A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  When I asked how much regional changes might affect the Palestinians Salim replied that, as Mubarak was being removed, exhilarated crowds gathered on city streets throughout the OPT, suddenly feeling empowered. But on the Strip they were roughly dispersed by unlabelled ‘security forces’. ‘Those men wore no uniform,’ said Salim. ‘They looked like Salafists getting that job to let them be violent. They like acting military but Hamas wants them only political. We were out in Palestine Square, calling for unity against the Zionists, when the Salafists made us run home. Is it a crime to ask for something good, like unity? For that we got beaten by men who don’t want Muslims working with other Muslims who read the Holy Koran differently!’

  Jamal cited the Nakba Day (15 May 2011) protest march from Gaza, Syria and Lebanon towards Israeli borders. ‘That couldn’t have happened before Tahrir. We got courage from seeing how big governments, even with American friends, can go weak!’ On the Lebanese border the IDF killed ten Palestinians and afterwards explained, ‘They tried to damage the fence.’ Four were killed on the Syrian border and one in Gaza. Israel predictably accused Iran of having organised these border breaches to promote terrorism and deflect attention from the current woes of the aptly named Bashar al-Assad. Jamal assured me the ‘event’ was pure Palestinian, Facebook-organised by exiled activists. I said I hoped there would be many more and much bigger marches – without deaths.

  ‘There was a big plan,’ said Salim, ‘for millions to march on Israel, all arriving at borders around the same time. It got everyone excited – thousands to march from Egypt, Syria, the Maghreb, the Gulf, Jordan, Lebanon, even Europe and America, the whole al-Shatat! The IDF heard and got panicked. They said to a newspaper they’d got no way to stop a mass non-violent march on the West Bank, even 4,000 couldn’t be stopped if the PA police wouldn’t help. Then they saw they’d no problem – we had no leaders to organise us and no money to move so many Palestinians around the world.’

  ‘Wrong!’ said Jamal. ‘Fatah and Hamas can find millions. Hamas maybe from Iran or some Saudi prince. Fatah from Abbas’s billion-dollar hidden slush fund!’ (This is money much spoken of and allegedly accumulated by the CIA-funded operatives.) ‘We know the problem is bad leadership, not needing money.’

  ‘We don’t know anything!’ retorted Salim. ‘How could we? All is lies and secrets. Hamas puts around that slush fund story – is it true, not true? Keeping people not knowing is one control method.’

  ‘Whatever way, Americans won’t let Palestinians be like Egyptians.’ Jamal was looking angry. ‘Obama’s people yelled against that Unity Agreement – no government including Hamas can have aid!’

  Salim smiled slightly. ‘From here on, maybe what America says isn’t so much important?’

  I made no comment but, taking the short term view, found it impossible to share in Salim’s optimism. On the very day of Mubarak’s departure, the New York Times reported, ‘The White House and the State Department are already discussing setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties.’ I wondered then – how many millions will it take to secure political power for secular parties in a Muslim country? The answer soon came from Hillary R Clinton:

  I’m pleased to announce today (17 February 2011) that we will be reprogramming $150 million for Egypt to put ourselves in a position to support our transition there and assist with their economic recovery. These funds will give us flexibility to respond to Egyptian needs moving forward.

  A month later Mrs Clinton again gave tongue:

  The US government also thinks there are economic reforms that are necessary to help the Egyptian people have good jobs, to find employment, to realise their own dreams. And so on both of those tracks – the political reform and the economic reform – we want to be helpful.

  Two months after that President Obama made a chilling announcement (19 May):

  First, we’ve asked the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to present a plan at next week’s G8 summit for what needs to be done to stabilise and modernise the economies of Tunisia and Egypt. Together, we must help them recover from the disruptions of their democratic upheaval, and support the governments that will be elected later this year.

  So it was definite; whatever seeds of hope had been sown in Tahrir Square were not to be allowed to germinate. Genuine self-determination would be thwarted.

