Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  I hired a taxi to return to Asqalan and arranged for the driver to bring me back to Erez at eight thirty the next morning. I’d beaten the protesters to the border, but the soldier at the gate said I still couldn’t cross. She gave me no reason. “Maybe it will open at ten o’clock,” she said. It didn’t. The gate finally slid open at noon, and I entered the Israeli border post, a bright and clean building laid with polished tile. The feeling of welcome startled me. The place resembled the arrivals lounge at Ben Gurion Airport.

  The checkpoint’s aesthetics of hospitality faded once I showed my documents to a soldier in a glass booth and navigated the gauntlet of security architecture behind her. I followed a yellow arrow and a sign reading, simply, GAZA in Hebrew, English, and Arabic and went through a door. More yellow arrows led me into a tight passageway flanked with high steel walls. I wrestled my backpack through the metal turnstile at the end of the hall, then walked across a fenced outdoor courtyard to another turnstile built into a gate of vertical bars. The entire labyrinth reminded me of the checkpoints at Qalandiya and elsewhere in the West Bank. Only here at Erez, no press of bodies struggled to get through. I was completely alone. According to the Israeli agency COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), hundreds of Palestinians pass through Erez each day. But for all I could tell, I was the only person entering Gaza that afternoon.

  Once I clanked through the turnstile, I faced the wall of the gray concrete slabs forming Israel’s security barrier around Gaza. A thick steel panel at the base of the wall rumbled eerily to the side, remotely triggered by someone watching me through a security camera, revealing a small opening in the wall. Sunlight poured through.

  I stepped through the portal into a wide cement pad. A long paved corridor, hemmed in by wire fence and topped with a wavy roof of corrugated steel, stretched across the buffer zone between the wall and Gaza proper. There was still nobody else around. I walked along the corridor until I heard the whir of an approaching golf cart. I stepped aside to let the cart pass, but the Palestinian driver stopped next to me and, without saying a word, gestured for me to take the seat behind him. He turned the cart around, and we sped down the kilometer-long cage until we reached the other side of Gaza’s buffer zone. Through the fence, I could see the Israeli guard towers on the border wall looming over a weedy swathe of no-man’s-land.

  Next, I navigated Gazan security. First, I presented my documents to a Fatah official sitting in a white security trailer at the Hamsa-Hamsa checkpoint. Israel and the Palestinian Authority both regard Hamsa-Hamsa, or 5-5, as the official border post for Gaza. Still, as the man in the trailer flipped through my passport, a poster of Yasser Arafat hanging on the wall behind him, the inspection felt perfunctory. The PA has exercised little authority here since June 2007, when long-simmering tensions between Hamas and Fatah factions erupted into open war on the streets of Gaza. The weeklong battle left more than one hundred people dead and Gaza under Hamas’s control.

  Darwish railed against the Hamas-Fatah fratricide in one of his last poems, “From Now On You Are Somebody Else.” Darwish asks the sparring factions: “Did we have to fall from a great height, and see our own blood on our hands, to realize that we are not angels, as we used to believe?” And he calls Hamas leader Khaled Mashal “the prisoner whose ambition is to inherit the prison.” Darwish considered the sort of Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Hamas a disaster for democracy, and he declared that dialogue between the two main Palestinian factions could occur only “if Hamas apologizes for what they did in Gaza.” Hamas was unmoved. After Darwish died in 2008, Mashal passive-aggressively sniped that while the poet’s death was, indeed, a great loss, “Palestine can give birth to ten Mahmoud Darwishes.”

  Hamas refused to recognize any sign of Fatah’s authority in Gaza. They operated their own border checkpoint, Arba-Arba or 4-4, about a kilometer down the road from Hamsa-Hamsa. Nedal waited for me there. He shook my hand, kissed both my cheeks, and handed me my Hamas-issued entry visa. Hamas officials checked my passport again and searched my bag for alcohol and other contraband. I had nothing illegal with me, but I was less worried about Hamas’s rules than Canada’s. My government considers Hamas a terrorist organization, and by paying them for my entry visa and temporary residency permit, I’d broken Canada’s terrorist financing law. I tried not to think about this.

