by Ahdaf Soueif
The devastation extended to industry and infrastructure. Israel destroyed water networks, universities, sewage pumping stations and over one hundred businesses, according to a report initiated by the Association of International Development Agencies. The main fuel tank of the Gaza power plant lay in ruins, and lack of spare parts left 25 per cent of the population without power. Hospitals sank into darkness. Gazans could not locate their loved ones, and food and water grew scarce.
The war destroyed 18,000 housing units, leaving 108,000 Gazans homeless.
Nearly a year after the end of Protective Edge little had changed in Shujaiyya. A few houses had been patched up but many more were nothing but rubble. Piles of prescriptions fluttered in front of the destroyed Ministry of Health. Everywhere homes lay collapsed like ruined layer cakes, the fillings composed of the flotsam of daily life: blankets, cooking pots, Qur’ans, cars. In one pile of dust I saw a child’s notebook, abandoned. ‘My uncle collects honey,’ the nameless child had written on the first page.
Graffiti adorned many houses: I LOVE GAZA scrawled next to a heart pierced by a rocket, I’M STILL HERE, AK-47s sketched by a fighter, a mural of a bleeding man pulling down the barrier between the West Bank and Israel to look at al-Aqsa Mosque. For all the attention Banksy won painting on Gazan rubble, this art is far sharper. Banksy can come and go, but these artists are trapped here in what many call an open-air prison. Defiance bleeds from their every line.
I watched as construction workers straightened rebar in front of the bombed-out el-Wafa Hospital, once a rehabilitation centre for paralyzed adults. During Protective Edge the Israeli army shelled the medical facility, knocking out the power and forcing nurses to carry disabled patients down pitch-black stairwells.
Rafiq, thirty, is an engineer working for one of the companies hired by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to clear rubble. Clearing bombsites is always a technical challenge, but Israel’s blockade, which limits the importation of construction equipment and materials, has made it much harder. Donkeys hauled loads of rubble. Workers straightened rebar with crude hand tools and rocks. Sometimes Rafiq’s crew found unexploded bombs, which they had to call the police to disarm. Worse were the bodies. Once Rafiq stumbled across a dead boy still clutching his school bag. Another time his crew dug out a mother whose head had been crushed while she was shielding her baby, her long hair tangled in the dust.
Shujaiyya wasn’t supposed to be like this. After Israel and Palestinian armed groups called a ceasefire in 2014, donor countries gathered in Cairo and pledged $3.5 billion to rebuild Gaza. But the high of good PR fades fast, and by April 2015 donors had only given a quarter of what they promised.
To deal with the lack of funds, the UNDP divided ruined homes into three tiers, depending on the amount of damage. According to sources working in rubble clearing, only owners of homes with minor damage have seen cash or materials. According to Gazans I spoke to, the help offered was rarely enough to fix what had been destroyed.
Ibrahim Abu Omar, fifty-seven, is one of the many Gazans who has taken rebuilding into his own hands. He served my translator and me tea in the concrete shell of what would be his new house. The grey box took ten months for his family to build and cost the $15,000 he had saved working as a truck driver. He recently took out a $12,000 loan. Despite this, the home is nowhere near finished. Its shell sits next to a twisted pile of rebar left by a private company he’d paid to clear his land.
Ibrahim remembers every conflict going back to the 1967 Six Day War. He remembers the lemon trees his father planted when he was a boy. He remembers 2006, the year of Hamas’ election and Israel’s subsequent blockade. ‘Everything was destroyed after that,’ he said with a sigh.
During Protective Edge he had to flee his home with nothing but the clothes on his back, running with his family through the streets to the UNRWA school, where they stayed for weeks. He returned to find both his home and his son’s neighbouring house completely gone. So that Israeli soldiers did not have to move through the streets, where they would be exposed, their tanks cleared paths by firing into houses. What shells started, bulldozers finished. Ibrahim’s house lay crushed under the rubble of his son’s.
After the ceasefire was declared, Hamas’ charitable arm gave Ibrahim’s family $2,000. The money quickly disappeared on food and other essentials. When he began to rebuild, Gaza’s municipal government demanded $2,500 to register the new house and connect it to the power grid. This was one of many stories I would hear of the municipal government using the destruction of people’s homes to extract fees or back taxes.
At least Hamas had given him some money initially. Ibrahim said that none of the NGOs swarming Gaza gave him a shekel, though UNRWA did stop by to take photos.
I asked him what he thought of Hamas. He laughed, then looked nervously to the side. ‘If you’re with Hamas, you have a good life. If you’re not . . .’ Ibrahim had been employed by the Palestinian Authority, whose dominant Fatah party has spent the last decade in an occasionally violent struggle with Hamas. Even now employees of the PA living in Gaza told me that, despite receiving salaries, they don’t show up for work, though they nervously declined to spell out the reason.
