Meet Me in Gaza

by Louisa B. Waugh

  In the late afternoon I follow Samer to one last house, where the front door has been torn from its hinges. His mobile rings and he pauses on the step outside. I step inside, to see if anyone is around. I call out and for a moment it seems there is no one and I am alone in this dark, cavernous hallway with debris scattered all around. But suddenly a group of a dozen women and girls appear. They make straight for me and demand to know if I speak Arabic.

  ‘Er, yes,’ I say.

  They grasp my arms and march me along a dark passageway into a bare room with no windows. They shut the door, surround me, take my hands and begin to talk. Two or three of them wipe away salty tears, dirt streaking their faces as they gesture violently with wet fingers. Their voices are loud and shrill and I can catch only a little of what’s being said because they are all speaking at the same time, demanding my attention. I am too drained to make much sense of it all, but realise this doesn’t matter. They want to blurt out what has just happened to them and I simply need to listen. I do my best as we stand there pressed close together in this bare cell of a room until finally their anxious, quavering voices start to die down.

  During Operation Winter Heat, the Israeli military killed 110 Gazans, almost half of them civilians, including 26 children. Gazan fighters launched some 200 rockets and mortars towards Israel during the operation. Some of them landed inside Israel, many fell to ground inside Gaza, and the fighters vowed to continue.

  The morning after our visit to Izbat Abed Rabbo, I am in a portacabin near the Gazan side of the Erez crossing, just beside the yellow barrier that marks the beginning of no-man’s-land. I’m waiting for the go-ahead to cross no-man’s-land and enter the main Erez crossing terminal building, where Israeli security admits people into Israel, or not.

  A man called Hani has his work desk in the portacabin. Hani spends his day telephoning Israeli security operatives inside Erez, coordinating permission for individuals to proceed across no-man’s-land, and still he manages to smile.

  I have no idea how long it will take me to cross into Israel. Everything I’m carrying will be searched at Erez. The UN does not allow its female staff to walk through the crossing – they drive through in UN vehicles – as there has been a recent spate of incidents involving foreign women being subjected to ‘humiliating strip searches’ by the private Israeli security company working inside the crossing.

  I have also heard about the room, deep inside Erez, with the grid floor where people are forced to stand, sometimes without their clothes, being interrogated by Israeli officials behind bulletproof glass. I am not looking forward to this at all.

  And I feel jittery too about facing the outside world, with its space and crowds and too many choices of where to go and what to do. Maybe I’m getting a bit institutionalised, like a prisoner gradually becoming fearful of being released from her jail.

  Hani answers his phone again, speaks in fluent Hebrew for just a couple of minutes and gives me the thumbs up.

  ‘You can go now,’ he says, quite casually. I wonder if he ever gets to leave Gaza.

  I stand up and reach for my suitcase and handbag.

  ‘You coming back?’ he asks.

  I smile and nod. ‘As soon as I can.’

  ‘Salam.’ He twinkles a smile back. ‘Enjoy it out there.’

  PART TWO

  A Gazan rocket meets an Israeli rocket up in the sky.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asks the Gazan rocket.

  ‘To Gaza, to kill terrorists!’ says the Israeli rocket, ‘where

  are you going?’

  ‘No idea,’ says the Gazan rocket.

  Gazan joke

  the milking station

  With one thing and another, it is almost six weeks later when I finally arrive back at the Erez crossing, armed with a new visa and a new Gaza entry permit. But the crossing is closed. When I get out of the taxi, I can hear explosions in the near distance, inside Gaza. While my Palestinian driver keeps the engine running, I speak to an Israeli officer inside a booth at the main Erez entry gate. She says there is shelling in Beit Hanoun – a town on the edge of northern Gaza – and she doesn’t know whether the crossing will open today.

  I hover outside the booth, considering my options. It’s late morning, so I can wait here and hope the crossing will open some time today; or take the taxi back to Ramallah, stay another night with Saida’s sister, Alla’, and drive back here again early tomorrow morning. I decide to wait it out. I’m not alone; at least forty other people, Gazans and foreigners, are hanging around the crossing gate too. The Israeli plain clothes security operatives prowling just inside the main gate have tinted, wrap-around shades and their index fingers rest on the trigger of their M16s. When I tell my taxi driver I’m going to stay, he merely nods. Bags in tow, I take my place on the low wall just outside the main gate.

