A Month by the Sea (10 page)

Hanaa’s Arabic scribble in my notebook helped me to locate the Elmadhoun home on a short squalid street of tall, early
nineteenth-century
houses, outwardly neglected. The ground floor, where Ya’qub had continued the business started by his father, was now let to two Jabalya camp families rendered homeless by Cast Lead. The blockade had killed the business. Upstairs, seventeen Elmadhouns (including grandparents) occupied two floors, the long high-ceilinged rooms shabby but comfortably furnished. The building’s wide, flat roof was a bonus, a safe play area for the
eleven children (five girls, six boys). Before the electricity, water and other crises, the Elmadhouns ran a normal middle-class household complete with a two-oven gas cooker and a giant fridge. Not any more: unlike my Rimal friends they could not afford a generator or complicated water-purifying technology – or gas cylinders, when long border closures inflated prices.

In January 2009 two daughters, then aged ten and twelve, were playing on the roof when the shell came. The ten-year-old died instantly; her two older brothers, having rushed up, momentarily mistook her twisted body for a big doll discarded by the parapet. Her sister, Rana, lost both legs from the groin and will always be confined to a wheelchair. Two shrapnel-torn young cousins have recovered – at least physically. One of them, now aged ten, dreads leaving her home, has to be forced to go to school and when in the classroom can’t concentrate.

Soon after my arrival Rana’s mother persuaded her to join us, then pushed her through a high double door from the adjacent bedroom. The mechanism in her electric wheelchair (a Swedish donation) had long since failed and might or might not be replaced. At once I realised that my visit wasn’t helping: Hanaa had got it wrong. Rana greeted me sulkily, clearly seeing herself as some sort of grist for a predatory foreigner’s mill. My not wanting a photograph of myself with Rana and myself with the family surprised everyone. I wondered then if Hamas had been using this tragedy in their legitimate campaign to publicise the criminality of Cast Lead.

Samira sat beside her legless daughter – a youthful-looking
forty-year-
old, despite everything, with a wide pale face, blunt features and the sort of eyebrows some women have to pay for, in time and money. She smiled a lot, Rana not at all. She had miscarried after the shelling but soon conceived again and as we talked Ya’qub dutifully dandled the baby who demanded constant attention. A three-year-old sprawled on the sofa beside them, helping to
entertain her little brother, whose impulse to crawl was being frustrated: Ya’qub believed crawling delayed walking. He spoke more English than his eighteen-and nineteen-year-old
UNRWA-schooled
sons. A US-born Israeli business associate had given him impromptu lessons in the good old Oslo days when the construction industry flourished. He had, it emerged, worked briefly for Atef’s father.

When Samira began to pour fruit juices other children appeared from various directions, each equipped with a mobile phone for use during conversational interstices. This incessant fiddling would grate on me, if I lived in such a household. Presumably most parents know nothing of the possible health risks – anyway Gazans are occupied by more immediate concerns.

According to her father, Rana was doing well at school, would probably get a degree (or two) from the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) and wished to become a university lecturer. Her two older brothers lacked such ambitions and couldn’t find jobs. They were available every day to carry her down and up the long, narrow, unlit stairway. Her twelve-year-old sister pushed her to and from school along war-roughened streets. Both those young men were cultivating beards and looked quite severely damaged, emotionally. They lounged on another sofa, beneath a much enlarged
photograph
of their ‘martyr’ sister, her chubby face framed in Koranic quotations. Unusually, a few words had been translated into English by the dead child’s Swedish teacher – ‘they wish for that which may cause you to perish’. During my short visit the youths referred repeatedly to Israel’s advanced military technology (‘they sell it to
America
!’) which proved that an attack on an open roof, where four children were playing, could only be deliberate … Who could blame them if they yearned to become militants? The beards were suggestive and I sensed their parents’ fear of this contingency.

