Meet Me in Gaza

by Louisa B. Waugh

  I ask Farrah what she thinks of the tunnels.

  ‘I don’t like them – I worry they will dig right under our house!’ she says. ‘But the siege means we cannot get aid or goods into Gaza. Israel controls it all. So they have to dig tunnels or we will have nothing.’

  Personally, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration; but I get her point. Israel controls and monitors everything that enters the Strip, ensuring there is enough for life to be tolerable, but never releasing its list of what can enter the Strip, and when. Yet unpredictability ensures that people can never plan ahead. Israel dumps its surpluses here, banning all exports from Gaza. This siege is a cash cow for Israeli producers too.

  I gaze over at the sprawling city of tarps, visible from everywhere we walk. Egypt is so close, we can almost smell it. I ask Farrah when she last crossed the border. She finds this question very funny.

  ‘I live so near! – but I have not been to Egypt for, I don’t know, maybe twenty years. And there is no chance now.’

  Farrah barely moves from this area, but she asks if she can visit me in Gaza City. We agree to go to the al-Deira Hotel terrace and spend an afternoon drinking coffee overlooking the sea. She’s heard of the hotel, but never been there. Gaza City centre, with its fancy hotels, its history museum, its cultural centres and its late night cafés where men and women can sit together, is like a different land.

  We eventually return to her house, to find Shadi drinking tea with her father, round his small smouldering twig fire. Farrah takes me into the family living room. She shows me great cracks warping the walls from top to bottom. Some are so wide, I can almost fit my hand inside. The cracks have made the walls tilt like drunks propping each other up.

  ‘The Israelis use very strong bombs to destroy the tunnels; our home trembles every time,’ she says. ‘You see, the walls are collapsing. Every house around here is like this.’

  Like they are all being shaken to death.

  By now it is late afternoon, and Shadi says we should leave soon: night-time can be dangerous in al-Salam district. But then J’meeah arrives, and we find ourselves persuaded to stay a while and drink sweet mint tea. When dusk settles, Farrah lights lamps and even though it’s cool, we stay outside, among the cushions and the bloody cats. Shadi and I end up lingering for another while, as J’meeah tells us stories of when she used to be a camel driver, back in the days when this area had no tunnels and no How-How … just Bedouin tents and endless groves of almond and olive trees, their thirsty, tenacious roots pressing into the eastern Sinai.

  Muhammad and all the things he might have done

  Noor and I are still visiting families across the Strip. We venture to places I haven’t yet seen in Gaza, quiet villages tucked away inside the middle areas of the Strip, around Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat, where the war did not rage so violently, but people were still killed and homes destroyed. Because nowhere was safe. We listen to testimonies almost every working day, and by the time the weekend comes we are both physically and mentally exhausted.

  One Saturday I return to my old haunt, Hammam al-Samara, to spend the afternoon steaming and bathing quietly. Abu Abdullah, the keeper of the hammam, is still there and as he welcomes me back, his moustache still twitches like a little silver fish. With quiet pride, he tells me that the old Turkish bathhouse somehow withstood the war without much damage.

  I take my things into the changing area and undress, already enjoying the damp heat. Over the last fifteen months I have been here many times; this hammam has become a sanctuary of sorts, a place where I can retreat when I need some space from the maelstrom of Gaza. Today there are half a dozen other women inside the steam chamber. We greet each other, make friendly small talk and enthuse about spending the afternoon like this. But we say nothing about the war, as though there is some unspoken agreement between us not to discuss anything dark while we relax inside these thick, warm walls. I lie on my towel and chat to a young woman called Jehan, who tells me she’s a lawyer. Like me, she comes here to retreat from the cold realities of life in Gaza. I suddenly recall seeing her here several times before.

  ‘Ah – I know: you’re the one who always smokes in the changing room!’ I exclaim. She gives me a wink and we both laugh.

  We lie side by side swathed in clouds of steam, as water pumps through the old pipes. After some time, another woman joins us in the steam chamber. She settles down, introduces herself and begins to tell me about her house being destroyed during the war. But Jehan immediately cuts her off.

