Another of the activists asks if I want to go and pick olives with them in Beit Hanoun as the harvest is just beginning. They are leaving early tomorrow morning. I really don’t feel like getting up at the crack of dawn, but manage to heave myself out of bed and go to meet them. They’ve hired a minibus and we trundle up to Beit Hanoun, where Samir, who runs the local community initiative, is waiting for us.
‘Louisa, welcome back to Gaza!’
Samir looks the same, too – those intense burning eyes; that serious smile. He has organised the olive picking, of course, and arranged another entourage of local press.
A group of us walk out of Beit Hanoun, along a track leading towards the Israeli border. I realise we are heading in the direction of the row of white cottages where the Swailams used to live. As the border looms, I can see the local landscape has changed: groves of spindly orange and olive trees have been planted, their leaves refract the light. There is a small nursery of saplings waiting to be planted. This land is being refarmed, regenerated, regrown. The last time I walked here, more than a year and a half ago, this whole area seemed to have been stripped bare, but now it looks like the farmers are slowly returning.
I wonder what the Swailam family are doing. All I know is that old Abu Jamal died during the war, apparently of old age, and that the rest of the Swailams are living in Beit Hanoun town and have never returned to their land.
I see a man with a sun-weathered face sitting beneath the shade of an awning at the side of his field; he looks at peace.
When we reach the trees where the olives are being harvested, a small crowd of local farmers have gathered and spread black nets around the base of their trees to catch the warm, dusty olives as they fall.
‘Things seem to be a bit better here,’ I say to Samir.
‘The situation is still difficult,’ he says, ‘but some of the farmers have come back, so we are here to support them.’
He never says that the situation is good, just varying shades of difficult.
‘What about the Swailams – have you seen them?’
I can see the rubble of the Swailams’ row of white cottages from this grove of trees. But there’s no sign of life, or growth, on their land.
‘Their houses, and their well, it was all destroyed during the war. They don’t farm here any more,’ he says.
The grove where we’re working is near the edge of no-man’s-land. I look over towards the Erez crossing: the tunnel with the torn tarp roof has been replaced by a cage that stretches across no-man’s-land, connecting the two sides of the crossing.
We work for a while, then most of us slump under the shade of the trees to rest. Except for the farmers and their sons, who keep working away in the sun-pulsing heat. These are tenacious men who have returned to their destroyed fields to replant them, over and again. Theirs is such a quiet, powerful act; not like the Gazan fighters still sometimes flinging their impotent rockets towards Israel, then scuttling back home. Empires and occupiers may come and go, but ordinary people’s love for, and connection to, their land has the deepest roots of all.
I have to leave the olive harvest around midday because I’m meeting a friend back in Gaza City. Wiping my sweaty, dirty hands on my trousers, I wave to Samir, the farmers and the activists and stroll back towards the road. As I pass the sun-weathered farmer still sitting at the side of his field, he hails me and asks if I would like a glass of water. I sit in the shade beside him and he hands me a cup filled from his well.
‘We are trying to replant our garden,’ he says. ‘God willing, we will have orchards here again.’
He used to be a Fatah bigwig, he says, but these days he has retired from useless politics and prefers to tend his fields in peace.
‘I stay away from Hamas and their spies; they don’t come up here.’
Locals murmur that Hamas is recruiting local spies. Last night I heard people in the Galleria joking that there are two kinds of zanana inside Gaza these days: the unmanned aerial drones in the sky, and local Hamas informants with their ears to the ground.
I ask if the farmer knows anything about the Swailams. They have haunted me at times since I left Gaza and I can’t imagine how they are surviving now. The old Fatah chief gives me the Gaza shrug.
‘Only Jamal Swailam sometimes comes up here, I never see the rest of them.’
We sit and smoke a cigarette together and look out over the fields. I’ve always appreciated Gazan farmers’ brevity of words. Just as I am thinking that it really is time to leave, a man cycles past slowly on a bicycle that looks much too small for him because he is overweight, almost bloated. But as the old chief raises his hand in greeting, I realise who this is.
‘Jamal!’
