A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  Cautiously we ascended the semi-shattered cement stairway to two little bedrooms, one with an intact bauble-decorated dressing table against a half-demolished wall. The children’s mattress on the floor was heavily blood-stained. Beyond the ‘buffer zone’ two army jeeps were visible, trailing dust along the ridge. From the closest watchtower a soldier – doubtless angered by Tom’s filming – yelled through a megaphone before firing a shot in the air. In December 2010 the kitchen opposite had been hit by a solitary shell which just missed the cooking gas cylinder.

  At the foot of the stairs we sat on stools of concrete blocks while the brothers boiled a tea kettle on their Primus stove; they were camping beside their mother. Three of her twelve children were dead, another three were being held without charge in Israeli detention camps. As we talked a helicopter gunship flew low enough to stop the conversation and the army jeeps reappeared. Then Tom asked Naser, ‘How can you go on living here, never knowing when the next attack will come?’ Quietly Naser replied that after all his family’s efforts to buy land and build a home no one could intimidate them into moving. This is a Palestinian quality not understood by Zionists, comprised of courage, obstinacy and a calm sort of pride. The IDF have the weaponry, the Palestinians have samoud.

  Naser was a tall, well-built man, clean-shaven and dressed in his best for the video but looking much older than his years. He began to limp slightly while escorting us back to the taxi; it was parked beside three rudimentary tents holding four single beds donated by an Islamic charity. Here lived most of the family and the two convalescent children sat together on a bed, playing with a string of beads, the scar still visible on Alaa Adin’s scalp. Courtesy required us to wait for Naser’s new wife to brew tiny cups of Turkish coffee with a kick like a mule. As a drone passed overhead, and three more jeeps patrolled the ridge, Naser drew our attention to newly planted olive saplings, replacing a grove bulldozed in 2008. An adjacent bushy patch half-hid the village’s communal beehives. Gazan honey is superb and I was paying the equivalent of £11.50 per kilo in the Rimal grocery store. These villagers sold their harvest, in bulk, for little more than £3 per kilo.

  In 2005 the ‘withdrawing’ IDF declared a ‘free-fire’ buffer zone, some 500 metres wide, on Gaza’s side of the border. After Cast Lead this was extended to a kilometre or so, encompassing 30 per cent of the Strip’s cultivable land. ‘Free-fire’ means Israeli soldiers can shoot, without warning, any who venture into the zone. Of necessity many Gazans take this risk and among farmers and rubble collectors the death toll has been high. ISM-ers regularly accompany such families and remain close to them all day, making random murder less likely. The international reaction to the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall (ISM-ers killed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003) affords foreigners a degree of protection.

  The Strip’s ISM-ers, like their West Bank comrades, also support the weekly non-violent protests held at strategic points. In northern Gaza a talented group of activists organises Tuesday demos not far from Erez. ‘Local Initiative Beit Hanoun’ also run educational and cultural events; they attribute their high energy level to memories of a November night in 2006 when an artillery shell killed nineteen sleeping Beit Hanounians. On that occasion the IDF apologised – ‘a faulty target device’, the shell had been aimed at a nearby rocketeers’ base.

  One Tuesday morning I joined the ISM-ers. We were first at the meeting point on the northern edge of Beit Hanoun outside a bombed Agricultural Research College where a lone donkey wandered through the rubble finding a weed here and there. Within the next hour serveeces delivered a few score young men and a dozen young women, several carrying megaphones. Sitting in the limited shade of a crumbling wall I talked to a petite twenty-year-old wearing jeans and a carelessly tied hijab. At intervals she stood up to shout – ‘I hate non-violence!’ With relish she mentioned the previous week’s casualty, a young man kneecapped by IDF forces from a watchtower.

  Eventually the ‘Local Initiative’ minivan arrived, driven by an older man with an air of authority. He distributed yellow jackets and supervised everyone’s possessions – apart from megaphones and flags – being stowed in the van. Then our noisy, flag-waving march, led by three brothers carrying a sheet-sized banner, straggled down a rough slope, past a noisome smouldering garbage dump, along a laneway between prickly pear hedges – now within sight and earshot of IDF watchtowers. Our chanting became more defiant as we crossed a field of thorny scrub brightened by a tall weed with golden flowers – land no longer cultivated, so many local farmers had been shot. As we stood in a line on a long ridge of earth, some 500 metres from the fence, there was no reaction: nothing and no one moved on the army road or in the watchtowers. My companions began to look a little foolish and turned up the volume on their taunting chant – apparently calculated to provoke a response which could later be rightly described as ‘excessive’. Soon we retreated – more slowly, in small groups – and Tom teased me. This anti-climax was all my fault: seeing an ancient female International, the IDF chose to hold their fire.