  ‘Habibti – khalas! Stop speaking about the war! Talk of politics or war is for outside. We have come here just to relax.’

  The woman falls silent, then moves away. I lie back on my towel and gaze up at the shoal of tiny portholes that refract small circular rainbows, feeling deeply relaxed for the first time since I came back. I am weary down to my bones.

  I spend hours in the hammam, finally emerging in the late afternoon, scrubbed and glowing. I feel a hell of a lot better. I wander back into the main sitting area, to pay Abu Abdullah.

  ‘How long are you staying in Gaza?’ he asks.

  ‘I have to leave in a few weeks,’ I tell him. My three-month visa will expire at the beginning of April. I have very mixed feelings about going, but in my guts I do sense that it’s almost time for me to live outside Gaza again, before I burn myself out.

  ‘Have you seen any of the other hammams in the Middle East?’ he asks.

  ‘No – I haven’t.’

  ‘This is one of the oldest in the whole region,’ he says.

  ‘The house the Mamluks built!’ I joke.

  Abu Abdullah nods and smiles. All of his gestures are leisurely. He points to a carving on the wall above, with a lengthy, intricate inscription embedded in the stone.

  ‘This is from the Mamluk period,’ he says, and again I hear that quiet pride in his voice.

  The Mamluks were slave soldiers, traded across the lands of the Turks and raised as vicious fighters. Led by the ferocious and flame-haired Sultan Baybars, they swarmed over Egypt in the thirteenth century. Baybars’s defeat of the Mongols has been described as one of the most important battles in world history as he literally stopped the hordes in their tracks. He then set about wiping out the remaining Crusader kingdoms across the Middle East. Mamluk viceroys were appointed to major coastal cities, including Gaza, bringing peace and stability. In Gaza City, beefy Mamluk builders constructed Hammam al-Samara around this period, in the old quarter of the city near the ancient Orthodox church. It was fitted with a labyrinth of steam chambers, marble basins for ablutions, and this shoal of tiny portholes that allowed enough natural light to enter the chamber for women to disrobe and bathe in the nude without being spied upon by leering men.

  The city itself was also beautified. The thirteenth-century Syrian scholar and geographer, al-Dimashqi, lyrically described Gaza as ‘a city so rich in trees it looks like a cloth of brocade spread out across the land’.52 But no empire lasts for ever, and three centuries later a new regional power rose to the fore. The Ottomans emerged from one of the Turkish principalities and captured Constantinople in 1453. Their leader, Selim I (nicknamed ‘Selim the Grim’), marched into Syria, capturing Gaza en route to the more important regional prize of Egypt – where he took the title, ‘Caliph of Islam’. Selim’s empire stretched across the Muslim world, and Gaza was sucked into the Ottoman province of Syria.

  When I emerge from the steps of the hammam, the street feels cold and lonely. I am expected at Saida’s house for supper and decide to walk there – it is only about fifteen minutes away. I cross the busy street beside Souq al-Zawiya. Avoiding the crowds as best I can, I stroll down a narrow hill passing by a school and come to a roundabout where a single tree stands almost defiant, spanning the width of the small roundabout. This is the local landmark of Sidra – legend has it that a famous and beloved sheikh was buried beneath this tree long ago, and for that reason alone this tree can never be cut down.

  Walking along Jaffa
Street, I soon reach the red gate that marks the courtyard where Saida and her family live, behind a local pottery workshop. The courtyard smells of paint and varnish, but the workshop lights are out. I enter Saida’s building, climb the dark stairs and knock on the front door of her home. Maha comes to the door.

  ‘Marhaba. My sister is not here; she is downstairs, visiting Muhammad.’

  ‘Ah – do you think it would be OK if I went downstairs to say hello to him?’

  I have never actually met her cousin Muhammad. Maha shrugs her narrow shoulders.

  ‘Leeysh-la? (Why not?)’

  I go back down one flight of stairs and knock on the door to my left. The girl who opens it resembles Maha – after all, they’re cousins. This is the home of Saida’s father’s brother and his family, including Muhammad, the young man whose legs were sliced off during the war.

