A Month by the Sea

by Dervla Murphy

  In 2004, at Givat Olga overlooking the Mediterranean, a large group of Israeli scholars and activists (supported from a distance by hundreds of their colleagues, including Professor Baruch Kimmerling and Meron Benvenisti, former Vice-Mayor of Jerusalem) met for a three-week discussion, mainly in Hebrew, about changing the political discourse in Israel. The initiators were: Anat Biletzki, Andre Draznin, Haim Hanegbi, Yehudith Harel, Oren Medicks and Michael (Mikado) Warschawski. They were not, they emphasised, launching another political party or movement or lobby. Their aim was:

  to initiate a genuine public discussion about the Israeli dead-end in which we live and the profound changes needed in order break out of it. Every Israeli knows that this is not a matter of political trifles, but a matter of deep concern for the fate of the peoples of this country … The State of Israel was supposed to be a democracy; it has set up a colonial structure combining unmistakable elements of apartheid with the arbitrariness of brutal military occupation … We are united in a critique of Zionism, based as it is on refusal to acknowledge the indigenous people of this country and on denial of their rights, on dispossession of their lands, and on adoption of separation as a fundamental principle and way of life. Adding insult to injury, Israel persists in its refusal to bear any responsibility for its deeds, from the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their homeland more than half a century ago, to the present erection of ghetto walls around the remaining Palestinians in the towns and villages of the West Bank … We believe that peace and reconciliation are contingent upon Israel’s recognition of its responsibility for the injustices done to the indigenous people and on its willingness to redress them … We seek coexistence of the peoples of this country, based on mutual recognition, equal partnership and implementation of historical justice.

  By this stage we had moved to M—’s home, in one of the less insalubrious corners of Shatti camp, and were sitting in front of a sluggish table fan being sustained by Egyptian shiny biscuits and many little glasses of mint tea.

  I told M— about my first impressions of Israel, before my sojourns in the OPT. While waiting to depart from Ben-Gurion airport I wrote in my diary: ‘This country is unreal. It can’t survive in its present form as a Jewish pseudo-democracy.’ My gut-reaction was confined to my diary; after a brief visit it seemed much too presumptuous to be voiced, even among friends. That was in December 2008. By June 2011 my spontaneous choice of the word ‘unreal’, in a scribbled diary entry, seemed fully justified on one deep level – far removed from ‘economic development’.

  During November 2008 I had repeatedly encountered Zionism’s evasion of reality – its refusal to accept responsibility for ‘the Problem’, its chilling depiction of Palestinians as sub-humans. For more than sixty years Israel’s governments have been deftly manipulating their kaleidoscopic population, conditioning people to think of themselves as under permanent threat from malicious forces plotting to obliterate their country. This explains my initial perception of Israel as an artificial creation, founded on self-deceit and bolstered by the success of world-deceiving propaganda. It seems all the ingredients of the Problem have been poured by Zionism into a misshapen mould – then turned out and presented to a gullible public as ‘the real situation’. Whereupon most of the Western world, prone to what Tony Judt diagnoses as post-Holocaust ‘self-blackmailing’, tries to deal fairly with this malformed mass of ‘history’. And always the spectre of ‘anti-Semitic’ accusations hovers over the scene, prompting official visitors – if inclined to protest against the Occupation, the settlements, the Apartheid Wall – to preface their timid criticisms by expressing a sympathetic understanding of Israel’s ‘security concerns’. Yet those concerns would not exist were Zionism to take the Olga gathering’s advice and ‘redress the continued injustice inflicted on the Palestinians, generation after generation’. Olga continues: ‘Only thus shall we Israeli Jews stop being plagued by the past’s demons and make ourselves at home in our common homeland … If we approach the Palestinians with an open mind and a willing spirit, we shall find in them what we bring with us.’

  On al-Jazeera, in December 2011, Teymoor Nabili talked with Yehuda Bauer, the Hebrew University’s esteemed Holocaust scholar, who was introduced with the observation that Israel is ‘a region where there are as many versions of history as there are people telling them’. To an extent this is true of every region and every history. However, al-Jazeera seemed to be conniving here with those who like to present the Problem as one in which each side has a valid argument – or both sides are equally intransigent. Yet certain basic facts, such as those confronted in the Olga document, are not dependent on any historian’s interpretation or analysis. They stand alone, needing no explanation – only recognition.