  Nedal and I boarded a taxi to drive us into Gaza City. Our driver, Munir, traveled along Saladin Street, the major thoroughfare connecting Gaza’s north and south. Once we passed through the fetid stench of open-air sewage ponds near the Jabaliya refugee camp, we left the smooth highway and turned west toward the seafront through a forest of broken streets. Ramallah’s creamy white stones are not found in Gaza. Nor is the pink limestone of Jerusalem. Instead, the same gray of Erez’s turnstiles and steel doors extends over the cinder block buildings that rose unsteadily around us. A week later I would meet a young woman who told me about seeing Gaza from a rooftop. The grayness was too ugly to bear, she said, and she never went to the roof again.

  We shared the road with packed buses and strange motorcycle-cart hybrids that resembled mechanical centaurs. Women were in hijab or niqab. Children crowded the sides of the streets, boys and girls both, kicking around soccer balls or walking in school-uniformed groups. They added some color to the surrounding drab. So, too, did the graffiti, the soda bottles heaped on donkey carts, and the laundry hung to dry on cracked balconies. Once on the coastal road, we passed a row of fishermen’s shacks and chicken coops built of scrap wood and rusted panels of corrugated steel standing on the trash-strewn beach. The sea and sky above were as gray as gunmetal.

  I rented an apartment in a building near the port. The building custodian was a young man named Ahmed with slicked-back hair and no English. He lived in a tiny office in the lobby, equipped with a cot and a gas burner on which he brewed coffee. I arrived during one of the city’s rolling electricity blackouts, so Ahmed had to switch on the generator to power the elevator. I stood inside the darkened cabin for a few seconds until the fluorescent lights flickered on. Then Ahmed gave me a thumbs-up and pushed the button for the eighth floor.

  My two-bedroom flat was far larger than I needed, and full of the sort of polished wooden furniture my Italian relatives favored in the 1980s. A note on the table from my landlord explained how to manage the “eight hours on, eight hours off” electricity schedule, something I never did figure out in the nearly two months I lived there. The note also told me to drink from the plastic tank of water on the kitchen counter. When I ran out, I was to place the empty tank outside my door with a one-shekel coin on top, and Ahmed would refill it. The brackish tap water made for foul showers and left a crystal crust on the rim of my coffee cups each time I washed dishes. My first sip of coffee each morning always tasted of salt.

  I could see Gaza City’s main fishing docks and the hotels along the seafront road from my window. I felt a jolt when I spotted the Al Deira Hotel. This was the only building in Gaza I knew by sight. I recognized the hotel’s red facade from news reports I’d seen during 2014’s summer war, Operation Protective Edge. The stretch of beach beside the hotel was where the Bakr boys were killed.

  Sometime in the late afternoon on July 16 that year, a group of boys played on the beach and atop a retaining wall near Al Deira’s seaside terrace. They were kicking a soccer ball on the sand when an IDF shell struck and the retaining wall exploded into flames. The boys scattered. Then a second shell, fired forty seconds later, hit the boys as they fled. Those who could still walk carried those who couldn’t to Al Deira, where international journalists in Gaza to cover the war tended to the bleeding bodies.

  The boys were all between nine and twelve years old, which according to Gaza’s cruel chronology means they’d already endured two previous wars: the first in 2008, the second in 2012. Ismail, Zakaria, Ahed, and Mohammed Bakr would not survive their third. They lay dead on the harbor wall. The cousins were members of a renowned fishing fam
ily that has plied the Gazan coastline for centuries. Family lore claims the Bakrs originated in Saudi Arabia, where they fished the Arabian Sea. Now, however, the Bakr family considers the Mediterranean a source of death and sorrow rather than sustenance. “We were devoted to the sea,” Ismail’s father told a reporter a year after the attacks, “but not anymore.” The broken man still wanders the beach looking for parts of his son’s body.

  The IDF investigated the incident for a year then exonerated itself.

  Military officials declared the killing of the boys a tragic accident, but no laws had been broken. A spokesman said the strike targeted a Hamas compound in an area used “exclusively by militants.” The claim contradicted testimony from journalists who witnessed the attack from Al Deira’s terrace and saw no militant activity anywhere near the boys.

