A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  Throughout the Strip small ragged dark-green flags hang from electricity poles or are strung as bunting across busy streets – reminders that Hamas Rules OK. The IDF have left many speed bumps on the reasonably well-maintained roads. These explain a low accident rate despite the popular Palestinian belief that if Allah doesn’t want you to die you can get away with breaking all the rules. In Gaza City the dominant continuous sound is of motors hooting, loudly and continuously; private car ownership is rare, yet a Gazan conviction that vehicles won’t move unless fingers are kept on horns gives an aural impression of heavy traffic.

  The driver’s excitable friend got off near Bureij camp, the others were delivered to apartment blocks near my destination – Rimal district, which retains many traces of poshness. Because the kind driver had been busy on his mobile, the whole adult al-Helou family stood smiling on the pavement outside their front door: Nabil and Nermeen, their married son Khalil and his wife Amal, their unmarried son Mehat. (Two other married sons have long been settled in Europe.) The al-Helous are ‘native’ Gazans, rooted on the Strip for uncountable generations. Their four-storey family home, pleasingly Ottoman-influenced, has been divided into flats and everyone escorted me to the top floor, roomy enough for a family of six – at the other end of the comfort scale from my Balata squat on the West Bank. Astonishment was expressed because I wouldn’t be using the microwave, the washing machine or the iron. Also some relief: electricity cuts wouldn’t bother me too much. However, as in many otherwise luxurious non-Western homes, the most important mod con was missing: a bedside light.

  In the elders’ flat a ‘Welcome to Gaza’ meal awaited me and at the time seemed almost embarrassingly lavish. I was to discover that all Nermeen’s meals are equally lavish and memorable. Cooking, she explained, is her main hobby. Whereupon Nabil corrected her, preferring to describe his wife’s dishes as works of art.

  I was asleep before dark; it had been quite a gruelling day.

  * * *

  Waking at dawn, for a moment I fancied myself back in Cuba. The only sound was the brisk clip-clopping of horse traffic as farmers drove their produce to market. My bedroom window overlooked a mature olive grove and a small, surprisingly green lawn with flowery borders. Next door lived a Christian family, also ‘natives’ and lifelong friends of the al-Helous. ‘It’s sad,’ Nabil had said, ‘that by now most Christians have left Gaza.’

  Soon after my return from a walk in the cool of the morning, through dreary littered streets, Atef rang – oddly, this being his first day at home. ‘Is OK I show you Gaza now? Only today I have. My father goes for long treatment to al-Shifa hospital – kidney cleaning. I leave him there, then find you living near it. At 9.30 is OK?’

  By 9.30 I was waiting on the pavement, chatting to Khalil and two of his friends who chanced to be passing. When Atef flung his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks all three young men hastily turned away before I could do introductions. (Khalil later commented that it’s easy to forget how to behave during a long exile in Westernised Cairo.) Unaware of his solecism, Atef led me around the corner to father’s car, a new Volvo imported though a tunnel and looking aggressively affluent in contrast to Gaza’s average vehicle. I would not have chosen to glean my first impressions from the cool comfort of a walnut-panelled limousine but I do believe in ‘letting things happen’. And our tour proved illuminating. My companion, home for the first time since 2002, reacted with mixed and sometimes disconcerting emotions to the many profound changes. Politically he seemed a babe in arms and when I provided current facts and figures, based on my recent homework, they didn’t really interest him.

  Before switching on the engine Atef switched on a gadget displaying numerous pictures of his daughter Mira, then aged seven months and one week. She had, it seemed, been photographed several times a day since birth. Skirting Beach/Shatti camp we drove along wide, dismal al-Nasser Street where Israel’s blockade has killed businesses that were still alive – if only just – before the Second Intifada began in 2000. Mingling with the motor vehicles were scores of horse- and donkey-carts, most animals well-fed, the more shapely Arab horses groomed to a glossiness not usually associated with draught animals in poor communities. Atef looked puzzled when I admired the cart-drivers’ skill, and their animals’ remarkable adaptability, and the motorists’ intelligent coping with these equine rivals for space. He glared at a horse’s ear, three inches from his window, and said, ‘Soon I hope we ban these carts. They are uncivilised and wrong in a modern city. On the West Bank you don’t see this.’ He ignored my riposte that, given polar ice-caps in meltdown, animal transport is the only sensible way forward, its waste fertilising the earth instead of polluting the air.