  Waiting to enter a hermetically sealed strip of land that is being shelled is not a position I ever thought I’d find myself in. But I have switched on to auto-pilot, or maybe it’s just denial. With nothing else to do, my mind drifts back to my six-week trip. I spent my first week outside Gaza snorkelling in the small Red Sea resort of Dahab, as I had planned; but found the first couple of days bizarrely stressful. After constant power cuts inside Gaza, the light of Dahab dazzled me and sudden loud noises made me flinch. The Egyptian manager of my backpackers’ hotel had tacked up a notice in the reception:

  No Israelis, No Dogs

  He told me it was a protest against Israel having just killed 100 people inside Gaza. I said it was pathetic. If he cared so damn much, why wasn’t he protesting to demand that his government reopen its Gaza border? A few days later I got chatting to a middle-aged American ‘living the desert dream’ with her local Bedouin husband. She asked me where I lived. When I told her I was working in Palestine, she told me I was helping Palestinians because my heart was wide open – and by the way, did I know about a website exposing what those powerful Jews in America are really up to? I didn’t know the website, and said I didn’t want to know it, and she looked away. I never heard poison like that inside Gaza.

  After Dahab, I went back to Scotland. I had been invited to give a reading in the far northern Orkney Isles, where, the day after the reading, I crouched amid rocks laced with lichen and watched blubbery seals snorting as they basked in radiant early morning sun. I filled my lungs with Atlantic Sea air, and at that moment Gaza felt like a dark tunnel that would just swallow me up whole. But as soon as I got news of my new entry permit, I flew from grey-skied London (which Gazans call Balad al-Dabaab, the City of Fog) to Tel Aviv, drove to Ramallah and spent a couple of nights with Saida’s sister, Alla’, and her family before heading back to the Strip.

  ‘OK, now you have seen Gaza,’ said Alla’, ‘you can see it is a hell. Khalas! Stay here in Ramallah.’

  But I missed the intensity of Gaza, I really did – and being away made me realise how much I wanted to go back. When I said this to Alla’, she shrugged and bought presents for me to take to her family. But when my taxi to Gaza arrived at her place this morning, tears sprang from her eyes. She pressed her lips together and shook her head, as though trying to rid herself of her own thoughts, and kissed me hard.

  ‘Kiss my family for me,’ she said.

  I flit between these occupied spaces of the West Bank and Gaza, visiting her family, but they never get to kiss each other.

  The Palestinian driving me down to Gaza in his taxi asked me if we could give someone a lift to Gaza, a woman he knew whose son was in hospital in Israel. When we picked her up, she was a rake-thin, timid-looking lady who said barely a word for most of the journey. It was only during the last couple of miles to the Erez crossing, as we sped past emerald groves of orange trees lining both sides of the road, that she told me about her 19-year-old son, Muhammad. He had been shot by Hamas, she said, ‘by mistake’, during a row. After fifteen months in a Jerusalem hospital, Muhammad still couldn’t walk, or use his right arm, because his brain was damaged. She had wait
ed months for a permit from Israel to visit her son in the hospital and had no idea when she would see him again. She was going home to Beit Hanoun.

  I told her that when we reached Erez, we would have to go through the crossing separately and she gave a passive nod. I felt rude saying it, but told myself I didn’t know her or her son and didn’t want to be refused entry into Gaza because I was in the company of someone the Israelis had their eye on. Gazing out of the car window afterwards, I thought to myself, ‘Jesus, this place makes you paranoid.’ When we got to the closed crossing, she took her bags, thanked me and walked away.

  After an hour or so, the explosions go quiet. But the crossing remains closed. A few more people arrive and join our lethargic queue. I notice a young man carrying a backpack and clutching a book in one hand. He looks around, sees that I am alone too, walks over and asks me in stilted English if this is the way to Gaza.