  I’ve seen a photo, taken the day after the attack, of the four boys laid out on blue stretchers. Their bodies, unnaturally gray in death, lay swaddled in bloodstained sheets and wrapped in the yellow flag of Fatah. Cuts and burns scar the boys’ faces. The boy in the immediate foreground seems to be grimacing in pain or fear, as if even death failed to ease his trauma. But I am struck most by the smallness of their bodies. The children were scarcely bigger than my own six-year-old son, and I wondered who could mistake such boys for men.

  On his blog, Ala Hlehel wrote a short essay, gnashing and sarcastic, from the perspective of one of the murdered boys:

  We ran fast. Children run fast because their bodies are light, and excitement usually controls our movements. We used to run fast in the narrow alleys of Gaza. We are familiar with all of its curves and rough areas. We know by heart all the worn-out houses accumulated over each other, even when they are intermingled and look the same: their construction is not finished. Their colors are like dry cement. Believe me. We are familiar with aesthetics. In class, they taught us about Leonardo da Vinci. But Gaza lacks cement and paint. Even if they were available—poverty is much stronger. . . .

  Allow me to apologize to anyone for whom we have ruined the delight of the “rational” and calculated attacks, and Israel’s ability to be humane while killing us. We have ruined for you the delight of the “international solidarity” with Israel’s pain. Here we are, once more as you see, insisting on dying at the wrong time. Even in death, we are illogical and impractical. Is there any enemy like us? Cruel and coarse as such?

  A few days after I arrived in Gaza, a woman named Haneen, whose sister I know back in Canada, brought me to the same stretch of beach. Haneen’s children were involved in a youth sailing program run by a Norwegian NGO, and we watched as a group of preteens practiced piloting tiny fiberglass boats. While they waited their turns, the others ran and splashed in the water, the girls in sodden T-shirts over their bathing suits and the boys bare chested. The setting sun gilded their bodies gold.

  I couldn’t help but think of the Bakr cousins, and I told Haneen I was surprised there was not some sort of memorial built here on the beach for them. She shrugged. “It was four boys,” she said. “Five hundred children died in that war. What do we build for the rest of them?”

  A Palestinian in the West Bank once told me that Gazans are lucky. In 2005, Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and marched its military out of the strip. Gaza is now the only place where one can fully live as a Palestinian among Palestinians. There are no Israelis in Gaza. No settlers and no soldiers. Gazans don’t face humiliations at checkpoints or gaze upon the settlements that loom atop the hills. In Gaza, at least, the occupation is invisible.

  Abeer Ayyoub draws little comfort from this unseen occupation. I met the young journalist for breakfast a couple of times during my stay in Gaza. On one of these mornings, she told me about a recent—and rare—visit to Jerusalem. It was the first time she’d seen Israeli soldiers in thirteen years. Abeer recounted how a friend in Jerusalem told her how hard it was to look the occupation in the eye on a daily basis. “I told him how much harder it was to feel the occupation every minute in Gaza,” she said, “and never have the privilege to look it in the eye.”

  But Gaza is less under occupation than under siege. After the Hamas takeover in 2007, Israel declared Gaza a “hostile entity” and imposed a sweeping blockade on the territory. Israel controls who can travel in and out of Gaza. Usually only merchants with permits, medical patients, and a weekly quota of worshippers who want to pray in Jerusalem are allowed to pass through Erez. For most Gazans, leaving the territory via Erez is impossible. Israel vets all goods that enter Gaza, too, and decides which Gazan products can be exported and sold outside the territory. Israel even determines how long the lights stay on. Israel bombed Gaza’s only power station in 2006 and then restricted the import of parts needed to rebuild it. This, combined with ongoing disputes between Hamas and the PA over who should pay for the station’s fuel and another Israeli airstrike on the plant in 2014, means that for a decade most Gazans have not enjoyed more than eight consecutive hours of electricity.

  Ziyad Fahed Bakr does not feel lucky to be in Gaza. The young fisherman—no doubt related somehow to the slain Bakr cousins—took me out in his boat one morning and told me about trying to make a living under the blockade. Israel decides how far from the coastline Gaza’s fishermen can sail, expanding and shrinking the zone as they see fit. High-quality fish like sea bream and tuna prefer the distant reefs and rocks to the sandy sea bottom near the shoreline, but fishermen who dare cross the navy-enforced line risk being boarded, detained, or shot. Ziyad rolled up his pant leg to show me the smooth round scars from Israeli bullets. Few fish are left swimming in the nearby waters. “Sometimes I get lucky on windy days when the sea bream drift close to shore,” Ziyad said. Usually, though, he only catches tiny sardines that fetch low prices at the market. “Some days I make no money at all,” he said.