  This was a day of blurred vignettes – mere glimpses of camp-slums where malnourished children swarm, of unexpected stretches of empty golden beaches (why were the children not frolicking there?) and of war-degraded fields where women labour in the midday heat wearing garments prescribed by fundamentalist bullies.

  Arriving at the far end of the Strip from Rafah, we paused near the closed Erez crossing to survey the site of Gaza’s vast Ottoman-era government building, one of Operation Cast Lead’s earliest targets. There I noted Asef’s (self-protective?) detachment from his birthplace. As a boy he had often visited those offices with his father. Now he seemed to view that shockingly empty bomb site almost as a tourist attraction.

  Before the First Intifada in 1987, Israel officially employed some 45,000 Gazan day-workers and an estimated 10,000 more who, lacking permits, could be extra-severely exploited. At least 30 per cent of those ‘illegals’ were adolescents. Permit holders received approximately one-third of the Israelis’ minimum wage. Before the Second Intifada, 30,000 or so workers crossed every day at Erez, a number reduced to 2,000 or less by July 2005, the date of the ‘withdrawal’. Since June 2007 only Israeli-approved VIPs and NGO employees and some urgent medical cases (with the right connections) have been allowed through.

  Erez’s grimly militaristic infrastructure includes one passageway for labourers and petty traders and another for the elite. Those neglected buildings and their IDF-ravaged environs seem to symbolise the cruel futility of ‘collective punishment’. At a pole-barrier two semi-uniformed, short-bearded Hamas policemen spurned Atef’s attempt to engage them in friendly conversation. Gesturing angrily, they shouted something my companion declined to translate. As he hastily backed, turned and jolted away on a tank-torn surface, I could see figures moving within an IDF watchtower sporting outsize Israeli flags.

  Soon we were passing a cluster of abandoned factories, once attached to an Israeli settlement and employing more than 3,000 from nearby camps. Then, briefly, we got lost in territory that would have been forbidden to Palestinians before the ‘withdrawal’. Our rough rocky track traversed a desolation of sand dunes and war rubble and smouldering mounds of household garbage. Here the most destitute of all Gazans somehow survive, unnoticed, amidst low, dusty bushes that half-hide ragged tents and clumsily contrived shelters – sheets of rusty tin propping each other up, with plastic sacking doors. We overtook a small skinny boy on a cantering donkey – riding bareback along the sandy verge, urging his steed on with his heels, singing loudly, a smile on his face.

  ‘See him!’ exclaimed Atef. ‘He’s happy! These Negev people don’t expect much, they’re OK in their tents.’

  I had to protest. ‘You’re forgetting something – in Gaza they can’t replace their tents or run their herds.’

  Atef wasn’t listening. Beyond a long sand dune the border fence had appeared, less than 200 yards ahead, and an IDF jeep had halted to address us through a loudhailer. Atef, looking tense, stated the obvious: ‘We must go back.’ He couldn’t understand the message but it was either a landmine warning or a threat to shoot us if we drove on. All along the fence Gazans are forbidden to use their sparse dunums (1000 square metres) of cultivable land, appropriated by the IDF as a ‘security zone’ – another of its many Orwellian phrases.


  Turning towards the coast, we detoured around sand dunes to avoid a Volvo-endangering stretch of track abused by tank traffic. Here were a few shelled ruins, two-storey dwellings semi-encircled by fire-blasted fig and lemon trees. Near one, the family was living in tents donated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Olive saplings, newly planted on their tiny patch of land – overlooked by an IDF patrol road – could not thrive for lack of water but seemed a magnificently defiant flourish. Ten days later I returned to this area on foot, with a new friend from Jabalya camp, and was shown two poisoned wells. The IDF had thrown dead dogs and cats into this more-precious-than-gold water.

