“Gallery went back the way it used to be,” Jamal said. “In every corner you’d find someone playing music or doing something interesting.” Jamal added a small reception hall on the property that could be used both as a stage for musicians and a studio for artists, and he filled it with paints and easels. Jamal rented out space for arts events at very low prices, sometimes for nothing at all. “I also had to put in a kitchen because my customers would sit all day long and get hungry,” Jamal said. The café earned a reputation as a venue for Gazans to cheat on their Ramadan fasts.
Gallery became a refuge for Gazan women seeking respite from the strict morality rules imposed by the new Hamas government. “Women could feel free at Gallery. Laugh. Be loud. They could sing. They could do whatever they wanted.” Aside from Jamal’s own prohibition on gambling—“I didn’t want Gallery to turn into a card place,” Jamal said—Gallery had no rules. “And that is why Hamas thought we were bad.”
Hamas started sending undercover security agents to harass Jamal and his customers, especially the young women. They scolded them for smoking nargileh and demanded to know the identities of the men they socialized with. “The agents always dressed the same,” Jamal said. “We knew them by their beards, vests, and sandals. The sandals are key.” Occasionally, agents forced Jamal’s customers up from their tables and brought them to the police station for questioning. Hamas knew nothing illegal was going on at Gallery, but Jamal suspects the continuous harassment was intended to frighten customers away so the café would eventually go out of business. “The good thing about the Gallery visitors is that they were strong,” Jamal said. “They argued. They were not afraid.”
Not even a bomb could discourage Jamal’s regulars. In October 2009, a phone call woke Jamal at around four in the morning. Someone had detonated a bomb at the front entrance of the café. The night watchman, Jamal’s nephew, suffered minor injuries to his leg. The bomb turned out to be small and handmade, but it caused serious damage to the café entrance and to some of the tables and chairs near the door. The police told Jamal they would look into the attack, but no one was ever arrested. “Apparently, they still are investigating,” Jamal joked. He is convinced Hamas planted the bomb to scare off customers. This tactic failed, too. Gallery was as busy as ever following the explosion.
Hamas wasn’t finished with Gallery, though. The following May, security agents appeared at the café entrance during an exhibit of graffiti photography by Swedish artist Mia Gröndahl. The agents started to pester Gallery’s visitors. One of the waiters called Jamal and told him to come to the café. When Jamal arrived, the agents told him they had been looking for him for the past two months. “Really?” Jamal said. “I’ve been here the whole time.” The agents took Jamal to the police station where they accused him of holding the graffiti event without permission from the Ministry of Culture. Jamal told him that he did, in fact, have a permit. Then the police told Jamal there were Israeli collaborators among the patrons at the café. “Then you should go and arrest them,” Jamal suggested.
His interrogators switched strategies again. “You meet many women at the café,” one said.
“What is wrong with meeting women? This is none of your business.”
The officer swore at Jamal and shouted: “You are having sex with these women!”
Jamal told them this was not true, that he had a wife and children and was an honorable man. The police, though, spent hours questioning him about imagined sexual improprieties. Then they demanded he return the next morning for further interrogation. When Jamal came back, the agents asked him the same questions again, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, and told him to return again the next day. On the third day, they confiscated Jamal’s mobile phone and scrolled through his messages. They pointed to numbers and email addresses belonging to female names. “Which of these women do you have sex with?” one officer demanded.
“None of them,” Jamal said. “And even if I did do it, I would not admit it.”
An interrogator leaned forward and snarled, “I can make you admit it, even if you didn’t do it.”
The officer ordered Jamal to stand and place his hands on the wall. He tied a blindfold over Jamal’s eyes. Then the man took a long stick and struck Jamal across his buttocks. Instead of crying out, Jamal laughed. He knew that by beating him, the interrogator had escalated the situation beyond his authority. The man hit Jamal twenty times. When he was finished, he told Jamal to return the next morning at ten.
“I will be here at nine,” Jamal said.
He did not return home from the police station. Instead, Jamal called all the foreign journalists and human rights activists he knew in Gaza and told them to meet him at Gallery two hours later. He figured this was enough time for the bruises on his buttocks to start to color. Then he stood before his makeshift press conference and declared, “I invited you all here to photograph my ass.” Jamal turned and dropped his pants for the assembled media. The red welts on his buttocks had turned to blue, purple, and green. “It was like a painting,” Jamal said. The journalists dutifully raised their cameras.
Jamal told the assembled media the story of his arrest. “I want this published tomorrow,” he said. His friends obliged. Photos of Jamal’s bruised ass appeared alongside the story of his beating on blogs and news sites in several languages all around the world. “In Japan, China, Italy, Morocco, Sweden. Even on porn sites you would find photos of my ass.” (I tried, but, alas, Hamas blocks porn sites in Gaza.) Jamal’s activist friends, some with Human Rights Watch, called Hamas officials and demanded to know why Jamal had been arrested and flogged.