  Farmer Abdusalam al-Manasrah did not feel lucky, either. His family has owned land in eastern Gaza since the days of the Ottomans. “Every speck of soil is mixed with my sweat and the sweat of my father, my grandfather, and my grandmother,” he told me. But ancestral ownership means little in the shadow of the border. During the Second Intifada, the Israeli army bulldozed Abdusalam’s ancient olive trees to create better sightlines from their positions along the border fence. Abdusalam planted wheat where his trees used to be, but the army burned the fields when the wheat grew too high. The IDF expanded the buffer zone in 2005 and again during the war in 2008. Abdusalam’s family fields lie completely in no-man’s-land now. He cannot access them at all. “Maybe you can reach the buffer zone line,” he said when I asked what would happen if I tried to walk to his fields. “After the line, the soldiers will shoot warning shots. If you keep walking, they will shoot the ground in front of your feet. Within one hundred meters, I don’t know. Maybe your legs. Maybe your heart.”

  The Karawan Café stands down an alleyway just off Omar al-Mukhtar Street, a boulevard of clothing stores, restaurants, and ice cream shops that forms Gaza’s main commercial thoroughfare. Although the café was a twenty-minute walk from my apartment, Karawan immediately became my local haunt, my Gazan replacement for Café Ramallah. I’d go there most afternoons to sit on a plastic chair and write in my notebook on one of the café’s wobbly tables. Young men in jeans and ball caps stared at their smart-phones while older men in open-collared shirts played cards. Occasionally, school-aged boys walked through the café selling cigarettes. Although posters of both Yasser Arafat and Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin hang on Karawan’s tiled walls, fixed in place by black electrical tape, everyone in Gaza knows that Karawan is a café for Fatah supporters. Hamas sympathizers, known as hamsawi, take their coffee and nargileh elsewhere.

  The head waiter patrolled the café taking orders. He was tall and thin and as constantly in motion as the flies that tormented the glasses of sweet tea he delivered. He carried tongs and a tin brazier of burning coals to replenish shrunken briquettes on his customers’ nargilehs, and he shouted tea and coffee orders to his minions in the bac
k. After only two visits, he already called me habibi and brought me an Arabic coffee and a lemon-mint nargileh as soon as I sat down.

  I first learned of the Karawan Café from The Drone Eats with Me, Atef Abu Saif’s diary of 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. Atef writes of coming to the café from his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp every morning for seventeen years and the importance of keeping up his daily routine in the midst of war. “We have to recapture some normality, to reclaim some of the life we had before,” Atef writes. “The Karawan Café is a very important ingredient of this normality.” I was pleased, then, when Atef suggested we meet at Karawan. We sat outside the front door with our coffees while traffic noise from the nearby Saraya junction filled the spaces in between our conversation.

  Atef never intended his journals from the war to become a book. On the fourth day, his London editor sent him an email to ask how he was doing. In reply, Atef translated what he’d written in his journal into English and sent it to his editor, who in turn posted the journal entry on the publisher’s website. Atef liked the idea of people outside Gaza reading his account of the war, so he started writing his daily journals in English and sending them to London. Atef didn’t know that his editor was also passing the entries along to newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Sunday Times, which were reprinting them. “During the war, sometimes we only had electricity for two hours. I would use those two hours just to write my diaries, so I wouldn’t check the internet,” he said. Occasionally, Atef walked to the camp’s internet café to write on its computers because it had a generator. The café owner knew Atef and chased out the kids playing video games. “He would say to them, ‘Leave mister to work,’ then he would lock the door until I finished my story.”

  Atef derived no pleasure from writing his war diaries, but he considered them necessary. During the two previous wars in Gaza—Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012—Gazans knew places where they could feel safe from the Israeli bombing runs. They waited out the fighting in the homes of friends and family who lived in neighborhoods they figured would be spared. But nowhere felt safe in 2014. The destruction was widespread. Everyone I spoke to about Protective Edge told me the same thing: they never knew if they would see another day. “The action of writing is a testimony of my survival,” Atef said. “When I am writing, I am proving that I am alive.”