  On the West Bank I had felt uneasy about certain ISM-ers and other Internationals who seemed too eager for angry confrontations to ‘enhance’ their video albums. Sometimes I wondered – do these set-piece protests, often attended by small groups of sympathetic Israelis, achieve anything? The publicity generated has slightly benefited a few communities but such demos can’t Stop the Wall – or halt house demolitions – or curb settler outrages. Since 2008 they have been organised by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC) which since October 2009 has been receiving from the PA a monthly subsidy of 50,000 shekels – adding up to US$125,000 annually. However, I felt no such reservations on the Strip, where the ISM-ers I met were protecting fishermen at sea and farmers in the buffer zone – an enterprise very different from ‘professional’ demonstrating.

  As we passed the reeking garbage, tons were being loaded into three metal trucks (Second World War models) for transport to – where? Nobody knew. Perhaps to be dumped offshore because Beit Hanounians had complained about the fumes.

  An al-Azhar student wearing a Freedom Flotilla T-shirt overtook me and introduced himself as Mehat. He talked of Vik, recalling that in 2009 a US right-wing website had issued death threats against the ‘Jew-hater’, giving details of how to find him. In exchange, I recalled Juliano Mer-Khamis’s reference, when I spoke with him a few months before his assassination, to death threats from Salafists within Jenin camp – thugs who reviled him for running a ‘mixed’ theatre group. Mehat feared for all ISM-ers, given the resurgence of extremism in Israel, in the US and among Palestinians themselves. Unlike NGO employees, ISM-ers are not controlled by bosses attentive to advice from wimpish governments. They can take risks when compassion seems to demand courage rather than prudence – and so they have their own ‘martyrs’. Mehat also spoke of his (and Vik’s) close friend Sharyn Lock, who worked 20 hours a day as a paramedic throughout Cast Lead, sometimes riding in ‘uncoordinated’ ambulances. Her understated record of those 22 days (Gaza Beneath the Bombs, written with Sarah Irving) must surely become the classic account of Israel’s shame.

  Our rickety serveece paused in Beit Hanoun’s centre to pick up three youths and a Canadian woman volunteer who sat on Mehat’s lap in the front passenger seat. Now the taxi was comically overloaded – everybody sitting on somebody else – and soon our survival seemed to me rather unlikely. Rebel songs were played, all the Gazans loudly joining in, and the driver often took both hands off the wheel to conduct an imaginary band as we dodged through the Strip’s erratic mix of horse and motor vehicles. Mohammed later remarked that such episodes of reckless jollity are part of the Palestinians’ coping mechanism.

  * * *

  When Alexander conquered the Strip in 332 BC, Gaza’s port had long served as one of Persia’s most important harbours. Now it is a sad, stagnant place, the nearby luxury hotels seeming to mock its dereliction. Pairs of Hamas naval policemen sit outside a hut by the wide gateway, not needing
to look vigilant. On the opposite walls graffiti artists have painted portraits of Vik, for years among the most daring escorts of Gazan fishermen. On various occasions he was arrested at sea, wounded, imprisoned, deported. When I wore my commemorative T-shirt the police cheered.

  Strolling around the almost-deserted harbour, I noticed numerous small bullet-holed fishing vessels. One sun-blackened grandad wore a short ragged beard and a ravelling woollen cap on tousled grey curls. He spoke basic English and pointed to a dismantled engine belonging to his son – a father of nine, dependent on fishing. The engine had been badly damaged within the three-mile limit; repairs would cost 3,000 shekels – an unattainable sum, unless the hard-pressed al-Tawfiq Fishermen’s Co-op could help. Yet grandad assured me that not all Israeli sailors are bad, some treat you fairly … I often marvelled at this willingness, on the part of older Palestinians, to give Israelis their due – if earned.