I charge towards him. Jamal dismounts from his bicycle. We shake hands.
‘How are you?’ I demand.
He stands silently, shielding his eyes from the sun. Then says, ‘We lost everything in the war … Now we live in the town. There is no money, the Israelis destroyed our house, our land, our well. We have no water so we cannot grow anything now.’
I look at his bloated face and can’t think of anything to say.
Jamal dips his hand into the basket on the front of his bicycle and pulls out a small, hard guava. He presses it into my hand. After meeting Jamal, I call my old friend Tariq, who still works for the UN. I ask if he knows anyone who can help Jamal gain access to his land and maybe rebuild the well. I know the UN has assisted some of the neighbouring farmers. Tariq says he’ll see what he can do. If the UN cannot help, then maybe, he says, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) can.
Two days later Tariq calls me back.
‘Habibti, I’m sorry but the ICRC couldn’t even go onto his land. It’s too dangerous. He is too close to the border, they cannot help him.’
I remember the tired, defeated look in Jamal’s eyes.
‘Doesn’t the UN here have a local job creation scheme?’
‘Yes,’ Tariq says with some uncertainty.
‘Do you think they can find some paid work for him?’
‘OK, look, I’ll see what I can do,’ he says.
He calls me back the next afternoon.
‘Habibti, I asked about work for Jamal. That job-creation scheme: the only available work they have is as a road sweeper earning $8 a day.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No, habibti, I’m sorry. There is still no other work.’
Abu Nidal goes first class to Cairo
It is good to be back inside Gaza, seeing my friends, and my colleagues from the Centre. But it is different this time in so many ways, especially the sad, flat atmosphere and the festering resentment against Hamas – who are still keeping tabs on me. Whenever I go up to Beit Hanoun or down to Rafah, my friends receive unwelcome phone calls from Hamas security, demanding to know who I’ve been visiting. (One afternoon I realise I’m being followed; but the plain-clothed spook behind me is such an obvious tail, I find it quite funny. Eventually bored with my meandering, he cuts across my path and asks a few inane questions about what I am doing in Gaza, etc. Then he scarpers.)
Hamas is tightening restrictions on women’s lives, torturing political opponents, harassing youth workers, local human rights activists and independent journalists – anyone who does not obediently tow their political line – and morphing into the paranoid Islamic bully that most of the outside world always said it was. I barely hear anyone say a good word about them. People criticise them in hushed voices. ‘Of course I like Hamas!’ one of the al-Deira waiters tells me when I ask him how things are going. Then, dropping his voice, he mutters, at a volume only I can hear: ‘Now we are frightened of them, you know.’ Gaza, for me, has become a more sombre and resigned place. I miss the friendly fawdah that used to permeate these streets.
Amid the sadness washing around me, I’m also seeing Gaza with new eyes, now that I know something of its history. I hone in on fragments and details that I was completely blind to when I first arrived here, almost thre
e years ago. A small example: one morning I am in the old quarter of the city, just about to enter Souq al-Zawiya to buy fruit and veg (then over to neighbouring Souq al-Bastat, for a new stash of glittering, see-through lingerie). Waiting to cross the busy street into al-Zawiya, I glance up, admiring the buildings opposite – they are some of the oldest still standing in Gaza. The building directly across the street from me has ‘The Municipality of Gaza’ engraved in English, high across its façade. I’ve walked along this street so many times, but never even noticed these words before. I cross the street and stand gazing up at it. A Hamas policeman slouched on a chair at the entrance to the building is texting on his jawaal. And watching me …
‘It’s in English,’ I say to him, pointing upwards and stating the bleeding obvious.
‘Yes – from when you British occupiers were here,’ he retorts, going back to his text.
After buying my fruit and vegetables, and before browsing for lingerie, I go in search of another fragment of local history. There used to be a train station here in the old quarter, and someone has told me you can still see a few metres’ remnants of the original track. I wander round and ask a few locals if they know where the old train track is. But no one seems to know. After an hour, I am parched with thirst but none the wiser.