As Ya’qub escorted me to a taxi route near the Gold Market he
spoke of Cast Lead’s long-term consequences: children blind, deaf, burn-scarred – young men paralysed – mothers maimed – homeless families with no possibility of replacing bombed dwellings – enfeebled grandparents left to succour disturbed orphans – orchards bulldozed, wells maliciously poisoned. Statistics can blur all this. So many killed, so many injured, the deaths usually fewer than the injuries. Too often we tend to focus on the heartbreaking finality of death, the desolation of the bereaved, and not to think enough about the injured and those who love them, the lives thwarted and distorted because ‘wars’ are no longer fought by warriors. Modern weaponry, callously deployed, makes nonsense of the concept of ‘professional armies’ fighting ‘just wars’.

The Strip provided only one frisson of fear. I was on my way home from visiting a village family whose eldest son, Yousef, had recently been ‘eliminated’ while training with a Qassam unit, the armed wing of Hamas. The young man’s father insisted on showing us (Nita and me) the orchard death-site, a hole five feet deep and ten feet in circumference, surrounded by charred lemon trees and overlooked by three-storey houses with shattered windows. Little bits of cordite were scattered far and wide; I was given one as a souvenir.

Nita, being in a hurry to get home, left me at a busy junction on the outskirts of Khan Younis, where communal taxis parked under an improvised tin roof. As I sat behind the driver’s seat in an empty minibus, awaiting fellow passengers, I noticed the busy traffic dwindling to a trickle. Then two figures appeared on the far side of the wide road, walking some fifteen yards apart, carrying rockets over their shoulders. Two others followed, carrying tripods. Each wore black slacks, black long-sleeved shirts, black ski-masks with narrow eye-slits. My first reaction was to chuckle; they looked too like stereotypical ‘terrorists’ to be taken seriously on a sunny
afternoon
among ordinary people going about their ordinary business – women dragging bulging sacks, a youth driving a horse-cart loaded with jerrycans, small boys kicking a deflated football, two old men hauling a handcart of broken concrete blocks. As eight other
jihadis
appeared in the distance – carrying AK-47s, also walking yards apart – their leader slowly crossed the road to stand in the shade beside my minibus, so close that I could smell his vice (nicotine) and by reaching through the open window could have touched his rocket. He stood very still, staring straight ahead as his comrades walked towards Gaza City, keeping to the far verge. They moved
with military precision but oddly – as though on their own, not in a public place. By then both the motor and pedestrian traffic had almost stopped. Was my neighbour aware of an International’s presence? I didn’t turn my head but swivelled my eyes and noted that the rocket looked very home-made, no more than six feet long with wobbly tail-fins. Then came my scary moment. I remembered that drones target rocket-launchers – quite often and sometimes accurately. Yousef had been carrying a launcher when ‘eliminated’ and now I was within cuddling distance of another. But that moment, though chilling, was brief. The statistics reassure: not many Internationals become collateral damage.

Ten minutes later my companion moved off to form the
rearguard
. Normally, during that time, the taxi would have been filling up; now, as the
jihadi
crossed the road, passengers crowded in, having been waiting at a discreet distance. I wondered, are these young men deliberately provoking the enemy or is this the ‘It can’t happen to me’ syndrome? Even if personally indifferent to death, it seemed callously irresponsible to risk exposing others to attack for the sake of proving they’re still armed and ready for action – though action is no longer being officially encouraged.

We soon overtook the unit, still walking yards apart along the verge. A long-bearded young man in the front passenger seat spoke English and I decided to be tactless. ‘Are they al-Qassam?’ I asked in a bright curious-tourist voice. ‘We don’t know them,’ came the curt reply. When I put the same question to Deeb he prevaricated – ‘They were going to some training ground’ – which didn’t tell me who ‘they’ were.

Moh, one of my unconstrained student friends, was prepared to speculate. They might of course have been al-Qassam. Or they could’ve been an al-Quds unit from Islamic Jihad’s armed wing. Or a Saladin Brigade unit from the Popular Resistance Committee’s armed wing. Or maybe a unit from the al-Ahrar Brigade, an armed wing without a body.

Acidly I remarked that if Gaza grew fewer wings it might not fly into such sterile grief. Yousef’s mother had told me of his boast on 19 March – around noon, warplanes had fired two missiles in an attempt to kill him and three of his comrades. The next attempt succeeded. His father said, ‘He always wanted to be a martyr.’

