer [in June 1948], we didn’t know how to get home safely. In the end, a local Palestinian official arranged for us to travel home under a British guard. We reached home safely under the guard, but that summer there were more problems between us and the Jews. My father brought weapons for our camp to defend ourselves against them. But their weapons were better than ours.’

The Zionists began to expel Palestinians from their homes even before the end of the British Mandate. At dawn on 9 April 1948, members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang (Jewish militias) entered the village of Deir Yassin. The Jewish mob flung hand grenades into the villagers’ homes and shot indiscriminately, killing between 100 and 240 Palestinians, including entire families. A number of the village women were raped, then murdered, by them.

Just over a month later, on 15 May, the British Mandate ended and the state of Israel was born. The Jewish community erupted into celebrations; hundreds of thousands danced, cheered and kissed each other in the streets. By now, almost a quarter of a million Palestinians had been driven from their homes. After the end of the British Mandate, the Zionist campaign intensified; more Palestinian villages were attacked, occupied and destroyed, their inhabitants massacred. The Zionists swept across northern Palestine. Then, bolstered by their successes, they began to move south towards the Negev desert, where the Bedouin lived and herded their animals.

One afternoon in September 1948, the Bedouin of Wadi al-Baha had just finished cutting the wheat and barley and were harvesting their maize when they saw tanks approaching from the north-west. They were Israeli tanks. The Bedouin had already built a defensive trench around their camp and also around the stone house that Abu Baha’s father had built for his family the year before and that they called the Villa.

‘My father was not in the camp that day, he was away working.’ Abu Baha is still smiling, but the tone of his voice has just changed, as though he’s mentally sifting through something painful. ‘The Israelis lined up all the men from our
ashira
against the wall of the Villa. “We will come back here tomorrow and if any of you are still here we will kill you all,” they said. And I saw them kill a man that day: Sheikh Abdullah was just an old blind man riding past on his donkey and they shot and killed him. We saw them do it, and we had heard about the massacre at Deir Yassin, so we were all very frightened.

‘When my father finally returned home, it was dusk. He sat down with the other men and they began to discuss where we should escape to, because we had to leave that very night. Some of the men said they were taking their families to Beersheba and others said that they were going to Gaza. My father decided that we would go to Gaza as well. So we packed up everything onto our camels, including my 10-day-old baby brother. We rode to Gaza that night and I always remember that it was a full moon.’

Abu Baha recalls the moonlit journey to Gaza by camel. ‘We ate
sabar
(prickly pears) to sustain us and I remember that, on the way, we heard Palestinians calling out that Jews were waiting to ambush us in the next valley. So we took another road and we entered Gaza east of al-Bureij camp. Most of the Palestinians arrived in northern Gaza, but we entered from the east and we set up our tents there.’ In 1947 the District of Gaza, as it was then known, had between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants. By December 1948, the population had swelled by 200,000. Gaza was filled with camps of white refugee tents. Altogether, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes during the
Nakba
, or ‘Catastrophe,’ many still clutching the keys to their homes. At least 530 Palestinian villages had been destroyed.

When Israel and Egypt agreed a ceasefire in January 1949, they drew up the Armistice Line designating the new borders between Palestine, Egypt and Israel. Gaza changed shape, both demographically and physically. Its population had almost trebled, yet its land mass had shrunk by a third. It became a Strip.

A woman enters the lounge, carrying a tray of glasses. Abu Baha introduces her as his wife, Firyal. She sits beside him, her hands neatly folded in her lap. Meantime he is still in full flow.

‘When we arrived in Gaza, we lived in our tent for a few months. But my father was bringing weapons to the Palestinian fighters and there was some trouble. We had to leave Gaza. We moved to the Sinai and for the next few years we lived in different Bedouin settlements. But there was also trouble between the Israelis and the Egyptians. Finally, in 1952, my father said, “
Khalas
, we are going back to Gaza.”’

Abu Baha was 13 years old when his family returned to Gaza. I ask him what Gaza City looked like in 1952.