The track remnant I’m looking for was part of a line laid by Egyptian and British forces in early 1917 to transport weapons, supplies and men between north-eastern Egypt and Gaza, bolstering their campaign against the Ottoman Turkish forces in Palestine. The Ottomans were holding the Palestinian border against the British and Egyptians advancing north – and had been relying on camel caravans to transport military supplies from Constantinople. So Jamal Pasha, one of the three Young Turk rulers of the Ottoman Empire (and known among local Arabs as al-Safah, the Blood-Shedder), enlisted a German engineer to construct a rail track linking the existing northern Jerusalem– Jaffa railway – the first in Palestine – to the southern Negev desert. Heinrich August Meissner obliged as the Germans and the Ottoman Turks were allies. The new railway had two branch lines: one reached Beersheba in the Negev, the other extended to Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.
British rule in Palestine started immediately after their victory in the third battle for Gaza. But the League of Nations did not formally mandate the British to replace the Ottomans as the ‘peacetime administrator of Gaza’ until April 1920. By then, the British had extended their railway line for deliveries of post-war supplies into southern Palestine – accompanied by fresh water piped all the way from the River Nile to Gaza. By the spring of 1920, Palestine Railways was offering passengers: ‘Rapid and comfortable travelling facilities to all parts of Palestine […] equipped with modern Passenger Coaches, Sleeping and Dining Cars, Day and Night Saloons, Luxurious Tourist Trains specially arranged.’ You could catch the train from Haifa in northern Palestine to El-Qantara (‘the Bridge’) on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, from there take a ferry across the canal and hop aboard a train bound for Cairo. By 1942, you could take the train from Cairo to Gaza, continue northwards to Haifa, then make your way via the city of Acre to Beirut, then Aleppo in Syria, and on to the Baghdad Railway that terminated at Basra.
This train journey between Gaza and Cairo intrigues me because it is unimaginable now – even though it used to be part of the local scenery. Trains are one of life’s great pleasures; but this journey has been extinguished as Gaza slowly spins backwards in time. I want to meet somebody who caught the train from Gaza to Cairo, so I ask my friends if they know anyone who used to hop aboard.
Gaza is littered with stumbling blocks, but finding ordinary people with extraordinary stories is not one of them. Two days later, I am sitting in a pale drawing-room on the southern edge of Gaza City. The windows are open wide, the sea air cooling and freshening the room a little. I’m in the company of an elderly Bedouin, Sheikh Al-Whaidi. He sits upright in his armchair, his loose-skinned left hand resting on a smooth walking cane and his thin voice wavering slightly as he recalls the old days, when he used to catch the train to Cairo every month.
Imagine that it is early springtime in 1963. Sheikh Al-Whaidi (almost fifty years younger and known then as Abu Nidal) is the financial director of the Palestine News. He lives in Gaza City with his family, but has regular business in Cairo. Abu Nidal always takes the train and always travels first class. A first-class ticket costs 3 Egyptian pounds and 60 piastres (then the equivalent of US$10) compared to just 1 Egyptian pound for a second-class ticket. But the first-class carriages are air-conditioned, with big black leather seats and smooth wood panelling. In second class you just get wooden seats, no air conditioning – and a face full of sand from the open windows.
There is one train a day from Gaza to Cairo, says Abu Nidal. It leaves at 6 AM from the station at al-Tuffah, on the eastern side of the city. This is the only station big enough for trains to turn around, so it has become the main Gaza rail hub, handling both freight and passenger trains. The other Gaza City station, at Shaja’iya, in the old quarter, the one that I was looking for, is just for passengers.
It is a long journey to Cairo, more than 340 miles, about twelve hours by train. It’s much quicker by car, but this road is notorious for accidents as drivers pelt across the eastern Sinai. The train is slower but safer.
Abu Nidal arrives at aI-Tuffah station early, buys his first-class ticket and puts his overnight bag on the top rack above his comfy leather seat. The train sets off just after six in the morning. The guards and staff are all Egyptian. They wear uniforms and peaked caps. There is a small canteen serving drinks and snacks on the train and plenty of passengers on board: businessmen like Abu Nidal in dark suits, Gazan families visiting friends or relatives in Egypt, or just taking a day trip. Gazan students, too, on their way back to Alexandria University – the young men in trousers and open-neck shirts, the women in blouses and loose trousers or knee-length skirts, their dark hair pinned up or flowing loose around their shoulders. Oh yes, women dress like this in Gaza in 1963. It is another of those precious times when everything feels possible.