  By the end of 2011 the Obama administration had decided to talk to the hitherto condemned Muslim Brotherhood. Early in 2012 William Burns, Deputy Secretary of State, travelled to Cairo for a meeting with Khairat al-Shater, one of the Brotherhood’s most powerful leaders. The main US concern, at that date, was Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. Mr Burns conveyed that the US could obtain for Egypt, through the IMF and the Gulf States, an extra $20 billion aid money – if the treaty continued to be honoured. During that and later meetings, US representatives brought the Muslim Brotherhood to heel. The movement showed willing to favour a free-market economic model (with a few minor concessions to Egypt’s impoverished millions) and always to take US security needs into account.

  In June 2012 Dr Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected President of Egypt. Almost immediately, according to DEBKA, President Obama was able to reassure a White House gathering of Jewish-American leaders that ‘President Morsi would be required to devote a section of his earliest speech on foreign affairs to the specific affirmation of his profound commitment to the peace pact with Israel’. (DEBKA is a website linked to Israel’s intelligence agencies.) Sure enough, within hours Morsi was announcing that the new Egypt would honour all its old treaty obligations. An invitation to visit the White House in September 2012 promptly followed. Then came his first state visit as President – to Saudi Arabia, on 11 July. On his return he made several public statements guaranteeing that Egypt would never interfere in the Gulf States’ domestic politics, would ‘respect the regional balance of power’ on Iranian issues and would not allow its relationship with Erdogan’s Turkey to grow too close. In Riyadh he had announced that ‘Egypt would keep the same distance to the Palestinian factions’ – meaning his regime would be even-handed in its dealings with the collaborationist secular West Bank regime and the defiant non-secular Gaza regime. Yet during his election campaign he had promised to end the blockade of Gaza. When Hillary Clinton visited Cairo and Jerusalem in mid-July, Israel reported that she had compelled President Morsi to agree to maintain the blockade. On Israel Radio, Danny Ayalon, the Deputy Foreign Minister, explained: ‘She is bringing a very calming message. President Morsi’s agenda will be a domestic agenda. There is no change and I surmise there will not be for the foreseeable future.’

  US strategists describe this sort of skulduggery as ‘a managed transition of power’. The New York Times noted that Mrs Clinton had to abandon her plan to give a ‘significant’ speech in Alexandria lest it might further enrage those many supporters of the military who believed the US had gone over to the Muslim Brotherhood. An odd illusion: General Tantawi and the Military Council knew that Egypt would continue to receive an annual military subsidy of $1.3 billion, plus an extra $1 billion aid package to get them through ‘the transition’.

  * In September 2011 UK’s Channel 4 produced a Dispatches documentary investigating Tony Blair’s financial frolics in the Middle East.

  Seven

  The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) is disconcerting. Behind high walls oil money has created another world, seemingly not part of the Strip – yet its ideological power-house. On a clean, orderly, tastefully landscaped campus stands an assemblage of soaring buildings (much concrete, more glass), some stark and severe, most incorporating classical Islamic embellishments that don’t quite come off. The overall effect is of an ultra-modern factory complex – perhaps pharmaceutical? Here young Gazans are programmed to be ‘correctly’ Islamic and each building’s design caters for segregation. Males and females enter the campus by different gates, enter the library and other facilities by different doors, relax in r
igidly demarcated areas of the litter-free, well-watered grounds where lawns are green, flowering hedges delight the eye and herb-beds delight the nose. A bilingual guide-booklet explains:

  IUG is keen to offer the best environment for students by including green places and parks which will surely make a comfortable atmosphere that encourages students to spend the most of his time at the Campus.

  Off campus, there’s an ever-present danger: young men and women might talk to one another as they do at Birzeit and An-Najah universities on the West Bank. However, on my several visits to IUG the students invariably looked cheerful and busy. In surroundings so utterly unlike the rest of the Strip they may well feel this is their share of that ‘normal’ world seen daily on TV and YouTube. The abnormality of IUG, by twenty-first-century standards, they seem not to resent. I asked Anwar about this. Dryly he replied, ‘For most of them, the programming works.’