  Gaza’s 40,000 or so fishermen are not refugees, therefore don’t qualify for UNRWA support. Yet the blockade has reduced them to destitution. Their average annual catch used to be around 3,000 tons, now it is less than 500. Families who were earning about £350 a month, before the Second Intifada, now earn less than £80. The traditional deep-sea fishing in international waters has been illegally forbidden by Israel. Boats must keep within a six-mile limit – often diminished, in practice, to three miles. Israel’s navy is even more blatantly aggressive than its army if it even suspects the limits have been crossed. Nets are ripped to bits and explosives often used to disperse a shoal as crews make to draw in their catch. Boats are regularly rammed – or all lights may be shattered, causing the craft to drift off course. This can provide a pretext for arresting the crew, destroying their equipment and impounding their vessel. Water-cannon are a favourite weapon, their load of foul liquid (sewage or some chemical brew?) causing nausea, headaches and rashes. Naval trigger-happiness is so common that by now gunshot wounds are almost taken for granted as an occupational hazard.

  Over the past decade, the ISM has assembled a solid body of evidence, visual and aural, proving that in the persecution of Gazan fishermen Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention every day and night. Volunteers often sail with the crews; less often, their own tiny boat (costly to run) joins a fishing fleet. Twice I hoped to sail but on the first morning a mini-gale confined everyone to harbour and on the second morning the ISM boat’s engine resolutely refused to start and was pronounced by an expert to be in terminal decline. This was a big worry; to maintain its independence, the ISM is funded only by its volunteers.

  * * *

  Nabil and Nermeen were uneasy about my wandering alone around Gaza; having spent most of their adult lives in Saudi Arabia they couldn’t adjust to my way of being. Granted, it soon became apparent that as an improperly dressed woman, walking alone, I was hated by Gaza’s fanatics, men quite capable of killing a non-conforming relative. Extreme disapproval may be disguised but hatred is unmistakable and looks so loaded have the force of something physical. I thought about the al-Helous’ warning, then decided it would be silly to allow a tiny minority to come between me and the welcoming majority. Perhaps because of their peculiar isolation, the Gazans seemed even friendlier than the West Bankers, even more eager, despite the prevailing poverty, to offer hospitality – maybe no more than a mug of water but one sensed that the gesture of giving was an important assertion of their identity.

  Casual heart-warming encounters were frequent. In the Ash Sharqi district, one too-hot forenoon, I rested in the shade of a fig tree, its roots thrusting through the concrete of steps leading down to a bomb site. Rebuilding was being attempted without the aid of machinery. A donkey-cart had drawn rubble from elsewhere to be recycled by four men, two of whom were wrestling with a 300-foot-long plastic pipe. It stretched from a domestic water main to an improvised concrete-mixer, an ingenious mating of tar-barrels with an old-fashioned bath tub. Quickly little boys gathered around me, then were joined by teenage brothers – all smiling, curious, polite, seeming astonished by my sweat-flow rate. One lad ran into the hosepipe house, then emerged to present me with a chipped mug of water. An impromptu English lesson followed, illustrated with photographs of my granddaughters and dogs.

  In a little café near Shatti Camp, on the ground floor of a half-bombed apartment block, all the shelves and showcases were bare but a large circular tray of syrupy pastry stood inside the door. As I entered a small girl, raggedly dressed, was buying a takeaway triangle. I requested two triangles and a coffee, and was invited to sit at the one tiny table. The owner and his adult son repeatedly asserted ‘Hamas good, Fatah bad!’ At the mention of Ireland both exclaimed in unison – ‘Bobby Sands!’ They envied me because now ‘no more fighting’. But they were not interested in Gerry Adams’ visit to Gaza to talk about reconciliation. While the Occupation continued they didn’t want to stop fighting. We talked for over an hour and my cup was twice refilled but no payment would be accepted.

  At noon one day, as I walked slowly uphill from the port, an elderly man noticed my crossing the road to avail of a high wall’s shadow. He was returning to his Rimal flat and spontaneously invited me in ‘to drink coffee’. His widowed daughter lay on a divan watching al-Jazeera in a large comfortable living-room overlooking a garden ablaze with flame-of-the-forest. Majda’s husband had been killed in the 2007 conflict, less than a year after their marriage. A yellow Fatah flag flew on the balcony. She was a jobless though highly qualified teacher. Gaza’s overcrowded schools work in two or three daily shifts, some classes starting at 6.00 am, but no one had enough money to pay enough teachers … An older brother lived in Stockholm, was married with two sons and had invited his father to visit – even sent a return ticket. But so far it had proved impossible to get either a Swedish tourist visa or an exit permit from Hamas. A younger brother, Yousef, soon joined us and Father urged me to stay to lunch. He looked incredulous, then peeved, when I explained that I eat only at breakfast time but would be happy to drink more coffee while the family lunched. Yousef was a tense twenty-four-year-old chemistry graduate hoping to migrate to a Gulf state. But because Hamas likes to punish Fatah families he, too, might be refused an exit permit.