  M— was the third Gazan to tell me of his past support for suicide bombers and his present conviction that their missions had been a mistake. In the two other cases no remorse was felt; those jihadists regretted the Israeli lives lost only when it became obvious that most Palestinians condemned mass-assassinations – though they might lack the courage to say so aloud. Moreover, the missions had been counterproductive on the international political stage, losing popular support for ‘the cause’ and not being destructive or dramatic enough to scare governments.

  M—’s case was different. I felt honoured and very moved when, during our second meeting, he described his ‘conversion’. Suddenly the slaughtering of civilians had looked like an unIslamic crime. ‘It happened after the war on Gaza. All our dead and wounded made me think “No! Humans should not do this to one another!” I’m an old man, I don’t know why something changed inside me then … We’ve all seen many corpses, killed by Israelis or other Palestinians. When our missions were successful I never got excited and happy, I never liked this way of war. But we needed action at the time and what else to do? I’m careful now, not letting martyrs’ families see I’m changed. They need respect, to feel sons, brothers, husbands will always be honoured.’

  Latterly M— had become a closet binationalist, inspired by Ehud Olmert’s prognosis at the end of the futile 2007 Annapolis ‘peace’ talks. Then Israel’s Prime Minister spurred on the BDS movement by saying, ‘If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights … as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’ Already Zionists recognise binationalism as a serious threat to their Jewish state. The argument that a two-state solution would leave Israel’s borders indefensible has carried much weight for many years with Zionism’s supporters. But in the twenty-first century, could even AIPAC justify arguing against the establishment of a one-person-one-vote secular democracy? However, as M— saw it, binationalism’s main opponents will not be Israelis but those US Zionists. ‘They don’t have to live with our conflict,’ he said. ‘We and the Israelis both want peace. Zionism only offers more conflict.’

  We agreed that there is a comforting inevitability about binationalism – and here again the Zionists are fleeing from reality. Stridently they complain about anti-Semites scheming to ‘delegitimise’ Israel – though the ‘delegitimising’ has been achieved by their own flouting of international law ever since the State’s foundation. We also agreed, while saying goodbye, that neither of us is likely to live long enough to see binationalism in action – despite M— being my junior by fifteen years.

  * * *

  I sometimes looked for a secluded corner in a café to transcribe a conversation while the exact words remained fresh in my mind. Thus I occasionally came upon young couples, on their own before my intrusion, who momentarily looked guilty and scared. Then, identifying me as an International, they would relax, smile, invite me to join them. By sitting together, drinking tea, they were breaking that 2009 law which forbids schoolgirls to wear jeans and which also bans women from riding pillion on motorbikes, having their hair cut by a male hairdresser and dancing in public with a male. Anyone detected misbehaving so flagrantly would be automati
cally fined by the Internal Security Agency. This is not the sort of ‘independent state’ the Palestinians want. Nor is it the sort of regime Hamas would impose were it not so scared of the Salafists. And the longer the blockade, the stronger that minority gets …

  One such encounter took place in the gloomy upstairs room of a large run-down café (all its confectionary display cases empty) on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, overlooking the palm-lined Square of the Unknown Soldier. The young woman, Aida, was an English teacher at an UNRWA school, her friend hopes soon to be earning a living as a photojournalist – not an easy profession to follow on the Strip. He spoke no English and seemed quite put out because this left the female in a position of power … Soon it was time for him to go and when we were on our own Aida immediately reprimanded me for being ‘naked’. ‘The Holy Koran,’ she sternly asserted, ‘orders every woman to keep every one of her hairs covered.’ We talked on for an hour or more. Aida longed to marry the photographer but for both ‘other arrangements are made’. Had it been possible to leave Gaza they would have eloped: or so they told one another. Among the Palestinians, and especially among the Gazans, one often comes upon these unexpected conjunctions: ‘every hair covered – elopement considered’. Before we parted Aida gave me her grandfather’s name and mobile number and suggested I visit him in Jabalya town because ‘he likes foreign books and the people who write them’.

