A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  On 3 January 2009 the IDF attacked several Zaytoun homes, rounded up 97 people (the Samounis and a few of their neighbours) and herded them into the main Samouni dwelling with orders not to come out. On 5 January, when four men emerged in search of firewood, a shell at once killed two and wounded the others. Minutes later a precision guided weapon hit the house, instantly killing 21 and wounding the rest. Within the next two days 27 of the wounded died because ambulances were not permitted to reach them. During those days four toddlers clung to their dead mothers. Hassan lost both parents but was ‘lucky’: they died quickly. Ahmed’s parents survived in agony until the ambulances were allowed through; both soon died in hospital. The ICRC reported: ‘The Israeli soldiers stationed nearby must have known of the people in the houses but the wounded died as they waited for medical care due to the slow negotiations for access.’ After the survivors’ removal on 7 January the IDF quickly bulldozed the house, preventing corpse retrievals or any medical examination of the remains. Soldiers then cordoned off the area until 18 January when the truce began and a Red Crescent team hurried to Zaytoun with body-bags and surgical masks to help the locals dig out their rotting neighbours.

  A collage of photographs of the dead, mounted on a sheet of hardboard some five feet by three, included elegantly scripted quotations from the Koran. Names and ages were in Arabic and Roman and everyone had ‘martyr’ status. This consoled the survivors for reasons I have tried to understand – but can’t. When the weapon was laid beside me I noted its details.

  US Contract Serno

  Guided Missile, Surface

  Attack: AGM 114 OXYD8

  Manufacturer 1410 01-425-4459 13415050

  NAIL STOCK No. PART No.

  LOT no MGP05 J529 – 014

  As I wrote I remembered that in June 2009, as President Obama made his famous Islam-friendly Cairo speech, the US was replacing the many multi-ton bombs dropped on Gaza. And in 2010, US military aid to Israel was the single largest expenditure in the US Foreign Aid budget. Since 1972 the US has vetoed 41 Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli violations of international law. Until the US is willing to play the international law game the concept is meaningless.

  While ambulances were being denied access to the Samouni home, IDF graffiti artists were having fun. Within yards of their dead and dying victims – within earshot of the latter’s desperate cries – they spray-painted those houses still standing. ARABS NEED 2 DIE – DIE YOU ALL – 1 IS DOWN, 999,999 TO GO – ARABS 1948–2009 – that last on a sketch of a gravestone.

  Nita said, ‘Those soldiers are sick. They’re worse damaged than us though we’re more hurt. They act like people with no education.’

  I said nothing but Professor Sofer came to mind. A demographer, Professor of Geostrategic Studies at the University of Haifa, advisor to Ariel Sharon – a man not lacking education. When ‘disengagement’ and the blockade of Gaza were being planned, the Jerusalem Post (20 May 2004) reported his vision of the future.

  We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed and houses will be destroyed … When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. Until collective imprisonment produces voluntary transfer. If a Palestinian cannot come into Tel Aviv for work, he will look in Iraq, or Kuwait or London … I believe there will be movement out of the area.

  The uniquely bizarre nature of the Palestine/Israel conflict is even more obvious on the Strip than on the West Bank. Here we have a wannabe Western-style democracy treating their neighbours’ democratically elected leaders as suitable targets for assassination while mass-slaughter eliminates those who elected them. They are ‘terrorists’ because they oppose an illegal occupation and blockade calculated to get rid of them, to leave the way clear for more Zionist expansion – as both the IDF graffiti and Arnon Sofer’s oft-repeated statements make plain. In 2003 Anthony Hurndall, a London lawyer, spent some time in Rafah investigating the IDF’s murder of his son Tom, an ISM volunteer. His 50-page report concluded that ‘The IDF chiefs of staff had given the clear signal to their soldiers and to the international community that in Israel soldiers can and do deliberately kill and maim innocent civilians, Palestinian and international, without cause and with impunity.’