  ‘Is Saida here?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Come inside.’

  She leads me through the dim apartment to a back bedroom, where Saida is sitting with her cousin. He is lying in bed, a blanket pulled up to his waist, concealing the stumps of his legs. On the wall above the bed is a large poster of Hamas. Saida is sitting on the other side of the narrow room.

  ‘Habibti!’ She stands to greet me and we kiss each other. I have not seen her so much these last few weeks, we have both been so distracted by work. I’ve missed her, and am looking forward to spending the evening with her and Hind and Maha. I don’t have much time left, and want to spend as much of it with them as I can.

  ‘This is my cousin Muhammad,’ she introduces me to the young man lying in bed. I step forward to shake his hand, but he shakes his head, placing his hand over his heart. Ah, he is one of the pious young men who don’t shake hands with women.

  ‘I’m so sorry about what happened to you,’ I say, sitting down beside Saida.

  Muhammad looks at me; he is a slender young man, 19 years old, with a thin face and an indoor complexion. He surprises me with an almost bashful smile.

  ‘Shukran. Inshallah, the doctors will be able to help me.’

  God willing, I think to myself. Thousands of Gazans have been maimed and injured in this war and the chances of them receiving the specialist medical treatment they need are minimal. Israel continues to restrict patients’ access to hospitals outside Gaza.

  ‘Muhammad was studying in university before the war,’ says Saida.

  When she first told me what had happened to her cousin, she cried, but now she’s dry-eyed though her voice is flat with dismay. We always think these tragedies are going to happen to someone else.

  ‘What were you studying?’ I ask Muhammad.

  ‘Physical education. I was training to be a sports teacher.’

  There is a small pause, and then the three of us, all at the same moment, begin to laugh.

  the mathaf

  Across the Strip, especially in the north and in Gaza City, where the war was at its most brutal, people are stoically rebuilding their homes and their lives. Visiting all these different communities makes me appreciate more keenly how people on the edges of Gaza, the farmers and the Bedouin – and those in the cramped refugee camps – live so apart from the rest. I feel like I’m peeling through layers of small different worlds that co-exist inside Gaza, while still musing on the past and its imprints on the present. Most of the people I meet through my work are just trying to survive day by day; my amateur inquiries into Gaza’s ancient history are of little interest to them, especially now. I need to leave Gaza very soon, but before I go, I want to talk to someone who is passionate about history and find out what it means to them.

  And this is how I come to be sitting with Jawdat al-Khoudari, the owner of the only mathaf (museum) in Gaza, one afternoon in early spring, trying to gauge his opinion on history. But this meeting is not going to plan at all.

  ‘Why am I interested in history?’ Jawdat looks at me and blinks slowly like an ox. ‘Why are you wearing green and white today? It is about personal preferences, nothing more.’

  ‘But you’ve spent years excavating and restoring Gaza artifacts – why is history such a passion for you?’ I ask.

  Another pause, then: ‘You know, I decided a while ago that I was not going to talk to any more foreigners. You ask too many questions.’

  ‘So why did you agree to meet me today?’

  ‘I made a mistake,’ he says politely.

  Jawdat is slow and ponderous, with a Gazan accent as thick as his waistline. He is an engineer with his own construction company, and the best-known historian-cum-archaeologist in the Strip. He’s been preserving local history here since the mid-1980s, when he began collecting stones from old buildings which were being demolished to make space for new ones. He began excavating artifacts too and buying them from other construction crews. Over the years he has unearthed hordes of ancient treasures – pottery from 3,500 BC, Roman columns, Egyptian masks, Hellenistic wine jars and early Islamic tiles. Eventually he built this mathaf, overlooking the sea just north of Gaza City, to house some of his best finds.53 The mathaf opened in the autumn of last year, complete with an outdoor café where a stream trickles between the wooden tables – and an indoor restaurant, where sections of wooden sleepers from the old Gaza railway track have been recycled into columns and beams.