  Mrs Halaweh’s invitation was equally spontaneous. We met on the beach where this great-grandmother was supervising the aquatic gambols of five-year-old twin boys. They were bright-eyed and bouncy and already confident swimmers but impressively attentive to great-grandmaternal directives. Mrs Halaweh, another Rimal resident, went bareheaded – a loud statement. She invited me to drink coffee on the following Friday when the twins’ UNRWA-employed parents would have the day off and we could enjoy a tête à tête.

  A native Gazan, born into ‘old money’, Mrs Halaweh had no time for either Hamas or Fatah. When she was young, women didn’t have to swim fully clothed and wine with a meal was taken for granted. Her photo albums held scores of Brownie black-and-white snaps, as sharp as the day they were printed, showing bathing-suited Gazans of both sexes posing beside picnic hampers and ballroom dancing on floodlit platforms laid across the sand below what is now the al-Deira Hotel. In those good old days, under Egyptian military rule, it seemed the Strip was becoming ‘civilised’. The biggest album held all the studio portraits, from infancy to graduation, of Mrs Halaweh’s children: six sons, three daughters. The twins’ paternal grandfather, I noticed, was himself an identical twin.

  Suddenly my hostess let her anger off the leash. Egypt’s exit had allowed ‘those Mujamma people’ to infiltrate. She hadn’t been able to counter their influence, had seen how their grip tightened, until now her grandsons wouldn’t let their wives go bareheaded and her own granddaughters wouldn’t be seen in public without a thobe and didn’t want to be free. That was what most upset her. In the ’70s and ’80s her grown-up daughters had resented the Mujamma’s bullying and scorned the Islamists’ perverting of Koranic texts. Now their children, as young adults, believed in those perversions, felt it would be sinful to break the rules – sinful
and unpatriotic. Only by being ‘faithful to Islam’ could the infidel be defeated and the Occupation ended. ‘But I’m faithful to Islam!’ declaimed Mrs Halaweh. ‘Every Friday I go to the mosque, I keep the Ramadan fast – but I’ll never wear the hijab and thobe!’

  My hostess was of course exaggerating; not all young Gazans are as broken-spirited as she considered her grandchildren to be. Many students admitted to me, sotto voce, ‘We’d like to live normal.’ Also, The Strip has a hard-working though low-key branch of The Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development which valiantly runs a Gender Resources Centre. In December 2010 they produced a harrowing report, ‘Testimonies from the Gaza Strip’, which stated that ‘The practice of violence against women in the Gaza Strip is based on man’s belief that violence is the suitable tool to control women’s behaviour. Practising violence is not only limited to housewives or uneducated women, but also extended to working and educated women’.

  * * *

  Not for many years have I visited a crowded place as tourist-free as Gaza beach, where I was seen as an object of interest, a stranger to be offered help and hospitality. When I paused to rest, people soon gathered around me, curious and welcoming, the small children enchanting – playful and affectionate, neither shy nor pushy, never begging.

  At intervals high wooden platforms are manned by lifeguards who also serve – said my Fatah friends – as Morality Police, looking out for couples who behave improperly (e.g., hold hands or lean a head on a shoulder) and for men who bare their torsos or women who bare anything but face and hands. As I sat one forenoon on the bottom rung of a platform’s ladder a large jolly family ‘kidnapped’ me, insisting on my lunching with them in Shatti camp. Hanaa was a wiry little septuagenarian great-grandmother who long ago had worked for UNRWA and acquired a smattering of English. She introduced me to all her companions (three generations, both sexes) and my later efforts to remember and pronounce those ten names caused much merriment. As we strolled towards Shatti the usual interrogation brought the usual reactions; deep sympathy because I live alone, an inability to believe that I do so by choice, an insinuation that Allah may be punishing me for not marrying and having a quiverful.