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One Week in Gaza

Published in Yidioth Acharonot on June 20, 2008.

This was my seventh trip to Gaza as a journalist writing for American newspapers, but the first time I have been in the territory in the last two years. When the Erez crossing was closed following the Hamas rocket attacks on Thursday, what was supposed to be a three-day assignment turned into one week—the longest period I have spent there since disengagement.

By Rafael D. Frankel

On the sea shore of the Beach Refugee Camp, dead rats, stiff from rigor mortis, mix with raw sewage, rusted out car frames, and garbage of every kind. The smell is overpowering. So is the feeling of despair. This is Gaza, I thought, dirty and impoverished.

Across the street is Ismael Haniyeh’s house. Ten Hamas fighters dressed in all black vests, t-shirts, and pants—the executive force—man a check point on the road in front. Guns at the ready, full beards, they nonetheless say “salaam alechem” to foreigners who pass by, as if there is actual peace in their hearts. This is also Gaza, I thought, violent and extremist.

Then I see her, in a red shirt with the word “love” stitched onto it, peering at me from a distance. Maybe ten years old, her hair is pulled back revealing a smile. Not just any smile, but perhaps the most beautiful smile I have ever laid my eyes on. The beauty is so out of place in this other world I was observing since that morning. Not sharing a common language, I cannot talk to her. But after a few shy moments she lets me take one picture of her. And when I showed it to her, she lets me take a couple more. After a few minutes, we wave goodbye. While she runs into the alleys of the refugee camp, I climb into my six-door, Mercedes taxi, wondering: Could this also be Gaza, beautiful and promising?

*

Going through Erez is always scary. It is like an episode of the Twighlight Zone, where you walk through a single door only to find yourself in a post-apocalyptic hell. In an instant, the clean, functional, and orderly world you know is gone. You look backward, you see the 10 meter-high wall and the sniper towers. You look forward, you see the rubble. For a kilometer in every direction. Rubble. Huge, broken slabs of concrete and twisted mettle support beams. Some shrubs and weeds grow in between these piles of what was once the industrial zone and is now wasteland. The destruction leaves quite an impression.

But so does the 150 dunam farm of Maamon Khozendar, located just above the beach toward the Israeli border and sprawling with olive and pomegranate trees, a pool, and a movie screen on a manicured lawn. While most Gazans are fueling their cars with cooking oil, and many are sending their children to scrounge for cardboard and sabras wood to light fires for cooking, Khozendar and a handful of prominent Gazans still live the good life.

Khozendar himself, who traces his family lineage in Gaza back to the time of Selahedin, also leaves an impression. A man with extensive business and political contacts in Israel, he could leave Gaza tomorrow if he chose to, perhaps live out the remainder of his years in one of his homes in Spain, Holland, Russia, or Egypt. “But,” he says, stroking his favorite Arabian horse, Layla, “if I go to Canada, who am I there? Here I am the master of this land.”

And so every night he hosts prominent Gazans—lawyers, doctors, engineers—at his farm, to try to bring about a change in leadership and the political situation of the Palestinian people. “Here, there is no captain,” he said. “No real leadership.”

On this night, he hosted a table of six foreign journalists. A businessman, he believes in peace with Israel and counts himself close with the Peres and Dayan families. “Businessmen everywhere have no nationality. Our passport is Benjamin Franklin,” he said.

But as the night wore on and the moon moved closer to the sea, he also had stinging words for Israel. “We (the Palestinians) have now had a change in our minds. Now they (the Israelis) need to change theirs. They believe too much in power. If you can’t protect your son in your own home, your power is nothing,” he said.

“The Jewish nation is very good to build things and very horrible in destroying them. They are divided between Jekyl and Hyde. And they,” he said, turning a piercing eye to me, “are our cousins.”

When the evening was over I approached him, and, speaking in Hebrew, I said, “you are right, we are cousins.”

Smiling, he replied: “From the moment I saw you, I knew. Come back any time, you are most welcome here.”

When word of the Tahadiyeh came, I called Khozendar from Tel Aviv. “It’s very exciting. But do you think it’s actually true?” I told him that I did think it was true. “Inshallah,” he said. “Maybe 10 percent of the people here want to fight. The other 1.4 million just want to live their lives. We, us and you, need some quiet.”

*

There are the martyr posters, plastered up in the refugee camps, on the city streets, and in billboards throughout Gaza. Glorifications of men, or boys, who have killed our people or died trying. There is also the graffiti, painted on nearly every wall in the entire Gaza Strip, glorifying the “resistance” and beseeching the sons of Gaza to join the holy struggle against the Jews. And there are the Hamas television programs and summer camps, where children are indoctrinated from a young age to hate Jews, and to become a shahid for the Islamic and Palestinian cause. This hatred and violence leaves quite an impression.

But so do the Fulbright students from Gaza—seven to be exact—who were offered scholarships in the United States to study at top American Universities. They grew up on these mean streets. They saw friends die at the hands of the IDF. They heard Hamas’s words. There were days when they could not go to school because of street battles. And yet they pursued their education, only to be told by Israel that despite the once-in-a-lifetime offer to study for free in the US, they would not be granted an exit permit out of Gaza.

Because of American political pressure, four will now go to the US. But what of the other three who the Shabak says are a security threat and will not allow to leave?