Meanwhile, Israel maintains its blockade on building materials coming into Gaza, claiming that it wants to prevent them from being used by Hamas to create tunnels. According to Israeli human rights group Gisha, Israel has only allowed into Gaza about a fifth of the amount of construction materials experts estimate are needed to repair the war’s damage. This trickle is so inadequate that Oxfam has estimated it will take a hundred years to rebuild the Strip, assuming Israel doesn’t invade it again in the intervening century.
According to Israeli politicians across the spectrum, Hamas is the cause of all Gaza’s woes. Because Gazans elected Hamas in 2006, and its government later pre-empted a coup in 2007, they are fair game.
Hamas itself isn’t much of a threat. It has ineffectual rockets – since 2007 rocket and mortar attacks have killed forty-four people within Israel, and many of these attacks are claimed by militant groups outside Hamas control. Hamas’ municipal government is so broke that many civil servants have gone months without pay. The besieged residents’ economic lifelines were the smuggling tunnels – before most of them were destroyed.
But Israeli politicians are more concerned with Hamas as a PR construct, one that lets them recast aggression as self-defence. Israel invokes Hamas to justify its hundreds of ceasefire violations, its restrictions on Gazans’ movement and the blockade that devastates Gaza’s economy, grinding the residents’ futures as fine as Shujaiyya’s dust.
On my last night in Gaza I saw that sort of misattributed revenge take place on a smaller scale.
A jihadi group opposing Hamas shot three rockets into Israel. They landed in a field where they burned a small circle in the grass. Israel holds Hamas responsible for any rocket attack coming from the Strip, even those launched by Hamas’ enemies. The drones buzzed more loudly than usual above our heads that night.
I sat on the balcony of my apartment overlooking Gaza’s beach, where during the day little boys hawked boat rides and couples smoked shishas. A year before, Israeli soldiers had killed four children on that beach. A week after my visit an Israeli internal investigation would absolve the army of any wrongdoing.
The drones grew louder. On the horizon out to sea I could see gold pinpricks – the lights of Israeli gunships. Then I heard the growl of fighter jets. These were common sounds on a common night in that uncommon, besieged and defiant city. By midnight the shells had begun to fall.
Gaza
Sabrina Mahfouz
Let’s be the protectors of poetry
let’s pull bricks down
with the tricks of words
and build them up again
when the sky no longer burns shadows
where we once spoke.
Let’s spill dark ink on the sand
use the forgotten fingers of our
hands
to fight with tides
that try to wash us away.
Let’s mark walls with the blood of our tongues
to know our lives will be heard
even when they are reduced to nothing
but reddish-grey rubble.
Let’s displace sentences
until they are so at home
in every metal-doored house
nobody is able to tell where they came from anymore.
Let’s throw darts dipped in vowels
so when they pierce skin they bring not only pain
but the ability to begin at the beginning of language again.
Let’s put out our cigarettes on full stops
allow the ash-drowned letters
of doomed love to look through glassless windows
with shards of a hope made whole.
Let’s stare at the sea
until similes sting our eyes
until we agree
standing on a rock older than poetry
that this land can only ever belong
to those who love.
No matter what the checkpoints say
or how loud the rockets scream
we know that love is enough
because there is nothing more
and we learned that through words
when touch was disallowed
so read me the poems as I drown
my love.
A DECADE OF WRITERS’ WALKS
Raja Shehadeh
The night before I was to take the authors participating in the Palestine Festival of Literature on a walk through the West Bank hills I woke up in a sweat.
The festival, launched in 2008, describes itself as a ‘cultural roadshow’ that travels around historic Palestine. Its chair, Ahdaf Soueif, felt that it would not be complete without experiencing the land through taking a walk. As the author of the book Palestinian Walks, it fell upon me to accompany the writers on this walk.
At first I asked for a slot of five hours. But they were pressed for time. The whole festival was one week, with many areas to visit, panels to conduct, workshops and performances to deliver. We bargained and settled on a maximum of two and a half hours. I had to give a lot of thought to the best representative route for so brief a walk. I found it near my house.
Were this walk to have taken place twenty years earlier we could have done without the drive. Close to my house is the start of an ancient trail that cradles the hill and slopes gently down to the valley. Once there we would have walked along the dry riverbed. We would have found ourselves in a wide valley with terraced hills on both sides and could have examined the various features of the land: the terraces, the springs, the old stone structures – qasrs – built by farmers to store their produce, where they slept on the roof during the hot summer months. (The Arabic word qasr literally means palace or fort.) It would have been possible to get the feeling of being entirely away from any urban development – roads, houses and walls. But in the past two decades the speedy and unplanned expansion of Ramallah has destroyed those ancient paths. To start the walk we now had to drive several miles down the hill to where the last building stands.
But where Palestinian construction stops, Area C begins; this is the largest area, comprising the majority of the land of the West Bank, and the Oslo Accords put it entirely under Israeli jurisdiction. Here Israel is rapidly expropriating Palestinian land to build new and expand existing Jewish settlements. Technically Palestinians cannot walk there without permission from the Israeli military authorities. As I planned the walk I considered the risk that a busload of mainly foreign writers would attract the attention of Israeli soldiers or settlers. We would then be stopped, questioned and eventually asked to leave. But then most areas where it is still possible to walk are classified as Area C, and so the risk is unavoidable.