  As Atef remarked, one can’t readily distinguish between Jabalya town and Jabalya camp (population about 130,000). Both look like places that shouldn’t exist in the twenty-first century. Yet the multitudinous children seemed cheerful enough, as did the old men sitting chatting in their doorways (another reminder of Cuba). However, the generations of men in between – the hopeless jobless, silently slumped wherever there was space to sit – gave off another sort of vibe. These of course were superficial impressions; Atef didn’t like my suggestion that we stop to talk and buy tea from a peripatetic chai-seller aged about ten. ‘They’ll beg if we stop,’ he objected. On my future visits to Jabalya, as a pedestrian, no one ever begged and several people bought me tea.

  ‘Gazan people make the best of things,’ continued Atef. ‘They go on living like they were in a normal country. They have weddings, play with kites, go to the beach, pretend it’s OK. Israel bombed our electricity plant in ’06 when the World Cup started. My father told me everyone invented different ways to watch – many ways! Same with tunnels, through so much dangerous sand. Gazans are good for inventing things.’

  Jabalya camp is famed for its militancy and boasts (a contested claim) that the First Intifada began here, on 9 December 1987, following the deaths of several workers in a collision with an Israeli driver near Erez. Within a day the uprising had spread throughout the OPT and it continued for more than six years. A memorial to the crash victims in a local cemetery is said to be worth seeing but Atef jibbed at trying to find the way, inching through streets blocked by carts and traders’ stalls.

  Instead we drove towards the Karni crossing, another militaristic monument visible from the Strip’s central road and approached across treeless farmland strewn with war litter. At this crucial crossing all goods entering Gaza from Israel, whatever their origin, must be inspected by Israelis. No imports are allowed by air or sea or through the Rafah Gate. Therefore Karni’s closure or malfunctioning leaves Gaza economically paralysed – not that it can ever be nimble. After the 2005 ‘withdrawal’, Karni was open for 222 days but on 166 of those only a quarter of the truck lanes functioned for limited hours. From June 2007 closure was total for a year, until the ceasefire brought about intermittent openings. Meeting no traffic, we assumed a closure – this, after all, was Naksa Day. Soon we passed a few more recently shelled houses; in the smallest, two men were struggling to repair a shattered gable end. Noticing us, they paused to shout advice. We would do well to keep away from Karni, the squad now on patrol were looking for trouble.

  ‘We go to Rafah town,’ decided Atef.

  Back on the coast road – the sea dancing brightly a few yards away, the sandy roadside vegetable fields densely green – I marvelled at the absence of any building. That evening Nabil explained: an acute shortage of fresh food made it essential to protect this fertile stretch where native Gazans maintain an ancient tradition of using morning dew to supplement an ever-dwindling water supply. Those few miles reminded us that Gaza, when normally populated, had its own sort of tranquil beauty.

  Turning inland, we drove through a few camps on the wide bisecting roads built to Sharon’s orders, causing the destruction of some 2,000 homes – mere shacks, of course, but to their occupants they were homes. In 1971 the Zionists were keen to abolish ‘refugee’ status and they rented land compulsorily from Palestinian landlords for 99 years. Then they offered the minimum of basic construction materials to any family willing to build themselves new homes and surrender their UNRWA card. I was to visit some of those families during the weeks ahead. By now many thousands have left the camps.

  Around Deir al-Balah groves and avenues of tall palms soften the camp’s bleakness. Then a dirt track winds through Israeli settlement remains, tons of weed-fringed rubble interspersed with rows of white plastic tunnels.

  ‘When I left,’ said Atef, ‘Palestinians walking here got shot.’ He remembered regularly driving past on the Area B road to visit his grandparents in Khan Younis. The settlers’ sapphire swimming pools, emerald lawns and spreading shade trees were clearly visible to thousands of their water-rationed neighbours (as is now the case on the West Bank). If Gaza has indeed become a ‘hotbed of fanatics’, why be surprised?

  Initially Israelis hesitated to move into the Strip; wherever they built, camps would be close. Then, in 1978, the Zionists, calculating that a settler presence would be useful, began to unofficially encourage (illegal) settlement. They could help to keep the maritime border with Egypt under surveillance and to disrupt inter-camp communications, thus frustrating any attempt to establish a Palestinian state on the Strip. By 2005 8,000 settlers lived in twenty farming and military units; Israel had appropriated 25 per cent of the territory of Gaza and 40 per cent of the arable land. The disproportionate cost of that occupation provided one motive for the ‘withdrawal’ – soon to be followed by the planting of 30,000 new settlers on the West Bank.

