We talk about the temple and the al-Aqsa Mosque. Michael says when the temple is rebuilt, we’ll all live in peace. “We all believe in one God,” Michael says.
“But you’d have to remove the mosque to rebuild the temple,” I say. “Where Mohammed rose to heaven.”
“No. We would just move it. It’s not even their holiest place. It’s only their third-holiest place. They pray with their backs to the temple.”
“It’s hard to imagine the Islamic world being OK with moving al-Aqsa,” I say.
“It’s hard to imagine a wolf and a lamb,” Michael replies.
I think about Michael on my way into Gaza. When the temple is rebuilt, there will be peace on earth. It’s not something I believe, but religious extremism has risen on all sides of the Israeli conflict. I think about Maimon, whom I saw later that night. We were in the Old City, filled with Orthodox Jews mourning the temple. We met an old friend of his on her way to the wall. Maimon whispered to me after she passed, “She’s not Orthodox. She used to fuck.” Maimon got his papers the other day. He’s being called up for military service, even though he’s forty years old.
Most people aren’t thinking about the war in Gaza, since everyone is focused on the war in the north with Lebanon. But 175 Palestinians were killed in Gaza in the past forty days.
Gaza is a hard concept to grasp without going there. It’s barely twenty-five miles long and four miles wide. There are 1.4 million people, making it the mostly densely populated place on earth. One million of them are refugees from the Israeli War of Independence, in 1948, or what Arabs refer to as al-Nakba, or the Disaster. Of those, 860,000 still depend on the United Nations for food. They are citizens of no country. The crossing to Egypt has been closed. The port for imports and exports has been closed. The crossing to Israel has been closed. All of Gaza is surrounded by an electric fence. Journalists and humanitarian aid workers are the only ones who can get in and out.
At the border there are three buses. America and Germany are taking their few citizens from Gaza to the Jordanian border. Everyone with a foreign passport is leaving. They laugh at me for going in. “We should kidnap you,” one of them says.
I walk a long, quiet tunnel built for processing thousands. A large gate opens at the end, and I step into a chamber. The gate closes behind me, and another opens. Sunlight scatters inside through holes in the roof. I pass a restroom covered by razor wire. Then I hear Arabic music and step into the Gaza Strip.
Ashraf is there to meet me. “You look good!” he says. “You took out your earrings, and your haircut makes you look like an Arab.”
“That’s because an Arab cut my hair,” I explain.
“Don’t tell anyone you’re American,” he says. “People here don’t like America anymore.”
We pass a destroyed bridge over a ravine that will flood when the rains come in the winter, houses reduced to rubble. There are some cars, but there are also carts driven by horses and mules. Posters of men surrounded by guns are taped to all the buildings. The men have died recently and are celebrated as martyrs. We pass the settlements the Israelis left just a year ago and destroyed on their way out. We pass a distillation pump donated by Italy, crowded with Palestinians waiting with jugs for the taps.
“Nobody can drink Gaza water,” Ashraf says.
It’s been five years since I last visited Gaza, and at the time, it seemed like things couldn’t possibly get worse. But things can always get worse. Gaza is the graveyard of optimism.
If you ask when the current round of destruction began, the Gazans will say it began with the death of the Ghalia family, killed by Israeli artillery while on the beach near the Erez Crossing, where I came in. Israel denied that its ordnance was responsible, but human-rights groups have displayed fragments of a 155mm Israeli artillery shell. Many Israelis believe that only militants are killed in the fighting. They don’t believe in collateral damage, but war is nothing if not mistakes. The image of the surviving child, Huda, captured the world’s imagination for a few days and the imagination of the Gazans for much longer.
The Israelis say the conflict started with the election of Hamas, whose militia continues to launch Qassam rockets across the border. The rockets are small, but they do damage, they terrorize the population, and eight Israelis have died. The Israelis believed that when they unilaterally left the Gaza settlements, the militants would cease their attacks. But they were wrong, and this has infuriated the Israeli public, who feel like they have given something and gotten nothing in return. But the Gazans, who don’t control their ports or crossings and have no international representation, don’t see what they have to be so excited about.