  Back on the road, awaiting a taxi under a fig tree, Nita and I were joined by two local women and a youth. One woman had recently lost a thirty-year-old son, a Saladin Brigade volunteer killed by a warplane at sunset on 8 April. His two companions were still in hospital in Gaza City. On the same day, at sunrise, another warplane had targeted a motorbike carrying two al-Qassam volunteers. The rider was killed, the passenger left permanently brain-damaged. A few hours later a tank on the border shelled a civilian gathering near al-Shuja’ia cemetery, killing two (one a child) and seriously injuring ten others including four children. I assumed these strikes were rocket-provoked but no one would confirm this. It intrigued me that Gazans were so open with one another (though not with the foreigner) about martyrs’ affiliations, labelling them al-Qassam, al-Ahrar or whatever and always distinguishing between ‘civilians’ and ‘volunteers’.

  In all, between 3.00 pm on 7 April and 6.00 am on 9 April, shelling killed eighteen Gazans: nine civilians, nine volunteers. The thirty-eight severely wounded included two paramedics and fourteen adolescents. Dozens of houses and several training sites were damaged. A few quarrels broke out between the owners of shelled homes and volunteers who argued ‘our training spaces are so limited we can’t avoid all residential areas’.

  During our taxi ride I asked Nita, ‘Did Cast Lead not convince most Gazans – apart from the chronically belligerent – that fighting Israel physically is futile for all and suicidal for many? Wouldn’t it be comparatively easy, now, to bring the volunteers, of all brands, under control?’

  Nita smiled, seemed genuinely amused. ‘For normal people, yes you’re right. But sixty-three years of Zionism have made us not normal.’ She was halfway through her thesis on the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and eager to explain. The men who brought the Mujamma ideology to the Strip were good Palestinians from the camps, born into stark poverty, knowing how much the majority who didn’t have their educational opportunities needed help. They associated Westernisation with the Zionism that had made them refugees and used the Muslim Brotherhood sort of Islam to heal their wounded pride. Nita emphasised the refugees’ humiliation – deprived not only of their material security but left with feelings of guilt and inadequacy because they hadn’t put up a fight – couldn’t, against Zionist wealth, but they’d lost sight of that valid excuse. For many, the past made it hard to be rational about how to confront Israel now … As is the case for many of Palestine’s friends in the west.

  Abassan is east of Khan Younis, not far from the border, a village where high, unlovely concrete walls conceal women from unrelated male eyes. Often a small child opens a wooden door just enough to see who’s there. In response to our knock a scared-looking nine-year-old peered through the crack but Ibrahim was expecting us and called reassuringly to his son. Then a neatly bearded fifty-two-year-old, wearing a grubby galabiya, came to greet us – not shaking hands, he and Nita exchanging the ritual Arabic murmurs.

  Olive trees half-filled the large yard and around them hens scratched and pecked and clucked. The one-storey breeze-block dwelling had tiny unglazed windows and a solitary, aged walnut tree grew by the narrow hall door. There our chairs were placed on a square of shattered concrete – shattered by the drone-delivered missile that a few weeks previously had instantly killed Ibrahim’s forty-one-year-old wife and nineteen-year-old daughter as they sat chopping vegetables at 12.20 pm. At 1.30 pm Israel Radio annou
nced, ‘We are sorry a missile went astray in the Khan Younis area.’ Two other daughters, aged eighteen and fifteen, were badly shrapnel-torn but had escaped maiming and would soon be home from hospital. The three youngest of the motherless eleven (all boys) did not appear; they were indoors with a twelve-year-old sister. As we talked, the nine-year-old and his seven-year-old sister sat on the ground beside their father’s chair, each with a hand on a paternal knee. At intervals Ibrahim stroked their heads. Both looked tense and bewildered, had not yet been able to bounce back as many children quickly do (or so we’re told).

  Ibrahim himself was still in shock, his handsome face expressionless, his voice low and calm. ‘It was Allah’s will. We must be patient, trust in Allah. The Holy Koran tells us truth. Allah will bring all that is bad to an end. Then will be no more Israel.’