‘Ah,
so
different! Just a few of the old districts like Zeitoun, where we lived, in the old quarter of the city. You could see all the way from the Saraya
⁵⁷
to the Mediterranean Sea. There were just small roads with many sand dunes and little clusters of houses. We rented a house and a small piece of land. We lived on our land most of the time, even though we had the stone house, because a Bedouin always feels like he is a captive in the city. We planted vegetables and we had fruit trees. In those days all our vegetables came from Gaza, and we grew so many big sweet oranges that we sold them all over the world.’

Four years later, in 1956, Israel invaded Gaza. Abu Baha was 17, old enough to remember the event quite clearly, but he says little about this brief first Israeli invasion.

‘When the Israelis came into Gaza, we fled through the orange groves to escape them. I remember they stole my father’s car. But they didn’t stay in Gaza very long. After just a few months they left.’

In November 1956 the Israeli military rounded up Palestinians, men and boys, in the city of Rafah, herded them into a local school and killed around 111 in one bloody day that elderly men and women from in and around Rafah have never forgotten.
⁵⁸
But Abu Baha says nothing about this. Even in a place as small as Gaza, people have extraordinarily different versions of the same history.

At the end of the 1950s, Abu Baha graduated from high school and left Gaza to study geography at Alexandria University. Afterwards he returned to the Strip to teach.

‘I was a geography teacher there for three years, and –’ he gives me a sudden playful look, his small eyes twinkling – ‘I married one of my students!’

Firyal and Abu Baha married in 1964. Afterwards he was offered a teaching post in Doha. They moved to the Gulf and lived there for almost thirty years.

When Israel ceded some administrative control of Gaza (though not the Jewish settlements inside Gaza) to the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Gazans living outside began to return to the Strip – including Abu Baha, his wife and their children. He tells me that, on his return, one of the first things he did was to revisit his birthplace, the Wadi of Pleasure, which now lies inside the state of Israel.

Leaning forward in my seat, I ask Abu Baha what it was like, returning to his birthplace. I can see that he has anticipated the question.

‘I will show you,’ he says, rising to his feet.

In the hallway of his uncluttered home, half a dozen sepia photographs are mounted on the walls, each in a heavy gold frame. They are treasured old photographs of parents, families and large Bedouin gatherings. The women are wearing ornate headdresses fringed with small coins. In the middle is a photo of a man standing in wide, open countryside. Just a fringe of trees in the background and a flat mound of stones beside him, an empty space that looks as though it was once filled. Abu Baha stands to one side of the picture.

‘That was Wadi al-Baha,’ he says, ‘the remains of it. I didn’t stay long. Because there was nothing, nothing but these stones. You see them?’

I nod.

‘That was the house my father built, the Villa.’

We stand in silence together, gazing into the photograph.

‘Is it still painful, looking at it after all these years?’ I ask him quietly.

When he doesn’t answer, I turn to look at him. Abu Baha nods, still smiling.

‘You know, I keep it here for my children, and their children, to see. So we never forget where we really come from.’

I left Gaza at the end of October 2010. Months later, at the beginning of the following spring, the Arab world erupted. From Tunisia to Yemen people poured through streets and into city squares clamouring for change. Within months stale repressive old dictatorships across the region seemed fragile, doomed even, as their own people took up against them. When the Egyptian President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office, the new government of Egypt committed itself to increasing Gazans’ freedom of movement in and out of the Strip via the southern crossing at Rafah. And young people in Gaza poured into the streets too, shouting for their own revolution.

But the Arab Spring didn’t come to Gaza. When I asked my Gazan friends why, their answers were all remarkably similar. The youth demonstrations had been quickly, violently quashed by Hamas, and many demonstrators beaten and cowed. ‘Egypt is a big country, but we are very small and Hamas is too strong for us,’ one of them e-mailed me. ‘Now we are living under two occupations: Hamas and Israel.’

At the end of October 2012, I came back to Gaza again because I still missed my friends and old colleagues and wanted to see how they were faring. It was a brief visit of just two weeks. But it was enough time to see Saida, now married and holding her first baby, and to see Shadi, who gave me his usual effusive welcome. Shadi and his family have decided to stay in Gaza after all. ‘We belong here, this place is part of us’, he said, with his crooked, happy-sad smile.