At the hospital in Rafa, the head surgeon sleeps on a mat on the floor. “There were nine martyrs today,” he says, trying to wake up, lighting a cigarette.
“There were also twenty-three wounded,” the surgeon says. “Today I amputated four extremities. We fear there will be more martyrs because of infection. We suspect the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] attacks again tonight. Always we fear at night.”
I notice that even the hospital walls are covered with posters of the men who have been killed.
Mosheer Al Masry is thirty years old, a member of Parliament, and the Hamas spokesman in Gaza. We meet in his apartment in Beit Lahia, a particularly hard-hit suburb just north of Gaza City. There is a sitting room in the front and a curtain to prevent us from seeing the women in the rest of the house. He is well dressed, with a nicely trimmed beard.
Mosheer tells me it is just the Israeli media that says Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and that Hamas has always been willing to negotiate. This is a lie, but I let it pass. He tells me, “America should correct the policies of its government. They will be more welcome in the world.” He’s just a kid with a beard, I think. I mention that the charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of Israel. Mosheer waves his hand and smiles. He offers me an orange soda.
At night I sit on the Mediterranean, on the patio of the Al Deira Hotel, where the richest people in Gaza meet. They wear Western clothes. Women sit at tables with uncovered heads. There is no alcohol, since the last bar, the UN Beach Club, was burned to the ground, less than a year ago. Among the patrons is a smattering of foreign press documenting the tragedy playing out, second-stringers covering a forgotten war since the hostilities with Lebanon to the north. There are almost no foreign-aid workers left in Gaza, and there are fewer than a hundred people sipping strawberry juice and smoking narghile pipes, talking and listening to the sea.
With its beautiful beaches, Gaza was once thought of as a potential tourist attraction, but all the hotels are empty except for Al Deira, which costs eighty dollars a night. Ashraf offered to let me stay in his apartment for free, but the water didn’t work, and there are only six to eight hours of electricity. I was hoping to save some money, since the Israeli military stole my computer, but when Ashraf told me I would need to keep away from the windows and open the door only if I heard my name, I decided I would stay in the hotel.
I sit with Hamada, the Gazan head of a UN organization. His office was destroyed several days ago during a riot that erupted to protest the UN response in Lebanon. “The people you see here,” he says, “they are here every night.” It’s like the deck of the Titanic after the last lifeboat had gone.
Hamada’s foreign counterpart has left Gaza already. I tell him I met a sick man earlier who was dying and had been waiting more than a month to leave for Egypt and get care. We talk about the impossibility of a targeted assassination. “There are four thousand people per square kilometer. There’s no such thing as a targeted killing in that dense of a population.” We talk about the crowding and poverty, twenty people living in one room with no basic sanitary conditions. The sewage running through the streets of the refugee camps, where the majority of people live.
“The main problem of Gaza,” he says, “is access.”
We talk about the import-export zone, which has been closed. There was a project t
o grow vegetables in the hothouses bought for the Gazans from the settlers by the World Trade Organization. After the settlers left, it looked like the project would be a success. But then, when it was time to export the vegetables, the port was closed, so the tomatoes sat on the dock, going rotten.
We talk about the phone calls. In the past months, the IDF has taken to calling people and telling them their homes are going to be destroyed. Often in less than ten minutes. The problem is that this has led to prank calls. “My neighbor got a phone call,” Hamada says. “‘We’re going to bomb your house.’ We didn’t go home for three days; there was no way to verify.”
Then there are the sonic booms. Ehud Olmert has vowed that as long as Qassam rockets are coming from Gaza, the Gazans will not sleep. When there are no troops in Gaza, planes fly over, breaking the sound barrier, releasing noises like giant bombs.