  ‘Yes it is,’ I say, ‘but do you have an entry permit?’

  ‘Entry permit?’ he repeats uncertainly. I glance at his book; it looks like a Japanese travel guide.

  ‘Are you Japanese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you want to go to Gaza?’

  ‘I want to see the suffering of the Palestinian people.’

  His reply is so straight-up, I am stumped for words. I point him towards the Israeli officer in the booth by the main gate and wish him luck.

  Two hours later, maybe more, the Israelis finally start allowing us inside the Erez crossing main terminal building, in small batches of Gazans and foreigners. Once inside, we are still on the Israeli side of the crossing, waiting to be processed like suspect parcels. In order to cross over to Gaza, we each have to go through Israeli passport control. This can take anything between ten minutes and five hours, depending on lots of factors, including whether the shelling resumes and how long the Israelis feel like keeping us waiting. One of the passport control officers is sitting in her bulletproof booth now, just a few metres in front of my nailed-down plastic chair, filing her nails, clearly in no rush at all.

  ‘Erez’ means cedar tree in Hebrew, an Israeli symbol of nobility. These days, the crossing looks like something out of a James Bond film. But when first rigged up, in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai war – Israel’s first brief military occupation of Gaza – it was a simple wooden checkpoint.30 In 1967 Israel re-invaded Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula; during the early days of this second Israeli occupation, Gazans continued to work as labourers in Israel and Israeli soldiers didn’t even bother checking the few Palestinian cars going back and forth across Erez. The right-wing Israeli Likud Party’s Zionist mantra – that all Palestine was part of Eretz Israel (‘Greater Israel’) – was one of the main reasons that Erez was dismantled in the early 1970s. And with the checkpoint gone, Palestinians moved around their own country more freely than they had done since 1948.

  But after the infamous ‘Bus 300’ hijacking in April 1984, the Erez crossing was re-erected and reinforced.31 On some days, the queue of Gazan labourers at the crossing stretched for up to 2 miles in either direction. On the Gazan side, Palestinians were corralled into metal walkways like cattle and they cursed the fortified crossing as al-mahlab, ‘the milking station’. Israel handed over the administration of Gaza to the new Palestinian National Authority (PA) in 1994 – but kept control of Erez (plus Gaza’s airspace, land borders and territorial waters) and built the 37-mile barrier that encircles northern and eastern Gaza, severing it from the outside world.32

  I perch on a moulded plastic chair, trying to read my novel. But it’s hard to concentrate when I know that every flicker of my eyelids is being recorded. Most of the other foreigners waiting to be processed are medical aid workers. I know this because they are wearing sleeveless vests branded with the names of their organisations. As I look around this vast fortified chamber a couple of people catch my eye, and we smile, but without moving from our seats, like pieces of chess waiting to be played. The woman who drove down here with me hasn’t appeared inside the terminal. Maybe she got stopped at the first gate. Or turned back. Or maybe she is being interrogated. I hope she makes it home today.

  Eventually, just when I really need the toilet, one of the foreign aid workers gets called into a passport booth. Most of us immediately stand too, scooping our bags and suitcases together, wired and nervous in case we are next. My name is called by the woman who has long finished filing her nails. I step up to her booth, slide my passport and documents under the glass towards her. The knot in my guts is taut because I’m nervous and intimidated, and I resent her for this. She asks a few questions about why I’m going to Gaza. I go into role play, giving very little information, feigning polite boredom while maintaining direct eye contact. She stares me down, turns to the computer screen in front of her, eyes flickering right to left until she finishes scanning. With a slight nod, she stamps my passport and slides it back.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, picking up my bags and walking out of the booth. Foreigners’ luggage is rarely searched en route into Gaza – just on the way back into Israel.

  In front of me, on the far wall, is a signpost:

  Gaza

  I follow the sign into a long windowless corridor, suddenly amused by the clinking of glass inside my suitcase. Come to think of it, I could do with a swig right now.

  In front of me now is a high metal gate. As I approach, it opens with a loud click. I step through. Ahead is a solid wall. I approach it slowly too and whoever is watching me presses a switch or a computer key. A section of the wall glides upwards, like the door to a secret passage. And there is Gaza. I step through the open section of wall and it glides back down, sealing me inside.