  In Rafah as in Jabalya, city and camp have, to the outsider’s eye, merged into one homogeneous deprived mass. The combined population is around 100,000 and the Volvo could advance only jerkily along broken streets heaving with people. The majority were children or adolescents, statistics come alive. Rafah has a reputation for ‘militancy’ and UNRWA records that since the beginning of the Second Intifada the IDF have demolished more than 1,700 Rafah houses, forcing 17,300 people to ‘re-locate’ – but to where …? Atef didn’t know and was shocked by this information. He now admitted that many Gazans studying abroad are unaware of – even indifferent to – events back home.

  During the ’90s Atef’s father held a business permit and took his eldest son on several trips to Israel and the West Bank, places beyond the reach of most Gazans. Atef remembered Nablus as ‘a great city, very old and famous with many rich men’. He mentioned the name of his father’s closest Nablus associate, a man reviled throughout the Casbah and Balata for selling cement to the Apartheid Barrier builders. ‘We stayed with that family,’ Atef recalled, ‘in a big new house high on a mountain. They liked all Oslo plans but they didn’t like Arafat. I think now they’re liking Mr Fayyad [PM of the PA]. It would be good if he could come to help Gaza.’

  Atef had his own positive memories of the Oslo period when the Strip’s cities and camps were freed of IDF patrols and at last Gazans were allowed to build and his father’s construction company prospered. But such uncontrolled expansion leads away from shared prosperity, a lesson Ireland has recently learned. The Second Intifada ended this boom and abruptly destitution threatened the majority, even before Israel’s blockade caused complete economic collapse.

  In 1998 Atef had attended the ceremonial opening of Gaza’s Yasser Arafat International Airport, an Oslo spin-off on the outskirts of Rafah. His father had been lucratively involved and preened himself when the foreign press described it as ‘state of the art’. Four years later Israel bombed it ‘back to the stone age’ and Atef felt curious about the site’s present use. Predictably, a pole-barrier thwarted us and its pair of policemen, sitting under a fig tree munching falafel, forbade us access to this ‘restricted industrial zone’. We could see only a few bombed houses and low sand dunes extending to both borders – Israel and Egypt. Atef looked startled when I surmised that the ‘industry’ in question was arms related. Most tunnel-transported goods come above ground in
public in broad daylight. But there are exceptions.

  Atef then announced, ‘I want to make a statistic.’ By this he meant that we would drive non-stop from Rafah Gate to Erez and see how long it took. From my point of view that frivolity was almost worthwhile. Hearing that the Strip measures 140 square miles doesn’t have the same impact as being driven its full length in one hour and fifteen minutes while realising that at its widest point one could walk from sea to fence in less than two hours.

  All morning Atef’s mother and wife had been phoning him – both in argumentative mood, judging by the length of the conversations and the controlled impatience with which he replied. However, during our drive north he talked affectionately of his family, originally from Jaffa (now in Israel) and slowly being dispersed throughout the Arab world. He was the twenty-eight-year-old eldest of eight. Next came a sister who had just graduated as a dentist and was to marry in September; she would then migrate to Abu Dhabi leaving grief-stricken parents behind. In Abu Dhabi she must work unpaid for a year while gaining experience (no doubt treating hand-picked patients) and this her father bitterly resented. A twenty-five-year-old engineer brother, as yet jobless, was to marry a month hence and Atef invited me to the wedding. It would cost about 40,000 shekels though the guest list had been pared down to 300: not excessive, given the size of Palestinian extended families. A twenty-three-year-old sister, a fledgling psychiatrist, was to be married the following year when her fiancé graduated from medical school; she would be migrating to Alexandria. Atef quoted his father: ‘Daughters are guests, must be well treated because soon they’re gone forever!’ (to my ears an ambivalent sentiment, tying in too neatly with the concept of ‘female as property’). Two brothers attended a private university in the Yemen where courses had recently been suspended until the fighting stopped. A brother and a ‘baby sister’, aged eleven, were still at school. Both would be sent to foreign universities; father reckoned Gazan degrees are now of questionable value, so severe and various are the restrictions imposed on the Strip’s four universities.