“We are not happy with what happened in Gaza over the last year,” said Fiddah Abed, 23, a computer engineering student who will head to Columbia University in New York for a masters degree if he can get out of Gaza. “We do not like that Hamas took over using violence. We are a victim of what happened here, we had no part in it, but [Israel] is treating us like criminals.

“We don’t know why Israel doesn’t want their neighbors to be educated. It would be better for Israel to have neighbors who are educated than neighbors who are angry.”

And what will Fidaah Abed, Zohair Abu Shaban, 24, and Osama Dawoud, 25, do if Israel, in the end, does not let them out of Gaza?

“There are no possibilities here,” Abu Shaban said. “We will spend our time praying.”

*

In Rafah, there are the smugglers like Abu Suhayeb, 36, who do $40,000 of business per month digging tunnels into Egypt and brining back whatever the market demands. These days it is women’s underwear, diesel fuel, and cigarettes. In previous years it was weapons, metals for Qassam rockets, and narcotics. The only reason he stopped moving weapons is because “there is now a glut in the market since Hamas has so much already.” The only reason he stopped moving drugs is because “drugs are now forbidden.”

Abu Suhayeb started smuggling goods into Gaza from Egypt when he was 13 years old with his father. He later spent six years in Israeli jails during the first intifada. He is a life-long criminal who has made enemies in Egypt, Israel, and Gaza and still has no intention of switching professions and no qualms about how many lives he has ruined in Israel and Gaza.

And there is a man in Jabaliyah, who would not give his name, who filled up the gas tank on his $10,000 motorcycle to the top when his friends were putting in only one quarter of one liter because benzene now costs 40 shekel per liter on the black market. How can he do this? “He is Hamas,” his friends say, “he has no trouble finding petrol.” He and the smuggler, who seem to care not even for their own friends’ lives, leave a selfish and destructive impression.

But then there are Waseem Khazendar and Fayez Annan who invented an electric car when fuel became too scarce and too expensive for most Gazans to run their vehicles. They now have a line of 400 people who want to convert their cars to electric from petrol, but only enough parts (Israel won’t let more through) to do the work for around 30.

The car can do 100 kph and drive nearly 200 kilometers before needing a recharge and it produces zero emissions. The inventors want to partner with Shai Agassi and other Israeli entrepreneurs to jointly develop and market the electric vehicles. They could save millions of people money, and save the planet at the same time.

“Yes, maybe we, Israelis and Palestinians, can save the world together,” Annan said.

*

There are truck drivers like Abu Faraz who collect the 60 trucks worth of food and medicine Israel leaves at the Sufa Crossing six days per week, which keep so many of the Gazan people alive. And yet, despite taking the food Israel offers, he says that the problem between the Jews and Arabs here started with the Balfour Declaration. The English never should have let the Jews into Palestine in the first place, he said.

But that was 90 years ago, what is the solution to the problem now? I asked him. “We must get all our land back, from the river to the sea. If it’s not possible today, it’s possible tomorrow, or the day after,” he said. “The Jews must go back to Europe.” That solution leaves a depressing impression.

Then there are people like Khaled abu Khader, my translator and fixer, who called me his “little cousin” and I, in turn, called him “big cousin.” Sometime early during the week we spent together, it became obvious that I was Jewish. Every fixer I’ve ever worked with in Gaza has picked up on it. There is simply a connection that we have with the Palestinians that gentiles do not. Part of it is culture, part of it is the Semitic face, but more than that, it’s that in our questions and conversations it is clear we Jews care more than the gentiles do about what the answers are, and how this conflict between us will ever end. So by virtue of our shared racial history, shared values, and shared future, we were cousins.

Hebrew became our secret language when we were not in public. When we were inside the car, with Mohamed Kamal, his uncle and our driver, who did not speak English, the three of us would speak Hebrew together. And laugh at Hamas, Fatah, Labor, Likud, Kadima, and everyone else we could think of.

After a week of working together, we got very comfortable with each other and we decided that we could talk about politics. And he said what I dreaded he would say—that he would never give up his family’s right to return to their land in Ashkelon. “Your people kept their dream alive to return to this land for 2,000 years,” he said. “How can you expect me, after 60 years, to stop dreaming?”

But after a minute, he added, that if it meant peace, “I will still teach my children that their land is in Ashkelon, but I will take a state inside the 1967 borders. And I guess, as the years go by, that dream will slowly fade.”

Abu Khader also welcomes the Tahadiyeh. “I would love it, I don’t care with who, or how, or when. I just care about life, my child. I want to live as a human being.”

But he is skeptical it will last more than a few weeks or months. “Look at the dispute within Israeli politics right now. The Israeli crises always move to Gaza.”

“Hamas has an interest in keeping the situation calm. As the government, they feel obliged to do something for their people,” he said. “But usually, the Israelis know how to provoke they guys here.”

*

Back at the Beach Refugee Camp, six men sat around a sheshbesh table talking and playing the game. I pulled up a chair and joined them.

An unemployed truck driver with eight children, Taisir Ahmad, 57, said Gazans were “angry at the American government for helping the Israelis keep a foot on our neck.”

Did they think maybe that would change if Barack Obama was elected president? “Obama has Jewish people guiding him,” Ahamad replied. “Jewish people all over the world are rich and control everything with their money. Nothing will change if he is elected.”

The absurd anti-Semitic notion that the Jews control the world, leaves an exasperating impression.

Then I see the girl in the red shirt, whose smile beams of kindness and hope.

And after a week in Gaza, that is the lasting impression.