When he returned to the police station the following morning, his interrogators were furious. They’d seen the photos of Jamal’s bruises online. Even Hamas leader Ismail Haniya had seen the photos. “How could you do this and show your ass to the world? It is haram! Forbidden!” The policemen let Jamal go, and Hamas eventually fired the officer who’d beaten him. Soon afterward, another pair of Hamas security agents showed up at Gallery, this time with their wives in tow, just to sit and smoke nargileh. “They told me that they were for freedom and that I could do whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t serve whiskey.”
This détente did not last. In 2011, PA leader Mahmoud Abbas was scheduled to give a speech at the United Nations demanding UN recognition of the State of Palestine. Many of Jamal’s regular clientele wanted to watch the declaration on the television at Gallery. On the afternoon of the speech, Jamal went to the café with his family. Security agents appeared just as Jamal was about to turn on the television. They told Jamal to come with them to the police station. When Jamal asked why, the men told him it was because he was about to show Abbas’s UN speech. “So what?” Jamal said. “I am not going to show a porno movie.”
The officers took Jamal to jail. Again. When they walked in, the prison’s television was showing Abbas’s speech while a local news scroll at the bottom of the screen read, “Theater director Jamal Abu al-Qumsan has been arrested. . . .” The prison director was enraged, but not at Jamal. “Why did you bring him here?” he shouted at the officers. “I told you never to bring him here!” He pointed to the television. “You see that everyone is talking about him now!” Then he cursed Hamas out loud.
The prison director feared that once news of Jamal’s detention spread, especially considering he hadn’t been charged with anything, dozens of journalists and human rights activists would invade the prison. But he had to save face and couldn’t simply let Jamal go. So the director decided to play nice. “He let me choose my own cell,” Jamal said. “And he recommended I share a cell with a friendly businessman with money problems.” The director then instructed his staff to clean all the cells quickly and invited Jamal and his fellow inmates to choose what they wanted to eat for dinner that night. “They treated me, and the other prisoners, very well because they knew the journalists were coming.”
They came in droves. Reporters, activists,
and dozens of Jamal’s supporters filled the jailhouse the next morning and demanded Hamas explain Jamal’s imprisonment. “It was like Gallery moved to the prison,” Jamal joked. The protestors transformed the prison into a place where all his friends came to meet and socialize. The authorities were desperate to invent a justification for Jamal’s imprisonment. They accused him of holding a jazz concert at Gallery without a permit, which was not true. They accused him of being a member of Fatah, which was also false, and not illegal anyway. They kept Jamal in prison for four days without formally charging him with anything. Then they let him go.
Jamal won most of his battles with Hamas, but he eventually lost the war. In 2012, Hamas declared that they intended to build a cancer hospital on the land where Gallery stood. Even though Jamal was paying his lease, the site was government land and Hamas argued that a hospital was more important than Jamal’s troublesome café. Bulldozers rumbled through and destroyed half of Gallery. Jamal operated the shrunken café until the following year when Hamas declared they needed the entire lot. I visited the site. There are sheep grazing on the land now, and piles of trash. There is no hospital.
Gallery, though, is not dead. Jamal and his wife recently purchased a plot of land along Gaza’s beach and have procured the necessary building permits. The new Gallery will eventually feature a café, cinema, a hall for art exhibitions, and a mobile stage. I asked Jamal if he would have to renew his fight with Hamas to keep the new Gallery open. He doesn’t think so. “I’ve learned how to be diplomatic,” he said. And the café will be built on land that belongs to him and his wife. “They will have no legal way to shut the place down.”
I asked Jamal why the place is so important to him. He told me Gaza’s creative and intellectual communities need a place of comfort and release, especially in the face of Hamas oppression and the Israeli blockade. They need a place to gather and exchange ideas. “There is no other place like Gallery,” he said. “You don’t have to call someone and tell him to meet you there. You just go and find him there already.”
Lara invited me to celebrate a friend’s birthday at her parents’ apartment. “There will be music,” she said. Sixteen people crammed onto the chairs and sofas in the salon. Lara’s mother and sister laid out bowls of popcorn and nuts and served trays of sweet fruit juice and tea flavored with sage. Lara tended to a pair of nargileh pipes we all shared. Lara periodically lifted the coals off the smoldering tobacco and dropped them on the tray to jar loose the cool white ash and expose their red interiors. Then she’d perch the coals back on top of the foil-wrapped bowl. The great clouds of fruity smoke that rolled out of everyone’s mouths testified to the skill of Lara’s tinkering.
While the pipes rumbled on the floor, and before the birthday cake was served, a man leaned forward on the sofa, lifted a violin from the table, and began to play songs by the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Another joined him on an oud. Then, like some exquisite miracle, Lara started to sing. A voice I’d only ever heard in whispers soared above the strings, the bubbling rumble of the pipes, and the occasional chime from someone’s cell phone. I was the only one who didn’t know these songs. Everyone else nodded their heads and mouthed the words, content to listen to Lara’s solo singing.
Gaza does not possess a broad beauty. The wide view is too full of broken things, the vistas too craggy, and this is all we see from a distance. Gaza’s beauty does not wave an easy flag of gloss. It demands more from us. To find it, we have to look close. Focus tight on the pleasure of a thirty-cent pomegranate bought from a donkey cart. On a café waiter’s habibi and a baba reading to his child. On the sweetness of oranges. On Lara singing through smoke.