  The buffer zone excludes this family from most of its land. Together the parents used to venture out – sometimes with ISM ‘protection’ – to grow parsley (an exceptionally profitable crop) but the children had begged their father never again to take that risk. On 19 March the minaret of Abassan’s village mosque took many hits during three hours of artillery firing from the border across Ibrahim’s land. And everyone knew about Sha’ban Qarmout, aged sixty-four and unconnected to any ‘volunteers’. He had been killed recently by several bullets to the heart as he drove his donkey-plough one afternoon, 550 metres from the border.

  Out on the road, Nita rang Jameel the taxi driver; he was roving around the village, hoping to buy apricots. Then she said, ‘This family, they make me want to cry many tears. You see Ibrahim’s galabiya is not clean and here is the one time no one gives us to drink. I know those girls, it’s a family full of love. Already I hear the old women planning the next wife and soon they’ll put pressure on. That’s cruel! Ibrahim is too sad, you can see the broken heart in his eyes …’

  Jameel drove us to the market area of Nussairat camp, picking up four more passengers on the main road. The Strip’s tortured landscape offers few visual rewards yet had it not been mid-summer I would have chosen to walk between villages. When I said as much to Nita she startled Jameel by loudly shouting ‘No!’ I must never be so silly – there were crazies around who might try to please Allah by killing an uncovered infidel woman brazenly walking alone. When I protested, ‘There can’t be that many crazies!’ Nita swiftly retorted, ‘And how many Salafists does it take to kill a granny?’

  The 16,000 refugees who in 1949 squatted in then-rural central Gaza have since become 70,000. Nussairat ‘camp’ is in fact a cramped, overcrowded, grimly impoverished city – but with a notably spirited and imaginative Popular Camp Committee, on whom a rising percentage, unregistered with UNRWA, are becoming dependent.

  Nita planned to spend the evening here with a favourite uncle, another recent drone victim though in a less drastic way; there had been many injuries but no deaths. Kemal owned a three-storey building on the edge of the market, divided into twelve flatlets and four mini-offices, all seriously damaged when a drone fired two missiles into an adjacent car-park in the middle of the night. Even worse, Kemal’s engineering workshop on the ground floor was wrecked, all the expensive machinery beyond repair. And it had provided jobs for four young fathers while helping to sustain Kemal’s own extended family (nine children, twenty-eight grandchildren and many more to come).

  We found Uncle helping a shopkeeper neighbour to contrive a substitute for a metal security shutter warped by the blast. Up and down the street were shrapnel-pocked doors; most of the broken glass had been swept up but the loose chunks of cracked pavement were treacherous.

  Kemal was short and stout with features dominated by worry lines. He invited us into his temporary office, a dusty, twilit cubby-hole opening onto the street. Despite Nita’s protests he was determined to brew tea on an alarmingly defective gas ring that seemed more likely to explode than to boil water. While coaxing it along he told us about his narrow escape when he drove past the nearby Palestine Naval Police compound five minutes before a mighty bomb destroyed two empty police vehicles. Rumour suggested the IDF had been misinformed, and expected to eliminate a group of senior Hamas officers who should by then have boarded those vehicles. ‘That’s how it is,’ said Kemal. ‘Allah decides do we live or die.’ In his view, no human agency was going to improve the Palestinians’ lot. But the Holy Koran tells that all things end and so Israel will end and the Palestinians will regain their land. ‘We must be patient,’ said Kemal echoing Ibrahim. ‘We must believe and have trust in Allah. All is his will.’

  Suddenly I felt another Islamophobic surge. I rarely swear but now I wanted to while pointing out, ‘What’s happening to the Palestinians is the Zionists’ will!’

  Looking at Nita, I suggested, ‘Why not stop waiting patiently? Why not have a bold rethink and some sensible action? Like petitioning Hamas to rewrite their Charter. It embarrasses most Palestinians I know.’

  Nita promptly looked embarrassed, Kemal admitted he’d never read the Charter but often heard it quoted in the mosque. He hadn’t liked my bluntness which perhaps was too blunt. (It’s a common defect of the old, who assume they’re entitled to say what they think and know there’s not much time left for saying it.) Later, a shrewd observer of Gaza’s mosque scene told me that certain imams advocate patiently waiting for Allah to sort it out as the only prudent course at present – given the ferocity of Israeli retaliations.