To illustrate the animosity between the Palestinians and the Israelis, Hamada tells me about the Beit Lahia wastewater plant. “The plant contains two million cubic meters of raw sewage in a lagoon. The plant is not working because of the lack of electricity. To make matters worse, the Israelis bomb the lagoon to prevent absorption. If something isn’t done soon, the plant will overflow. If the plant overflows, it will flood an entire neighborhood. The flood will cover four hundred fifty houses. The only thing to do at that point will be to push the sewage into the sea, which will kill all the fish.”
I imagine four hundred fifty houses filled with two stories of shit. I wish they served alcohol here. But when we talk about solutions, Hamada disappoints me. He talks about the right of return, which is the idea that all the refugees from the 1948 war should be allowed to return to Israel. It’s the kind of idea suggested by people who are not looking for a solution. Most of the homes and communities they would return to have long ceased to exist. Hamada says that Israel provokes all the intifadas and that the Qassam rockets are just firecrackers, when in fact the Qassams have destroyed homes and claimed lives. More important, the Qassams are a provocation.
The problem here is that a Gazan intellectual with a good job with the United Nations cannot see the part his own people must play in any solution. History, Israel, the United Nations, the Arab nations, particularly Egypt, have created a welfare state and an echo chamber in a cage. This echo chamber is oblivious to news coming in from the networks and the Internet. People don’t trust information from the outside world because most people don’t know anybody from the outside. Here, in response to the seizure of a Palestinian militant in Jericho, rioters destroyed the British Council, where people could get job training and borrow books. In response to the war in Lebanon, they destroy UN offices, even though the UN is the only real employer left and is responsible for feeding and housing more than half the population. Hamada doesn’t see the role the Palestinians have played in their own misery, the kidnapping of the soldier, the election of Hamas. In this way he’s no different from most of the Israelis I’ve met, who blame all their troubles on Arabs. I let Hamada pay for my juice.
I lie awake in the middle of the forgotten war. There is some gun-fire in the streets, or perhaps just fireworks from a nearby wedding. I watch CNN, and the current death statistics filter across the bottom of the screen, followed by a doping scandal in the Tour de France. I ask myself, If I were stuck in this cage and unable to make contact with the rest of the world, what would I do? The second most important man in Gaza, after the leader of Hamas, is John Ging, head of the Gazan United Nation Relief and Works Agency. He’s the only person in Gaza willing to criticize the Hamas government. But then, his office is giant and air-conditioned, and he can leave when he wants to. Ging says:
The tragedy is, after all this time, we still feed eight hundred sixty thousand refugees in the strip. With the recent incursions we’ve added a hundred thousand to our rolls. Donor assistance has been cut off since March, when the Palestinian Authority, under Hamas control, didn’t meet donor requirements. There are no garbage trucks to pick up waste, for example. We’re at the relief end, providing the very basics. We have four schools at the Jabalia Camp that we’ve now filled with fifteen hundred people seeking shelter from the Israeli military. This is the first time the Israelis have cut off power, so things are much worse. The sense of imprisonment is heightened. Anybody with the option to get out is already gone. What the Palestinians don’t understand, when they launch their rockets at Israel, is that the damage might not be the same, but the fear is the same. People get distracted by the magnitude of force. Israel should rein in its military. The PA, which is run by Hamas, has the responsibility to stop the Qassam rockets. Hamas can form a legitimate government, but there cannot be a separate military wing that exists outside of the government. They also have to recognize Israel and recognize existing agreements. Over the years there’ve been so many false starts. We see a flicker of hope, most recently the settlements leaving. We thought we would now move on to economic development. But it didn’t happen.
I visit a school filled with families whose homes have recently been destroyed. I see the schools and the rooms filled with mats. Each room sleeps roughly fifty people, with separate rooms for women and men. Many have lost homes near the Israeli incursion zone, the homes destroyed for strategic reasons. They tell me about the phone calls—parents running with their children, and eight minutes later, their house is destroyed. One family explains how their house was bombed two weeks prior. The only grown-ups in this family are women and a very old man. Their brother was killed over a month ago. “And then they shot the cow,” they tell me.