  When the PLO denounced President Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel a vengeful Egypt closed its universities to Palestinians, prompting the Muslim Brotherhood to found IUG in 1978. At first it was under PLO control, then came an urgent need to seek funds from abroad – through the Mujamma. This meant a not-so-gradual assertion of Islamic influences; Mujamma student groups ousted the nationalist/PLO candidates in student council elections, often using violence or the threat of violence. Thereafter the quickening pace of religious revivalism, throughout the OPT, debilitated Palestine’s liberation movement. In January 1980 the Islamists, having lost an election to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) council, were further enraged at the suggestion that the secular/nationalist al-Azhar college might be expanded to rival IUG. A long-bearded mob set out to burn the PRCS office and library in Gaza City, pausing en route to wreck alcohol-selling cafés and video shops. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers sat watching the mayhem from parked jeeps. When Gaza’s military governor, Brigadier-General Segev, was later challenged about their inactivity he blandly replied, ‘Our enemy today is the PLO.’

  At that date the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal was to wean Palestinians off secularism in their daily lives and off nationalism in their political thinking. By the beginning of the First Intifada it was firmly in control of IUG and all Gaza’s cinemas and purveyors of alcohol had been closed.

  IUG’s ten faculties provide 55 undergraduate programmes, 40 postgraduate programmes and eleven higher diplomas. Sara Roy has described it as ‘arguably the most visible expression of social penetration through institutional means’. She points out that by now it has educated thousands of religious leaders for Gaza and (until the blockade) the West Bank and hundreds of civilian leaders for most sectors of Palestinian life. Yet for all its brave face (listing international honours won by professors and links with foreign universities) it must limit coming generations if they hear the same message from home, mosque and university. The founders of Mujamma/Hamas, who all studied abroad, were better equipped to confront European and American antagonists and make the most of foreign friends. One postgraduate male student told me, ‘You’re wrong about independent thinking, it’s not correct Islam. We’re not allowed to argue with parents or teachers.’

  IUG’s security is much tighter than the Department of Foreign Affairs’ – one doesn’t stroll in casually, as to an Oxford college. Two armed men guard each narrow entrance and on my first visit Deeb had to escort me. When I paused on the pavement to hide my white locks beneath a hijab borrowed from his wife the bushy-bearded sentries glowered at the brazen infidel. Uncovered, I (aged eighty!) would have been refused admission.

  On Sunday 28 December 2008 Israel marked IUG’s significance by totally destroying the Science Labs building and the Engineering and Technology building. Within moments, 74 research centres, containing a wide range of complex and delicate appliances and apparatuses, lay beneath hundreds of tons of concrete and metal. Nothing could be salvaged. Prince Torkey Ben Abdul Aziz and the Islamic Bank for Development had invested US$15 million in this equipment. The academic careers of a majority of IUG’s 20,000 students had also been wrecked or at best severely disrupted. I can think of no better recruitment ploy for the Qassam Brigades, Islamic Jihad et al. Nine other buildings were partially destroyed but have been more or less restored.

  When Deeb as a male could go no further Suhair appeared, an English-speaking member of the administrative staff whose beauty was equalled by her self-assurance. She wore a special badge authorising her to enter male territory and led me to the vast crater where once had stood the multi-storeyed victims of Israel’s fanatical (and ultimately self-destructive) aggression. No trace of rubble remains; all has been reincarnated in scores of camp homes. The photographs taken next day are painful to look upon, even for an outsider.

  Suhair gave me a leisurely conducted tour of the campus, starting with a 1,000-seat conference hall where – the guide-booklet tells us – ‘IUG conducted Graduation Ceremonies annually to complete the happiness of students among their family and parents. About 29,000 students have been graduated since 30 years of establishment.’ This building is perfectly suited to adaptation as theatre, concert hall, debating chamber – all forbidden activities.