  Now I am on a wooden walkway, with lines of razor wire on either side. The walkway leads to the tunnel that spits pedestrians out into no-man’s-land, the final stage of walking into Gaza. Gazan porters work on this Palestinian side of the Erez crossing, ferrying people’s luggage back and forth across no-man’s-land; I can see one of them hurrying towards me now, from the other end of the wooden walkway, eager to carry my bags for a fee. But I stand still, distracted. Staring out at the fields just beyond the razor wire, where, no more than a few hundred metres from the perimeter of Erez, there is a small row of white cottages. I remember them from the first time I crossed Erez. Then, as now, I wonder who the hell lives there and why, because that’s a crazy place to stay, so close to the Israeli border. Maybe I can get someone to come and visit them with me and meet whoever is living there, right on the front line.

  why no one visits the Swailams

  At work, I spend a lot of my time editing documents and reports that the Centre publishes in both Arabic and English. But I get out of the office as much as I can. Recently I suggested we could interview ordinary people across Gaza about their experiences of living under siege and publish the interviews on the Centre’s website.

  These narratives have proved to be popular, so I have been encouraged to continue writing them. When I get back to work, I speak to my immediate boss, Hamid, and suggest I could go and interview whoever lives in the row of white cottages next to Erez. Hamid sits back in his chair, thinks about it for a moment and then agrees. He tells me a family called the Swailams have been living in those white cottages for generations (in Gaza people can usually be identified by area, as extended families tend to live within sight of each other, often in the same building). The Swailams used to farm citrus, especially oranges. But Hamid isn’t sure how they are surviving now.

  He suggests I take another colleague, Majd, with me to act as interpreter. I’m happy to do so: Majd is broad-chested, has a booming voice and speaks English better than I do. We get on very well. This morning we take a taxi and drive north. We stop briefly in the grimy town of Beit Hanoun to pick up a local contact, a community worker called Samir who knows all the farmers in this corner of Gaza. Samir is young, but has the silver-streaked hair of an older man and a searing gaze. When we meet him, he is polite, but brief, s
aying little except to direct the driver out of Beit Hanoun, then onto a rutted dirt track amid the fields. A little while later the driver pulls over to the side of the track. He says he will wait for us here. We are 400 or 500 metres south of the white cottages, which look as if they are about the same distance from the razor-wire Erez perimeter.

  Majd, Samir and I clamber out of the taxi and start walking towards the cottages. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around, just what looks like a big dog on a chain. It’s late morning, the sun is shining and the warm air is spring fresh. But Majd isn’t happy at all.

  ‘Why’, he hisses towards my left ear, ‘do we have to walk? Why can’t the driver just wait for us outside the white houses? I have a wife and four children you know, and this … situation is making me absolutely nervous.’

  Majd is not from northern Gaza. He lives in the city of Khan Younis, down in the southern Strip, and doesn’t know this area. Samir scowls at Majd – who doesn’t notice – and strides ahead. As we approach, the dog stands and yanks its chain with a sullen growl. Still no one is around – and if we can see that Israeli watchtower, there is no doubt they can see us too. A few other farmhouses are dotted around this area, but the Swailams’ cottages are closest to the buffer zone – the 300-metre military zone that extends along the entire northern and eastern perimeter of Gaza, bordering Israel. The Israeli military patrol the zone day and night and fire warning shots if anyone approaches: anyone reckless or desperate enough to attempt crossing the zone into Israel will be shot dead.33

  I felt almost fine a minute ago, but now Majd is making me nervous. We are almost at the row of white cottages, close enough to see the large allotment at the front, facing east, where bright flowers are growing between rows of well-tended vegetables. A few hens are scratching in the dust. It looks for all the world like a traditional smallholding, the kind of place where men and boys have calloused hands and filthy nails, and women and girls bake steaming fresh bread. As long, that is, as you blot out the watchtowers built into the wall ahead and the white sphere suspended above the wall, like a tethered moon, and which I now know is listening to Gaza.