If nature is an open book on which humans continuously write their script then there are few areas in the world where they have scribbled more avidly than on these hills. With seemingly unlimited financial means, the Israeli settlers have been the most active. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank five decades ago they have never stopped scribbling.
When I started these walks, for the first few years I would begin by briefing the PalFest authors about the land law applicable in Palestine and how Israel had amended it to make it possible to seize land for the settlements. I would be so involved in my task that I would not notice how bored the writers were getting until I saw my wife Penny gesturing to me to stop. By the time I finished, a precious half-hour had passed out of the two and a half designated for the walk. In later years I came to realise that nothing compares to being physically on the land, walking it, brushing against the dry herbs – the sage, thyme and oregano – smelling these and seeing with one’s eyes the ruined paths and the encroachment by buildings and roads, and realising the tragedy of these places – unchanged for centuries – that are now vanishing.
The plan was to walk a short distance along the valley then climb up the hill and get to one of the qasrs. From there we would continue to the next village, Ayn Qenia, where we would meet the bus that would drive us back to Ramallah.
The first brief stop along the drive down was where the outpost of Yad Yair had once been. This small settlement was evacuated by the Israeli army in 2009, leaving behind reams of the concertina wire that used to surround it and blocks of concrete. Otherwise nature was taking over, as nature always does, with weeds and shrubs growing again on the land. As I explained how the settlement and the military outpost that were placed there to protect it had prevented us for ten years from using this road I wondered how many of my companions could imagine how the place had looked and what it meant to live next to this fledgling illegal Israeli presence so close to Palestinian homes. The day may come, after the settlement project is abandoned, when it will take a strong imaginative effort for visitors to a Palestine free from illegal Jewish settlements to realise what it had meant to those of us unfortunate enough to have lived through it all.
After this short stop we began a drive along a narrow, pockmarked, winding road that has only recently reopened. Down we went and I had to deal with the complaints of the bus driver: ‘Is the road like this all the way? How will I be able to make it up again with such narrow spaces to make turns?’
Soon after we began our descent a few of the authors asked whether the housing project they could see on the next hill to our right, east of Ramallah, was a Jewish settlement. I picked up the microphone (which made me feel like a tour guide) and explained that it wasn’t.
‘But it looks like one,’ I heard someone say. I had to agree. In the past Palestinians built individual homes surrounded by gardens. Now large construction companies are spending huge sums borrowed from banks, aiming for large returns on their money by building as many units as possible on a single plot of land. The gardens are gone and uniformity is in. No wonder the Palestinian houses built in rows look much like the settlements, displaying the same ugliness and causing an equal degree of destruction.
I gave the authors the best clue to recognise Israeli from Palestinian housing. The former can do without water tanks on the roof because they are assured a constant and steady supply of running water. Not so the Palestinians, who need to store water in the tanks that identify every Palestinian house.
Soon we came to a crossroads close to the valley. The bus found a place to park and we started on our walk.
Once in the valley, the hills spread out on either side with their terraces and olive groves. We walked for a short distance and started our ascent along barely discernible trails up the hill heading to the qasrs. The land was extremely stony so the possibility of someone falling or spraining their ankle was strong. I worried about this. How then would we be able to carry them down? And what if someone was bitten by a snake or scorpion or tripped and fell or collapsed from exhaustion or heat?
There were two qasrs on the same level. These wer
e left over from when the residents of Ramallah lived off the land and left their houses in the village for the summer, tending their vegetable plots and caring for their olive trees and vines, using ancient tracks to transport the produce on donkey-back or if they were more affluent on a mule. I decided the qasr to the north was the more interesting and headed to it. When we got there I realised my mistake. But now there was no visible track to the other one, so we had to plunge into thorny bushes to get through. I feared we might come across a wild boar, who would rush out at us and frighten the visiting authors, but none were around that day.
A number of the writers during the walk got their legs scratched. Some were wearing the wrong kind of shoes, too soft for the stony fields. However, J.M. Coetzee, the oldest in the group, straight-backed and strong-legged, kept up with me and continued to ask questions about the occupation and the laws governing it. ‘Do you have resort to the Israeli High Court?’ he asked. I told him that we did but it has constantly proven futile. He also said that Ramallah struck him as affluent, which surprised him. The economy of the occupation never ceases to surprise me.
We arrived exhausted, this time at the right qasr. It looked dark and forbidding inside and no one was prepared to venture in. I threw a few stones to scare off any animal that might have been sheltering from the sun and entered. The others were at first reluctant but then began to stream through and up the circular stairs to the next floor. Fortunately I was the first to arrive at the top because just as I entered I saw a snake politely slide away through a hole between the stones. I did not announce this previous visitor to the others.
It was indeed cool and atmospheric inside the stone structure. I could see the relief in my guests’ eyes, but some were clearly worried about the way down. We sat on the windowsills. Some, like Coetzee, kept standing, and I began to read.