  Much as I detest mobile phones I have to concede that they do simplify life on the overpopulated Strip where it can take a very long time to locate an address. When I showed the serveece driver what Aida had scribbled in my notebook he conversed animatedly with her grandfather, Abdel, and mere moments late we found Abdel and his nephew Salem waiting for me on a crowded pavement in the heart of Jabalya town.

  Grandad was small and pot-bellied with a short grey beard, a high domed forehead, deep-set grey-green eyes, fluent English and an oblique sense of humour. Salem was tall, thin, intense and at first rather shy. They led me through a maze of sunless passageways to a warped, unpainted door suited to a slum dwelling. It gave access to a narrow, unroofed corridor from which an outside stone stairway, long and steep, led to the spacious home where Abdel was born in 1947. His parents had married (aged fourteen and eighteen) in 1938, during the war on Zionism. The family was poor (‘new poor’) and times were hard when so many refugees were driven onto the Strip; Abdel had eleven siblings but six died young. His own nine children were thriving and already he and Mariam had fifteen grandchildren. Mariam was young enough to be my daughter – a bulky woman who can’t ever have been beautiful but made up for that by being gracious and quick-witted and radiating a special sort of matronly charm based on contentment. I had to lie to her about my meeting with Aida; it had taken place in the UNRWA school, not in a café.

  In two pleasing respects, Abdel was slightly unusual. Although Mariam spoke no English he ensured her full participation in our conversation, translating every word. Also, he was as eager to listen as to talk and seemed genuinely interested in my view of things. Aida had been right about her grandad: he did like foreign writers.

  The four of us sat in a wide breezy window embrasure and Abdel drew my attention to the bomb-damaged balcony, its new delicately wrought bars made from scavenged steel rods. ‘Gaza is the world’s recycling capital!’ boasted Abdel. Below us lay an oblong of land, two acres or so, uglified by a central bomb crater but still supporting a few olive, lemon and apricot trees and two bedraggled banana plants. Enclosing this space were several other eighteenth-century three-storey houses, all occupied by members of Abdel’s clan. Here I learned two new words – muwataneen (a native Gazan) and mehajera (a refugee).

  On one cousin’s roof a yellow Fatah flag fluttered but I soon realised that Abdel’s branch of this clan lived above the fray. Another branch, however, stubbornly supported an old plan, no longer much discussed, to transfer at least half of Gaza’s mehajera population to the West Bank. Some of Jabalya camp stands on clan land, leased to UNRWA. Abdel was firmly pro-mehajera. In his view, throughout the Strip, Palestinian disunity had yet again made bad worse. An undeniable truth. In Shatti camp I heard many bitter criticisms of the PA’s Oslo-era decision to build a luxury hotel on nearby government land that should have been used to ease Shatti’s appalling congestion.

  When I arrived an anaemic twenty-year-old (Hoda, Salem’s daughter) was wearing a sleeveless blouse and shorts and cuddling the first great-grandchild, an enchanting eight-month-old-girl with a mass of raven curls and hyacinth-blue eyes. Then came a warning shout: two male cousins were arriving. The baby was dumped in Grandma’s lap and Hoda hastened away to don a loose, calf-length, printed cotton prayer-gown incorporating a hijab, the garment women wear when praying at home (as they mostly do). This comfortable hot-weather attire can no longer be worn out of doors – say the Salafists – because it might blow around, showing too much. Towards noon Salem and the cousins excused themselves: it was prayer time. As they went Abdel smiled at his wife, then said to me, ‘Younger folk are more devout than us – or should I say “we”?’