6
She Is Oranges That Explode
Mahmoud Darwish used the feminine pronoun when he wrote of Gaza.
And Gaza is not the most polished of cities, or the largest. But she is equivalent to the history of a nation, because she is the most repulsive among us in the eyes of the enemy—the poorest, the most desperate, and the most ferocious. Because she is a nightmare. Because she is oranges that explode, children without a childhood, aged men without an old age, and women without desire.
I, too, quickly came to regard Gaza in feminine terms. I passed many of my Gazan hours in the company of women. This surprised me. I thought that Gaza’s inherent religious conservatism, further hardened under Hamas, would stand between me and the women I wanted to meet. I felt tremendously grateful to be wrong. No one taught me more about life in Gaza than the women I encountered there. They felt the pressures of war, occupation, and conservatism most acutely. The women writers of Gaza craft themselves a life on the page that Gaza itself denies them. If all Palestinian writing is, in some way, an expression of resistance, the poems and stories of Gaza’s women are acts of heroism. They transform longing and trauma into art.
Author Mona Abu Sharekh guided me through the clean side streets of Shati refugee camp. Eighty-five thousand refugees live in the half-kilometer shantytown, making the camp one of the most crowded places on earth. Some of the alleyways were too narrow for us to walk side by side. We turned one corner and found a bedsheet hanging across one of the lanes, blocking our way. A young girl, her hair a chaos of curls, explained that her family had draped the sheet to make an impromptu extension to their home. She told us adorably but firmly that we could not pass.
We wandered instead through the market, past carts of vegetables and herbs and the horrid stink of chickens, before returning to the warren of streets that wind through most of the camp. Mona translated the graffiti adorning the cement walls. Graffiti along the main roads usually bears political or religious messages—calls for people to support Hamas, for example, or to remember their prayers—but messages in the residential side streets are usually more intimate. Long lines of spray-painted script announced weddings, new jobs, or the birth of children. Mona pointed to a message written by a man congratulating his brother for graduating from university. I asked her if the messages stay on the walls forever. “Maybe another brother will graduate, and they will paint it over,” she said.
I would have gotten hopelessly lost in Shati’s maze were it not for Mona. She was born in the camp and spent much of her childhood in these streets, but she hesitates to call Shati home. Her father’s family comes from Asqalan and fled to Gaza during the Nakba. “You know this story,” Mona said. “It is boring.”
The notion of home is complicated for second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees. Mona must consider Asqalan her home. To do otherwise would be to concede defeat to the occupation and admit that where she now resides is where she belongs. But she has never even been to Asqalan. “I don’t feel it is my home,” she admitted. Mona can see Asqalan from the top of Gaza’s tallest buildings, but it remains unreachable, both physically and emotionally. Asqalan exists in her father’s memory—he disapproved of Mona’s choice of husband because his family was not Asqalani—but not in her own. “I don’t have my life there,” Mona said. “My life is here. All the streets. All the corners of Gaza. My family are here. All my experiences. The first person I fell in love with was here. I was married here. This is the place that lives inside me.” This is the refugee’s dilemma: to long for somewhere you do not know, and demand a return to a place you’ve never been.
Mona attended primary and secondary school during the First Intifada, when education ranked low on Gaza’s list of priorities. Young masked militants often shut down schools in the middle of the day in advance of afternoon clashes with the IDF. They insisted students either join their cadres of stone-throwers or return to the safety of their homes. As a school subject, creative writing was especially devalued. Mona remembers that every lesson in her textbooks ended with a list of questions, the last of which always asked students to express their feelings or opinions about what they’d just learned in a short piece of fiction or poetry. Mona’s teacher told his students to ignore these exercises. He said they were not important.
Mona co
mpleted them anyway. She remembers writing a story, at the end of an Arabic lesson, about a woman battling cancer. The next day, her teacher stood at the front of the class with the pile of exams in her arms and asked where was Mona. “She didn’t know me,” Mona explained. “I was a very quiet student.” When Mona meekly raised her hand, the teacher told her she would be a great writer someday. The compliment inspired Mona, and she began to write more often. She won first prize in a creative writing contest the following year. “That was also the year I read Wuthering Heights,” Mona recalled. “It was the first time I cried from a book.” Her mother did not like Mona reading such melodramatic novels. “She thought these books keep you sad and thinking about death,” Mona said. “They were not good for a thirteen-year-old kid.”
The masked boys stopped disrupting classes during the brief period of calm between Intifadas. “There was a break,” Mona said. “A good life.” New schools opened with new curricula and new libraries. “We were expecting Gaza to become a great city,” Mona said. “Yasser Arafat told us Gaza would be the new Singapore. We believed him because we always believed him.”
The Israelis shut the Erez border crossing at the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000. The closure was an economic disaster for workers like Mona’s father, who worked as a day laborer in Israel for decades and relied on employment on the other side of the line. Rather than despairing, Mona’s father regarded the closure as an opportunity to change careers. He became a merchant and opened a distribution center for various goods. The family earned more money than they did when the border was open and eventually moved out of Shati and into a new home in Gaza City.
Pay No Heed to the Rockets Page 23