Moh thought it inevitable that quite a few young men were keen to prove that Gazans could and would continue attacking Israel, even when Prime Minister Haniyeh was in conciliatory mood. Supposing Moh had it right, the long-term implications are
disquieting
. If a small armed group could do its own thing wherever and whenever it chose, who was governing Gaza? Was the relative calm of June 2011 more apparent than real?

Another friend, a middle-aged Cast-Lead victim who made light of being one-legged, said, ‘Really, nobody is governing. Hamas tried but the whole world is against them. Remember they’re terrorists! Part of trying to control is letting those groups show their strength.’ As Nizar saw it, if Hamas were recognised as the legitimate government it would be different, many more Gazans would respect their authority. He continued, ‘Those you saw, I can guess who they are. I know what they’re like. They are not mad Salafist dogs, they’re young Palestinians wanting respect. They don’t feel they have it when everyone says their fairly elected government is terrorist, criminal – can’t have any tax money or normal funding. For self-esteem they need to go marching around with guns saying “We’re not terrorists or criminals! We’re Palestinians fighting the Occupation, never giving up!” Yousef, whose family you visited, he was that sort. They don’t care if they can’t do much damage in Israel, if their rockets’ real victims are their neighbours. For them it’s the ritual that matters. Taking action, being daring, two fingers to the IDF and death’s OK if it comes. Martyrs get more respect than anyone else around.’

A few days later, en route to Abassan village, Nita insisted on our visiting some of the Samouni family survivors. Their fate ranks as the most barbarous of Cast Lead’s many atrocities and her plan made me vaguely uncomfortable; this crime scene has become a macabre parody of a tourist attraction, a ‘must’ for foreign politicians, human rights teams, NGO delegations and journalists. But then, as we sat with three survivors, I sensed that our visit was being appreciated. Perhaps it helped them to know that their sufferings have not been forgotten.

Zaytoun is a semi-rural district of Gaza City, quite close to the sea. From the main road we followed a sandy, tank-ravaged track past the shelled remains of mini-industries surrounded by bomb craters and hillocks of rubble sprouting that tall yellow weed. A substantial new villa – startling amidst the drab desolation, painted orange and brick-red with white trimming – was not yet lived in. It stood on the site of the mass-slaughter. Three short rows of olive saplings had been planted nearby: the
samoud
gesture, seen so often where IDF tanks or bulldozers have savaged ancient groves. Fifty yards further on, at the base of a high thorny hedge, four pale skinny little boys sat beside a tray of the cheapest possible sweets. Who were their customers? There was no one else in sight. An opening in the hedge gave access to the small yard of a three-storey house missing half its roof and one gable end. Nita called a greeting and Mohammed appeared, a tall man in his mid-thirties needing a crutch and with bags under his eyes. Ahmed followed, a very tall, painfully thin nineteen-year-old whose paralysed right arm could possibly be fixed elsewhere – but not in Gaza. Then came
twelve-year
-old Hassan who put a tea-kettle on the Primus stove before rolling up a trouser-leg to show me his shrapnel-scarred thigh. We sat on the ubiquitous white plastic garden chairs under a sturdy vine, gnarled but fertile, trained to provide ample shade between hedge and house. All around lay shattered gable-end stones, shards of roof-tiles and twisted sheets of corrugated iron.

On 3 January 2009 the IDF attacked several Zaytoun homes, rounded up 97 people (the Samounis and a few of their neighbours) and herded them into the main Samouni dwelling with orders not to come out. On 5 January, when four men emerged in search of firewood, a shell at once killed two and wounded the others. Minutes later a precision guided weapon hit the house, instantly killing 21 and wounding the rest. Within the next two days 27 of the wounded died because ambulances were not permitted to reach them. During those days four toddlers clung to their dead mothers. Hassan lost both parents but was ‘lucky’: they died quickly. Ahmed’s parents survived in agony until the ambulances were allowed through; both soon died in hospital. The ICRC reported: ‘The Israeli soldiers stationed nearby must have known of the people in the houses but the wounded died as they waited for medical care due to the slow negotiations for access.’ After the survivors’ removal on 7 January the IDF quickly bulldozed the house, preventing corpse retrievals or any medical examination of the remains. Soldiers then cordoned off the area until 18 January when the truce began and a Red Crescent team hurried to Zaytoun with body-bags and surgical masks to help the locals dig out their rotting neighbours.