  Dr Moheer, Dean of the new Medical School, entertained me generously in his large, expensively furnished office on the top floor of a rather pretentious edifice. Finishing touches were being put to enormous rooms – reminding me of nuclear power plant control centres – where international video conferences would be held and other esoteric cyberspace capers could take place to outwit the blockade. (Or so I was told.) Hi-tech lecture halls and sophisticated labs were about to go into action. In some corridors high quality furniture was being unpacked and giveaway sand trickled out of those crates. For the unpacking of one small parcel two elderly, excited professors came panting upstairs. Only they could do this job. Expectantly we waited, until a boring little machine appeared – for the medical genetics department, price US$58,000.

  To me this exuberant spending, within a cat’s spit of extreme poverty and overcrowding, felt inappropriate. The medical school’s fancy design seemed shockingly wasteful; given such extravagance, is it not hard to beg convincingly for more funding? I reckoned the electronic pencil-sharpeners summed it all up – one attached to the edge of each desk. Too Gulf State …! On the other hand, if oil-sodden princes and bankers have so many surplus dollars why not spread them around by employing armies of construction workers and buying incalculable quantities of construction materials – even if the end product does look excessive to someone who thinks in tens rather than millions.

  The campus’s purdah quarter has a conventual tinge because of all the hijabs and jilbabs. Even the traditional Palestinian flowing gown (the thobe, often exquisitely embroidered) doesn’t satisfy Shari’a fashion demands. Instead, women students must wear the jilbab, an ankle-length coat of uniform design, high-necked and long-sleeved, fitting closely around the wrist. The approved jilbab is black; just occasionally a rebellious young woman ventures out in milk-chocolate brown which makes quite a loud statement. Many poor students receive clothing vouchers, donated by one of IUG’s oily patrons and only valid for the purchase of jilbabs and hijabs. As someone abnormally heat-prone, I found it personally uncomfortable merely to see these unfortunate women going about the streets in temperatures up to 38°C. All those with whom I commiserated assured me they were used to it, didn’t suffer; yet I noticed that indoors, when their homes were male-free, they wore the infidel summer garments one saw hanging in all markets – including tanktops and very short shorts. The wide availability of such fashions must mean a high percentage of Gazan women appreciate them.

  Suhair made much of the fact that 62 per cent of IUG students are women. (A common statistic in Islamic universities elsewhere.) Was this not proof of equality? Similarly, Dr al-Zahar – looking smug – told me his wife had been a teacher before the IDF broke her back, and their first daughter was an engineer, the second a teacher of English, the third an accountancy student. I was not impressed. The Islamist e
mphasis on equality of educational opportunities, and women’s freedom to practise in the professions, can confuse the issue for newcomers – and soon one realises it is meant to do just that.

  Rather meanly, I asked Suhair why IUG segregates its students. Promptly she replied that an Englishwoman (name forgotten) has proved (sic) that ‘coeducation is bad because girls are more intelligent than boys and when they learn together boys resent this and disrupt the girls’ work’.

  ‘That may be,’ I replied, ‘but it’s still a pity they can’t relax together when not learning.’ Whereupon Suhair changed the subject, informing me that IUG takes no fees from handicapped students and ‘all coming from poor families get free books and materials. Also the government tries to help us. We’ve internship arrangements with the Department of Industry for engineering students and with Finance for accountancy students. But that help is very little. Most of our graduates, with good qualifications, have nowhere to go.’

  Before I left Suhair agreed to meet me at the entrance, to escort me past the sentries, whenever I returned to spend time in the library.

  That evening I read through the IUG guide-booklet and learned that ‘the Library Services hold over 100,000 printed items, and vast quantities of materials in many other electronic formats’. Also –

  IUG launched a new satellite TV channel named ‘Al-Ketab’ which aims at promoting values, spreading good morals and participating in solving the problems that face the Arabic and Islamic communities focusing on the Palestinian community. Through this channel, IUG hopes to expand the educational process from its geographical limits to reach out to every house in the world, in addition to broadcasting some other varieties.