The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The Strip is not a forbidding prison; most of it is agreeable but unspectacular country, flat except for a low ridge, called Ali Muntar, north and east of Gaza town. From Gaza south, it is green for twenty miles, then begins to go shabby and semi-desertic, and tails off into bleakness at Rafah, the last village. It is roughly twenty-five miles from north to south, and five from west to east, but its arable width is diminished by beaches and sand dunes along the Mediterranean shore. The better soil nourishes orange groves, eucalyptus trees, cactuses, and goats. When the cease-fire caught the refugees here, the tract was already overpopulated. This was because, in addition to the peasants and fishermen it might have normally supported, it contained Gaza, the most considerable place in southern Palestine, with a pre-refugee population of forty thousand, and Gaza’s economic life depended on the hinterland, from which the war cut it off. Gaza was, of course, a famous place of old; it belonged to the Philistines and is associated with that Biblical Fanfan la Tulipe, Samson, who is locally alleged to have picked up the pillars of the Philistine temple after he had pulled it down on his head and carried them to the far end of the crest of Ali Muntar, where admiring posterity has erected a marabout as a marker. Gaza was captured at various times by Alexander, Pompey, Napoleon, and Saladin, which shows that it must have been considered worth capturing, and during the Middle Ages it was a textile center that gave its name to French gaze and English gauze. Its modern eminence may be gauged by its prison, the largest built by the British in all Palestine. The town is graced by the homes of Moslem landowners whose properties once extended far to the north and east of the present boundaries. With its resident population plus its refugees, it is impossible for the Strip to be self-supporting.

  The Israelis, during their four-month occupation of the Strip, which began when they captured it last November 1st and is ending as I write, did nothing to reduce this human edema on their borders beyond shooting a disputed number of civilians when their troops entered and removing twenty-five families compromised by overfriendliness when they left. Their renewed contact with the refugees seemingly offered an opportunity to begin negotiations for the return of some and the compensation of others, but the chance was neglected, and the popular Israeli line on Gaza following the withdrawal may be gleaned from a piece, signed “Diplomatic Correspondent,” on the front page of last Tuesday’s Jerusalem Post: “To continue to administer this island of misery and hate would be a tiresome and costly undertaking for such a small country as this. The best thing for the refugees themselves is, probably, the way chosen by nearly a million Jews—emigration.” Diplomatic Correspondent’s advice to people trapped in a submarine is to call a taxi.

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  My own acquaintance with Gaza dates back only ten days, but I had the good fortune early in my visit to acquire the perspective of a man who had known it a long time. He was General Refet Bele, commander of the Turkish Army corps that defended the city forty years ago against the British. The General sat in the postprandial sun on the terrace of a trim pension and regarded with restrained amusement the undamaged villas around him. The pension is well removed from the old Arab part of town and stands among the dwellings of the big landowners. A small, thin man with a falcon’s head that looked large in proportion to his shrunken neck, he was dapper in a suit of small checks; by his own account, he is seventy-five years old. The General is the Turkish representative on the advisory commission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees—or UNRWA—and has ambassadorial rank. UNRWA feeds, medicates, and educates the refugee community, which at the last head count totalled 219,423 in the Gaza area. General Bele told me that when Turkey entered his war, he was a major of thirty-three; three years later he was commanding a corps. “As a major, I took a detachment from Palestine to the Suez Canal, at El Kantara,” he told me, “but I had not sufficient strength to take the Canal. The British spoke so highly of me, though, that I was promoted.” He sighed, as if at a reminiscence he chose not to disclose. “A generous enemy is more helpful than a jealous friend,” he added. He spoke in French; he said that he had studied it in Caucasian garrisons from the novels of Pierre Loti and Paul Bourget. He told me that this was his first visit to Gaza since its capture from the Egyptians by the Israelis last year (the Israelis were still there, of course), and then he gave me a clue to the merriment I had seen in his face. “When I defended Gaza,” he said, “I left it completely flat. Not one house—not the littlest one—was standing.” He moved his right hand in a horizontal arc, palm down. I could see that he was flattered by the deterioration in the quality of war since his day.