The train trundles south, following the route of Salah al-Din Road, occasionally curving from one side of the road to the other. It stops to pick up passengers at Deir al-Balah in the middle area of Gaza, then in Khan Younis. All the way to Rafah, the track is lined with groves of orange and lemon trees and Abu Nidal enjoys the sight of ripening vines, too, like the dunams of rich, dark grape vines that grow behind his house in Al-Sheikh Ejleen, on the southern edge of Gaza City.
The train picks up passengers in Rafah, too. But the moment it crosses the border and leaves Gaza, the land is transformed into an arid desertscape of sand dunes, camels, black Bedouin tents and scrubby, buckled-by-the-wind trees with deep, thirsty roots.
Because it is 1963, and Egypt is still ‘administering’ Gaza (what a benign word for a military occupation!), there is no passport check until the train reaches El-Qantara. Gazans travel on Palestinian documents issued by the Egyptian government; a privilege from their serial invader. Now the track skirts a shallow desert lake known as ‘al-Bedawiya’ because so many Bedouin camp here between Gaza and al-Arish, with their scrawny goats and barefoot, tangle-haired children. Abu Nidal is from the al-Tarabin Bedouin tribe, but he is a wealthy, urban Bedouin and didn’t grow up in the traditional woollen black Bedouin tent, or beit shar.
A few miles past the lake, Abu Nidal looks up from his newspaper. He can feel the train braking and knows that he will soon catch a glimpse of blue, bright as lapis lazuli, as the track dips towards the Mediterranean coastline at al-Arish. This local resort is popular with both Egyptians and Gazans because of its beautiful long sweep of beach, decked with seaside chalets and restaurants. After picking up passengers at al-Arish, the train curves inland again, then snakes southwards through the Sinai. Here, away from the sea, the land is dry and cruel and the people who live here are literally dirt poor. The Gazans pity them.
The city of El-Qantara sprawls across the east bank o
f the 164-kilometre-long Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas (when the canal opened in 1869, there was no bridge). The train grinds to a halt at El-Qantara and Egyptian officials clamber aboard to check that the passengers’ papers and travel documents are in order. But even for the Gazans, this is a mere formality. The passengers gather up their bags, and children, then disembark en masse, crowding onto a ferry that chugs them over the murky canal waters to the west bank. This is where the journey often gets delayed, waiting for the ferry, or for the train that is supposed to meet the passengers on the west bank. But today Abu Nidal and his fellow travellers are lucky. When the ferry docks, their connecting train is waiting.
Once on board the second train, Abu Nidal stretches out in his seat, newspaper crumpled in his lap, and dozes off to the steady rhythm of the carriage.
It is another four or five hours before the train finally pulls into Bab el-Hadid (Iron Gate) station in central Cairo. When they arrive, dusk is descending but the early springtime air is still warm. As Abu Nidal and the others clamber down onto the platform, they are hit by the stench of body odour, hot food, rotting leftovers, piss, rancid fumes and stale air.
Bab el-Hadid is a seething ant colony; there are passengers, guards, deft pickpockets, touts, tourists, black Sudanese, some blotchy white Europeans, even Russians (President Nasser is courting the Soviets), Egyptian merchants, shouting pedlars, local prostitutes, wily beggars, infested street children, Arab women adorned in gold, bearded imams and Christian Copts. Abu Nidal threads his weary way through this overwhelming crush. He has to be at the office early tomorrow morning.
‘Did you always enjoy the journey?’ I ask.
‘Taba’n (Absolutely)! You know, we always arrived with our coats covered in dust and sand, even in first class! I enjoyed the train, and Cairo too. But home is home. After a few days or a week, I was always ready to come straight back to Gaza.’
I know what he means. Every morning now I feel the magnetic pull north, towards the place I call home.
Meet Me in Gaza Page 23