A collage of photographs of the dead, mounted on a sheet of hardboard some five feet by three, included elegantly scripted quotations from the Koran. Names and ages were in Arabic and Roman and everyone had ‘martyr’ status. This consoled the survivors for reasons I have tried to understand – but can’t. When the weapon was laid beside me I noted its details.

As I wrote I remembered that in June 2009, as President Obama made his famous Islam-friendly Cairo speech, the US was replacing the many multi-ton bombs dropped on Gaza. And in 2010, US military aid to Israel was the single largest expenditure in the US Foreign Aid budget. Since 1972 the US has vetoed 41 Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli violations of international law. Until the US is willing to play the international law game the concept is meaningless.

While ambulances were being denied access to the Samouni home, IDF graffiti artists were having fun. Within yards of their dead and dying victims – within earshot of the latter’s desperate cries – they spray-painted those houses still standing. ARABS NEED 2 DIE – DIE YOU ALL – 1 IS DOWN, 999,999 TO GO – ARABS 1948–2009 – that last on a sketch of a gravestone.

Nita said, ‘Those soldiers are sick. They’re worse damaged than us though we’re more hurt. They act like people with no education.’

I said nothing but Professor Sofer came to mind. A demographer, Professor of Geostrategic Studies at the University of Haifa, advisor to Ariel Sharon – a man not lacking education. When ‘
disengagement
’ and the blockade of Gaza were being planned, the
Jerusalem Post
(20 May 2004) reported his vision of the future.

The uniquely bizarre nature of the Palestine/Israel conflict is even more obvious on the Strip than on the West Bank. Here we have a wannabe Western-style democracy treating their neighbours’ democratically elected leaders as suitable targets for assassination while mass-slaughter eliminates those who elected them. They are ‘terrorists’ because they oppose an illegal occupation and blockade calculated to get rid of them, to leave the way clear for more Zionist expansion – as both the IDF graffiti and Arnon Sofer’s oft-repeated statements make plain. In 2003 Anthony Hurndall, a London lawyer, spent some time in Rafah investigating the IDF’s murder of his son Tom, an ISM volunteer. His 50-page report concluded that ‘The IDF chiefs of staff had given the clear signal to their soldiers and to the international community that in Israel soldiers can and do deliberately kill and maim innocent civilians, Palestinian and international, without cause and with impunity.’

Back on the road, awaiting a taxi under a fig tree, Nita and I were joined by two local women and a youth. One woman had recently lost a thirty-year-old son, a Saladin Brigade volunteer killed by a
warplane
at sunset on 8 April. His two companions were still in hospital in Gaza City. On the same day, at sunrise, another warplane had targeted a motorbike carrying two al-Qassam volunteers. The rider was killed, the passenger left permanently brain-damaged. A few hours later a tank on the border shelled a civilian gathering near al-Shuja’ia cemetery, killing two (one a child) and seriously injuring ten others including four children. I assumed these strikes were rocket-provoked but no one would confirm this. It intrigued me that Gazans were so open with one another (though not with the foreigner) about martyrs’ affiliations, labelling them al-Qassam, al-Ahrar or whatever and always distinguishing between ‘civilians’ and ‘volunteers’.

In all, between 3.00 pm on 7 April and 6.00 am on 9 April, shelling killed eighteen Gazans: nine civilians, nine volunteers. The thirty-eight severely wounded included two paramedics and fourteen adolescents. Dozens of houses and several training sites were damaged. A few quarrels broke out between the owners of shelled homes and volunteers who argued ‘our training spaces are so limited we can’t avoid all residential areas’.

During our taxi ride I asked Nita, ‘Did Cast Lead not convince most Gazans – apart from the chronically belligerent – that fighting Israel physically is futile for all and suicidal for many? Wouldn’t it be comparatively easy, now, to bring the volunteers, of all brands, under control?’