  I asked him what Palestine had been like under the Ottoman Empire, and he said, “A country of pastoral happiness, where everyone slept on both ears every night. Jew and Arab and Christian lived together in security. They felt they had a father.” He felt that the British fomenting of Arab nationalism had opened Pandora’s box, and he regretted the passing of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. “They were not sufficiently strong to inspire fear,” he said, “but by aiding Germany they balanced the colossus Russia. They have been destroyed, and today one sees the result!” I left him in the sun, the calmest and most reasonable man I have encountered in Gaza. The General, however, is not trapped here. His tour of inspection ended and the battlefields revisited, he will go home bearing presents for his latest child, aged seven.

  Even the members of the international staff of UNRWA who are stationed in Gaza suffer from a trapped feeling, though their situation is not as irrevocable as that of their three hundred thousand fellow-inmates. Two planes a week from UNRWA headquarters in Beirut land within the Strip, and a man is always free to ask for a transfer or to resign. Social life was limited before the arrival of the United Nations Emergency Force—there were eleven “internationals,” nine men and two women—at the apex of the staff of three thousand; all the rest were refugees, except for a few Egyptian and Lebanese doctors, nurses, and teachers. In addition, there were within the area half a dozen officer observers of the United Nations, Egypt, and Israel Mixed Armistice Commission, who had had no official duties since the armistice exploded last November, and two American Baptist medical missionaries, who were running a hospital. Some of the UNRWA men had had their families with them before the November fighting, but just before the Israeli attack the families were shipped off by air to Beirut, where they remain. The UNRWA personnel have also felt the lack of a large city for distraction, such as they have in the Arab states that harbor other refugees. But the chief source of the trapped feeling is contagion. It is hard to live long in a prison for three hundred thousand without sometimes feeling claustrophobia.

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  Most of the refugees are divided among eight great villages of cabins, built by their labor with UNRWA materials and direction. All the refugees are registered on a ration roster, but of the forty thousand families getting rations, only twenty-four thousand have UNRWA housing, and these occupy thirty-three thousand rooms; it works out to about a room and a third per family, or four persons per room by Arab-peasant standards. The crowding is not as bad as it sounds, but the minority ménages where one man has two or three wives are cramped. The food ration consists basically of just bread—twenty-two pounds of white flour per head per month, which the women bake into flat loaves—plus infinitesimal amounts of lentils or beans, oil or fat, sugar, rice, and occasionally dates. It all comes to fifteen hundred calories a day; children get supplementary meals at school. It isn’t brilliant, but, à la rigueur, it will indefinitely prevent a human being from dying. The normal refugee, therefore, spends a considerable part of his time on small schemes for bridging the gap between subsistence and getting enough to eat—by working for UNRWA, by working for people who work for UNRWA, by keeping a scraggly hen or goat, or by trading white flour for a greater quantity of the less valuable but equally filling local gray variety. The rest of the time he devotes to political conversation and reflection.

  I asked a man w
ho speaks a bit of English to describe his daily routine. “I get up in the morning and I walk around the village and look at nothing,” he said. “Then I sit outside a coffee stall, even when I have no money for coffee, and listen to the radio. Also I play trictrac”—a form of ticktacktoe played with stones on sand. The women have hardly more to do, since housekeeping is not complicated. They also bear and scold children. The children are the best off, because they have school to occupy their minds and school meals to bolster their diet. A good half of the population is under the age of sixteen, and at least a quarter of the present refugees must have been born in the Gaza Strip. Officials say that the reason the probable real increase in the refugee population is not reflected in the statistics is that the earlier rosters were inflated by refugees pardonably interested in obtaining extra rations. The gap between the real and the fictitious populations is constantly narrowing, though, as UNRWA checks its figures.