  Uncountable small children were all the time darting to and fro, most looking rather anaemic yet none lacking energy. A triple bed, strewn with lavishly embroidered cushions, took up half the floor space and on it a ginger-and-white kitten slept soundly when not being played with, roughly though affectionately, by a six-year-old boy suffering from an eye defect. One lid drooped uncontrollably and Abdel was struggling to get him to an Israeli hospital for corrective treatment. Mariam observed that it was inherited; there were several other cases within the clan. One might have expected this highly educated family to be wary of consanguinity – but no. As Abdel tried to clarify who I was meeting, or was about to meet, he mentioned one cousinly marriage after another. For Aida (the mating she hoped somehow to avoid) a second cousin had been chosen.

  Over the next pot of coffee Suzanne joined us, Mariam and Abdel’s first-born, the forty-year-old mother of Aida and eight others though her husband had been in a wheelchair (a botched spinal operation) since adolescence. (This couple had been greatly helped, Aida told me at our next meeting, by the al-Wafa workshop on sexuality for patients with spinal injuries.) Suzanne was holding Sawsan by the hand, an eight-year-old daughter, scared-looking and white-faced with elfin features. She had been severely traumatised when the family home was smashed to rubble by one massive bomb. The whole family was sheltering then in an UNRWA school and none was injured. But the youngest, aged five and a half at the time, had been unhinged by the loss, within moments, of their home and all their possessions including hens, a donkey, a cat. The donkey was always hired out during the ploughing season and those few extra shekels had made what Abdel called ‘a Micawberish difference’.

  Suzanne angrily compared the international media coverage then being given to the captured Gilad Schalit’s five-year imprisonment without visitors and the ignoring of almost 8,000 Palestinians imprisoned without visitors in Israeli jails. (Only one jail is in the OPT, where West Bank relatives can occasionally visit.) Two of Suzanne’s brothers-in-law (her husband’s sisters’ husbands) had been in Israeli jails for more than three years – without a visit. None of their family or friends could get a permit to leave Gaza. During an IDF incursion into Rafah town both had been arrested in their homes, detained for 95 days in an interrogation (torture) centre, then tried and sentenced by military courts but never treated as POWs. The IDF had vandalised several Rafah homes that night, kicking TVs, computers, fridges, ripping upholstery, smashing kitchenware, scattering food all over floors before urinating on it. Throughout the West Bank I had heard many similar stories and in some cases seen the ‘morning-after’ evidence as families wept over destroyed possessions they couldn’t possibly afford to replace.

  Abdel said, ‘The IDF is a very sick institution. Maybe we shouldn’t blame individual kids. They’re taken out of the schoolroom, processed in a dehumanising machine, injected with fear and loathing of Palestinians. I hear people say, in another w
ay they’re victims.’

  Salem, by now back from the mosque, said, ‘Maybe all armies do this sort of thing but we notice it more where all are clamped together, in our Holy Land.’

  Suzanne, sitting with Sawsan on her knee, was uninhibited about arguing with Father. She, too, spoke excellent English. ‘Those kids choose to be processed! They could do jail for a month or pay a fine. And the officers who send them out to hunt us and persecute us, they’re no kids! And the politicians who reward the officers with big jobs when they retire – are they kids? If they’re all sick, they’re sick the way Hitler was and no one makes excuses for him!’

  At that moment some mischievous local jinn decided to provide the foreign writer with raw material and, as lunch was being served, a very loud thump shook the floor and made everyone jump. (Except me: I don’t react to sudden loud noises, which probably means there’s something radically wrong with my central nervous system.) Salem hurried to the little annex bathroom, added in the 1950s and jutting over the garden. He couldn’t open the door: half the ceiling had collapsed. I recalled then my visit to the cartography department, in Gaza City’s labyrinthine municipality building, where I was told that most structures on the Strip, however outwardly unaffected, have in fact been weakened by Cast Lead and are liable to show the strain as time passes.

  That thump made poor little Sawsan scream in terror and cling frantically to Suzanne as though she were trying to return to the safety of the womb. When at last she had been soothed, all fourteen of us settled down on the inner room floor to eat from piled communal platters. Then Salem voiced a widely held suspicion – Cast Lead’s air attack had been so extreme because the US-donated GBU-39 bombs, weighing 250 pounds and reputed to be ‘smart’, needed testing in 2008 and were not quite suitable for ‘humanitarian interventions’ in such places as Kosovo and Libya.