  When Nita and I had arranged our next ‘misery tour’ (her phrase) I took a taxi to the shore and in the cool of the evening paddled home along the beach brooding on the 1988 Hamas Charter. I first read it in 2008 and then many passages sounded hideously familiar, an echo of the Vatican-inspired anti-Semitism prevalent in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1950s. Rabid Christianity in Ireland, rabid Islam in Gaza, rabid Judaism in the Holy Land – tolerance and compassion being overridden wherever religious fanaticism is hitched to nationalist bandwagons. And yet – on rereading that pernicious document, and discussing it with Muslim friends who knew something about its genesis, I saw that it could be melted down, purged of its dross and recast as something valuable. To Deeb I said, ‘There’s the most crucial and dangerous task for the next generation of Hamas leaders.’ He didn’t disagree.

  Other Hamas friends were nonplussed when I asked what they thought could be done about both the Charter and the obstinate rocketeers. With Salafists beckoning the thousands of male adolescents who have nothing to do all day, Hamas reformers must proceed cautiously. To revise the Charter too abruptly, boldly, aligning it with the more constructive strands in current Hamas thinking, could destabilise not only Gaza but regions far beyond where Salafists have their spiritual home. As for the rocketeers, even though non-violence had become the official flavour of the new decade, not much could be done to restrain them. Said one young man, ‘They might start more internecine stuff if held down too hard.’

  In the Department of Foreign Affairs, my unlikely home-from-home, I did occasionally get glimpses of a better future. Many conversations were predictably confused and confusing but now and then – as when mountain trekking through shifting clouds – there was a clear space, a bright expanse of beauty, all the details plain to be seen. Beyond a doubt, those comparatively youthful Hamas members saw Palestinian unity as a first step without which nobody could get anywhere. They took heart from Khaled Meshaal’s quiet assertion and reassertion that ‘There is no political horizon if Hamas is not included as a legitimate element of the Palestinian people.’ (An interesting turn of phrase, not presaging a takeover by Islamists – until recently the goal of some of the first generation of Hamas leaders.) But then there were bleak moments as the clouds closed in again. It had been too easy, deploying a ruthless army, to punish all Gazans for the majority’s election of a Hamas government. How to achieve unity when the saboteurs were so implacably against it, knowing ‘Divide and Conquer’ to be essential for the maturing of their ‘Eretz Yisrael’ project?

  One morning Deeb beckoned me to his co
mputer. He had found an Ha’aretz item (18 April 2009) with an ‘if only’ headline that stabs the heart: ‘ISRAEL COULD HAVE MADE PEACE WITH HAMAS UNDER YASSIN’. Kobi Ben-Simhon, interviewing a retired Israel Prison Service chief intelligence officer, Zvi Sela, recorded that in the mid-’90s Sheikh Yassin recognised the State of Israel and, said Sela, ‘He was smart and brave. Cruel but credible. He gave his life in the war for the freedom of his people. I tend to think that if we tried for an agreement with him, we would have succeeded.’

  Several years before Zvi Sela talked with Sheikh Yassin in his prison cell, a close friend of the Sheikh, Dr Mahmoud al-Zahar, had visited Shimon Peres, then Israeli Foreign Minister. Although not formally representing Hamas, the doctor was known to be a founder member. That was in March 1988, a few months into the first Intifada, when Israel was still treating Islamist officials as social reformers rather than militants. To Mr Peres, Dr al-Zahar presented a suggested long-term solution to the Problem. This potential discussion document revealed a softening of the Mujamma/Hamas determination to view all of Palestine as a waqf (Islamic endowment) – a position equalling in dottiness Gush Emunim’s view of Palestine as Abraham’s legally and morally binding bequest to his descendants. Had Peres not declined to discuss that proposed solution, would the catastrophic Charter, proclaimed five months later, have been so rabid?