  Such picayune details of the refugee’s life may tend to belittle him at a range of several thousand miles. A refugee camp is, in fact, a belittling environment; only gas chambers, torture, and starvation can dramatize the human predicament in these latter days, and even they pall easily. But the Palestine Arab peasant—which is what most of the refugees are—is a human type impossible to reduce to a figure of fun. The broadcasts he listens to are all political speeches or news commentary with a political slant: Radios Cairo, Damascus, and Cyprus, the Voice of America, even an Israeli program in Arabic—he is insatiable. The political romanticism of revenge that grew up during his first eight years of such listening suffered considerable shock when the Israelis demonstrated their strength in November, and his hope of a total solution of the refugee problem by force has been shaken. The Egyptians, when they were here, tried to strengthen this romanticism by precluding the hope of any other solution; it was a species of treason, for example, for an individual to admit that he might accept compensation from the Israelis for his land if compensation were offered. Egyptian security agents kept excellent tabs on the interminable public conversations, and there was no temptation to depart from the official doctrine of all or nothing, since there was no possibility of getting past the barrier up the road. In the Egyptian days, no refugee could be found who would say even that he would take his own land back if it meant returning to Israel as an individual and living among Jews. (There is no record, of course, of any such offer’s having ever been made.) This legend of the monolithic intransigence of the exiles—not the Gaza lot alone but all the diaspora, in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—was in its time useful to Israel, too, because it barred any payments to anybody. The Israeli argument when visitors raise the question of the possibility of piecemeal compensation is that conditions have changed since the Arabs went away—and besides Israel can’t spare the money. On the piecemeal resettlement of the refugees in Israel, it is “We need the land for a hundred thousand Jews we expect from Portugal”—or Pimlico or Guatemala; details are unessential. Many Israelis are not only incapable of thinking that this is a paradox but unable to believe that it seems odd to a foreigner. Yet there are Palestinians on the Gaza beach who say, “My land is five miles from here, and they have taken it to give it to men from ten thousand miles away.” The difference of opinion is irreconcilable. The degree of intransigence expressed varies, however, with the known political views of your interpreter, who is usually a camp official, and the men among the refugees who have the most substance and education, and who themselves speak English or French, are generally the most reasonable of all. “I would go back and see if I could live happily in the new environment,” one such said to me—I had been warned against him as a hothead—“and then see if I couldn’t sell out and go where I felt I had more freedom.”

  The expulsion of the Egyptians last November brought a chance for contact between the present Palestinians and the ex-Palestinians. The chance still exists, as long as the Egyptians don’t return. The incursion of the Israeli Army, however, shut off the Strip’s most important source of outside revenue, aside from UNRWA’s contribution to the economy. This was the money sent home by between five and ten thousand men from the Gaza Strip who work in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar. The Egyptian authorities, while they were in command, stopped the Gaza people from coming farther into Egypt than the scabby oasis of El Arish (although they made an exception for Gazans studying at Egyptian universities), but they permitted men to go out of the Strip to work in the oil countries. The Palestinians are often more literate and always more advanced technically than the Arabs of the Hejaz—or, for that matter, than the Egyptians. Their labor is therefore at a premium in primitive Arab lands, and the revenue they sent home was estimated at from twenty-five thousand to a hundred thousand Egyptian pounds monthly. (Gazans, when they talk money, still talk in Egyptian pounds, which are officially worth two dollars and eighty cents. The Israeli pound, officially worth fifty-five cents, found slow acceptance in the Strip, and the day before the withdrawal of the Israeli forces you could get from seven to ten Israeli pounds for one Egyptian pound—a situation that offered a magnificent opportunity for quick profit in what I think is called arbitrage. That same week in Beirut, I was informed, one could buy an Egyptian pound for two dollars. The imagination staggers.)