  Jawdat and I are sitting in the mathaf restaurant now, drinking cappuccinos. It is a big, elegant space filled with plants and natural light. After weeks of visiting smashed-up homes and grieving families, it feels restful, and totally surreal. I’m trying to talk to Jawdat about his work and his love of history – but having invited me here today, he doesn’t really seem to want to tell me anything.

  ‘Are you still excavating Gazan artifacts?’ I ask him, lighting another cigarette. He gives me another long, searching look … and says nothing. I try again:

  ‘Look – why is Gaza’s history so important? Why does it matter so much anyway?’

  I am trying to provoke a reaction from him, but I’m asking myself this same question. Gaza is one of the oldest stories in the world. But its histories have been neglected and destroyed, treated as though they are almost worthless. So are these remains only meaningful for academics, collectors and curious writers?

  But now Jawdat is staring at me like I have just sworn filthily at him.

  ‘Are you trying to make me nervous? Look at us, our situation – what’s the basis of our conflict with Israel?’

  ‘The history of who this land belongs to …?’

  He leans forward, his big hands extended towards me.

  ‘The whole story of Gaza is history – and history matters because Israel has claimed history as its own, to prove its case. Our history is evidence of our roots here on this land. Just look around you. I am telling you now: if you don’t know the history, then you don’t know anything of this place.’

  This is the most that he has said since we sat down. Now I fall silent because I want him to continue speaking. Jawdat is taking his time. I can hear him thinking.

  ‘Yes, the Jews have claimed the history of this land as theirs,’ he says without looking at me. ‘But listen to me … they are just the new occupiers. I ask you something: in 200 years, how will the history books record Israel’s occupation of us?’ He holds a thick thumb and index finger just a few centimetres apart. ‘It will take up this much space in the history books. One sentence. Like nothing.’

  ‘Because all Gaza’s history has been occupation?’

  ‘Exactly. And our history is the evidence of the great civilisation of Gaza. I have found coins, you know, dating from 450 to 430 BC. We were minting our own silver coins back then.54 And I tell you now, if Israel wants to settle this conflict by bringing archaeologists to find out who this land belongs to historically, then I will say to them, “‘Itfadalouh – Please, come and see for yourselves!”’

  Zionists claim that Jews have always been present in historic Palestine. But for successive centuries there was no Jewish population
in Gaza. The only direct Israelite rule of Gaza in antiquity was the Hasmonean dynasty, in 145 BC, which lasted for just over a century (even then, the Gaza Jews were probably a minority of the local population). A Jewish community did settle in Rafah in the ninth and tenth centuries, and again in the twelfth century – when a community of Samaritans was also based in Rafah. Most of the Jews, however, left Gaza after Napoleon’s brief 1799 conquest of the Strip, which also ignited European interest in the region. Zionist Jews began to immigrate to Palestine from the late nineteenth century, often fleeing persecution. By the start of the British Mandate in 1918, however, Jews made up just 5 per cent of the population of Palestine.

  ‘Do you think Gazans really know their own history?’ I ask Jawdat.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he says, more vehemently this time. ‘The people here, they said this December 2008 war was the most terrible ever in Gaza. But’ – he looks me straight in the eye – ‘this was nothing! You think about all the wars before – like the First World War and the thousands of people who died here then and the mass destruction of buildings. This war was nothing.’

  I know what he means – compared to previous Gaza wars, this one was bloody and quick. But still shattering.

  imagining A. Love

  Almost three months after I returned to Gaza, some people tell me they believe it is time to move on from the war, while others say Gaza will never get over what the war ripped out of them. I am also a different person from the woman who arrived here almost a year and a half ago. Life has been so full-on, so vivid and intense, and though I feel exhausted, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But my time here is nearly over, for now. My interviews are complete and I have just finished my report for the Centre. The director has made it clear that I’m welcome to stay and continue working with them. I have lots of friends here, and though I don’t have a lover any more, I would find another. But then I remember Wafa’, the lovely muhajaba with attitude, saying to me over a coffee one afternoon, ‘Louisa, you told me you wanted to leave Gaza while you still love it, so I think you should go now.’