“What?”
“After the Israelis bombed the house, they shot our cow.” Before I leave Gaza, Ashraf shows me the universities. There are two, al-Azhar University and the Islamic University. Al-Azhar University was founded by Fatah. The Islamic University is at least unofficially affiliated with Hamas. Al-Azhar is decrepit, the buildings in disrepair despite the fact that it is newer. The Islamic University is pristine and orderly. This is why Hamas is in power in Gaza. Under Fatah, a tenth of the population was employed by the government, but the police wouldn’t stop the most basic of crimes. But Hamas runs clinics, and its security forces are effective. Islam offers structure in a place that knows only war. Hamas did not come to power because of its position on Israel. The idea that Hamas can be forced from power by starving Gaza is false. Hamas is the power here; it controls the message. There is no one else to negotiate with.
4
My first night back in Jerusalem, I go to a gay bar with an Orthodox rabbi and others who have arrived in Jerusalem for the gaypride week that is coming up. He asks me what I think of the idea that Islam doesn’t work because it was founded on success, while Judaism and Christianity are founded on failure. “Well, it’s not true,” I say. “At least for the Shiites. Anyway, I don’t think you’re getting at the heart of the problem.”
I remember Ashraf just back from the mosque. I asked him what he heard, and Ashraf responded that the preaching concerned America and the evil use of American power. I remember the destroyed buildings, and Ashraf pointing and laughing. “American made! You make very good bombs. Look, they go through six floors. It’s amazing.”
The rabbi and I watch the transvestite burlesque.
“I love this,” he says.
“I wouldn’t mind doing that,” I say. The tall black woman is lipsynching “I Will Survive.”
“Are you good with makeup?”
“No,” I reply. “And I twitch. My mascara would be everywhere. But I do feel most comfortable in a dress and heels.”
We watch the show and dance until midnight, when the rabbi leaves. He has to be up early for an interfaith meeting. He’s hoping to spread tolerance and acceptance for gays in the religious community.
On my last day in Israel, Maimon and I meet back in Tel Aviv. I want to talk to him about the third side of the conflict, the one simmering in the West Bank, the land between Jordan and Israel. Israel has built a security barrier separating Eas
t Jerusalem from Ramallah and Bethlehem, cutting off 40 percent of the West Bank economy. I want to talk about the giant settlements like Ma’ale Adumim, built between East Jerusalem and Ramallah, with forty thousand residents already and forty thousand more expected in the next few years. I want to tell him I visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham is buried, father of the Arabs and the Jews, and how you could feel the pain of the conflict simmering in the streets of Hebron and the small settlement there and in the square in Kiryat Arba, named in honor of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 slaughtered twenty-nine Muslims while they were praying. It’s a small country, but these are all places Maimon has never been. I want to talk about the conflict and the history and how hard it is keep the story together when there are so many threads.
But when Maimon sits down, he looks very serious.
“I ordered a pitcher,” I say.
“Good idea,” he says. Then he starts to cry.
I get up and hug him. He’ll be reporting soon, going off to fight in Lebanon or maybe Gaza or to staff a checkpoint in the West Bank.
“Oh God,” he says again and again and again. “I just got the call. My cousin was killed in Lebanon.” Other people, waiting outside for their meals, look away. A man passes the bar carrying a surfboard. Maimon doesn’t have the details yet, just that it happened more than twenty-four hours ago and they haven’t been able to recover the body yet.
We sit in the restaurant for as long as we can. The sea is so close. The only real border, where the land ends. Maimon makes a joke, then starts crying again. “Lebanon,” he says.
At the airport terminal, as I am getting ready to leave, Maimon says, “Remember Colorado?”
“Sure.”
“All we did was snowboard all the time.”
“Yeah.”
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