  When the Israelis took over the Strip, all communication with the Arab countries was naturally cut off, since Israel is still technically at war with them. One of the first and most pressing tasks of the United Nations administration at Gaza will be to hold the Strip open to communication and economic exchange at both ends. Maybe we can get those people out of that submarine.

  Norman Lewis

  MAY 3, 1958 (ON CUBA AND ITS REBELS)

  LL OVER CUBA, one finds public buildings decorated with murals of a heroic, if lugubrious, nature, depicting the resistance of student revolutionaries to the tyrants of their day. Often, the students are shown facing a firing squad composed of the ferocious volunteers raised by the Spanish colonial authorities or of the no less grim-faced soldiery of one of the early indigenous dictators. None of the macabre episodes portrayed are less than thirty years old, however, and one supposes that at least another thirty years must elapse before the young men who are now carrying on this old student tradition with revolvers and bombs will achieve pictorial commemoration of the same kind. The history of Cuban youth in revolt started a century ago, when students organized a struggle against the senile and brutalized Spanish colonial regime. It was continued sporadically after the liberation from Spain, when the new order so often revealed itself as nothing more than the old order with its recently acquired democratic mask fallen slightly askew. Although in many parts of Latin America the practice of parliamentary democracy is rare, quixotic, and incomplete, Latin-Americans—and Cubans in particular—have never ceased to carry on a nostalgic courtship of the democratic ideal, seen, as it were, as an inaccessible beauty behind an ornamental grille. In periods when something that will just pass muster as democracy is achieved—when elections take place and are not too cynically manipulated, when the press is vocal and the generals are mute—little is heard of student revolutionary action. But when a dictator puts himself in power and stays there too long, the students begin to plot, and soon to throw bombs, and in the end the Army and the police are forced into reprisals of the kind that will one day form the subject matter of yet more depressing murals in provincial town halls. After the period of chaos that attended the overthrow of the detested President Machado in 1933, there followed a fairly quiet quarter of a century, by Cuban standards. Then, late in 1956, the old periodic eruption started again, provoked by what was beginning to look like another immovable dictatorship. Within the ensuing twelve months, there were political assassinations, sabotage, mass demonstrations, and local uprisings, and by the beginning of this year the University of Havana and the other state-supported universities had closed down. Now the jails are full of students, and many idealistic and hotheaded young men—often barely out of their teens�
�have lost their lives. Nobody seems to have any idea how the thing will end.

  When I arrived in Havana not long ago, a fugitive from the chills of London, and more or less a student of Latin-American upheavals, the city was enjoying a brief respite from nightly alarms. The processional crowds of the evening were abroad again, moving in ranks down the Prado under trees full of squawking birds, and then thinning out along the Malecón, past the opulent gray baroque houses, and dodging the whiplash of spray over the low sea wall. Havana was beautiful and noisy, perfumed with cigar smoke and hair oil. People lived clamorously in the streets, under the flame trees in the parks, and in a thousand bars. One remembered T. S. Eliot’s “I had not thought death had undone so many.” There were gentle-mannered, philosophical pimps at all the street corners—men who, if allowed, would talk of their ancestry first and then describe their wares. This was normality as I remembered it from other visits, but for the past year, I learned, there had been incidents on three nights out of six. There had been bomb throwing and sniping in the streets, and quite frequently the power cables had been cut, blacking out the town and thereby exposing those taken by surprise in the darkened streets to the incidental hazards of gunplay between snipers and police. Even the present lull was an uneasy one, and it was considered foolhardy to visit the cinema or the theatre—inviting places for the planting of bombs—or even to wander far from one’s hotel at night. I found fresh bullet holes in the counter of my favorite bar, on the Calle Industria. A few weeks previously, a regular of the establishment had been shot down by a tommy-gunner firing from across the street. One of the barmen had lost a finger in the ragged volley, and, smiling importantly, he held up the stump for inspection. This occurrence had not been bad for business. In Havana, people like to pop in for a drink at a place where there has been a recent shooting, just as in London they might visit an East End pub once patronized by royalty.