GAZA STRIP 2001

(This is taken from a longer article about the 2nd Intifada. You can read that article here.)

I spend my first night in Gaza behind the safe blue wall of the United Nations Beach Club, surely the most exclusive club I have ever been in, open only to UN workers and journalists. I have drinks with diplomats while a tropical breeze blows in off the Mediterranean and a procession of Hamas children stop to tell me, “Arafat!” and then stomp their feet to grind the old guerrilla into the sand.

Gaza and the West Bank, though often grouped together, are not at all the same. The people do not even look the same. In Gaza, the Palestinians essentially have self-rule, but no control over their own borders. In Gaza, you don’t have to worry about being mistaken for Jewish; a Jew would never walk the street there.

Gaza is bustling, dense, cut off, and poor — funded by cracks in the coffers of Arab nations. Unemployment is at 60 percent, and the only career path is the Palestinian Authority police force. In Gaza City, four or five hotels stand empty at the end of the main drag. This was once supposed to be a vacation spot, but now the beaches are filled with rocks and trash.

Some people refer to Gaza as the largest jail in the world. It is twenty-eight miles long, five miles wide, and surrounded by an electric fence. Israel controls all borders, including the sea. Since the start of the Intifada — the Palestinian uprising — the Arab population has not been allowed in or out. The water is poisoned with salt and nitrates, and many infants die from “blue-baby syndrome.” The last fifty years here is a story of abuse and tragedy. From 1948 to 1967, Gaza was part of Egypt, but the Gazans were never given Egyptian citizenship, and the refugees who fled here to escape the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors were never offered permanent homes. Rather, they have been unfortunate pawns in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mortars are fired today at the border crossing in Rafah, between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. I go there and speak with Mahmoud, who lives in a tent atop a pile of rubble that was once his toy store. In the ruins, I can see the heads of dolls and pieces of his computer and cash register. “This is my home,” he says, pointing to the rock-strewn field, “my library,” waving a hand at the air. He arrived, he tells me, on August 11 of last year, just before the latest intifada. He’s Egyptian and wanted to be close to the border so he could go back and forth and visit his family. He says this was not an area of heavy shooting, but on the morning of May 2, the Israelis came with bulldozers, and he had to flee his house in his pajamas. This is what he has left. Mahmoud hands me a card with silver edges. It says, “Mahmoud Hassan el-Shair, export-import,” and gives numbers in Cairo, Gaza, and Rafah. He speaks perfect English, this man who lives in a tent.

Half of Gaza, more than six hundred thousand people, lives in refugee camps, creating a two-tiered society. The Gazans whose families were here before the war in 1948 look down on the refugees who arrived after the war. But the natives are also jealous, because although the refugees have less room and poorer services, they have better schools, run by the UN. I walk through the narrow, unpaved streets in the refugee camps, followed always by a crowd of children. The adults keep inviting me into their houses. Finally, I go inside. A child is sent for tea and comes back with a two-liter bottle of soda. Men lie on mats on the floor. What does one do in a refugee camp? Sit. Talk. Wait for the UN to hand out packets of food. Pray.

The Palestinian Authority is not strong here. Arafat can hold his own in Gaza City, but not in the other two population centers, Rafah and Khan Younis, which are strongholds for the Hamas movement. There are also smaller, grass-roots rebel cells that aren’t affiliated with Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, but are responsible for many of the mortar shells lobbed into Gush Katif, the large Jewish settlement on the southwestern end of the Strip. Things have not gotten better in Gaza since the Oslo Peace Accord, but rather much worse. Several people tell me they were happier when Gaza was an occupied state.

Last Wednesday, a mortar was fired from Khan Younis into a Jewish settlement. The shell hit a schoolhouse while class was in session. The Palestinians were not targeting the schoolhouse; the Palestinians don’t have that kind of aim. It was an unlucky shot. In response, Israel pushed back the border another hundred meters. The UN, as usual, set up tents over the destroyed buildings: large green sacks with blue water coolers.

I walk from this area to an Israeli checkpoint. It is very rare for anyone other than a handful of Arab workers to try to come through this way. I stand under the netting with Michael, an Israeli soldier and American immigrant, while they run my documents. After an hour, Michael offers me some cake. In the U.S., Michael was not accepted to his first-choice college and thought his chances would be better after some life experience in the Israeli military. He says the Palestinians shelled the school, so Israel had to take drastic action. He says a civilian with a gun is no longer a civilian. He says soldiers hide out in civilian houses, so Israel has to destroy their homes. He says it’s tragic, but they can’t afford to let Israeli citizens be bombed. He says you can’t beat the Palestinians, because they don’t mind being killed. “Nothing makes sense here in Gaza. How do you reason with suicide bombers? Smear pigs’ blood on the mosques; put alcohol in their water. That will get them to stop.”

Tonight I am staying at a youth hostel in Gush Katif. I am the only one here. Down the road is a four-star beach-front hotel: closed. The tourist industry is not doing well.

The streets are clean. It’s a balmy night, and the settlers are out walking around. Eight thousand people live here. Most work in agriculture. Gush Katif is self-sufficient and exports $50 million in organic vegetables every year. The standard of living is as high as anywhere in Europe.

I go to the Yamit Yeshiva, the religious school that boys attend before and after their stint in the military. The school is built in the shape of the Star of David. Students from all over Israel come here to study. A friendly kid named Alon shows me the monument to Kal Yamit, built from broken glass and stones. Kal Yamit was a settlement in Sinai that was evacuated when Israel made peace with Egypt in 1989. Many of the settlers here are from Kal Yamit, and the yeshiva takes its name from their former home. The monument reads, “If you remember, you can build it again.”

Alon shows me where a bomb hit last Sunday. Parents were visiting with their children at the time. He introduces me to a group of shirtless eighteen-year-olds lounging on couches, smoking tobacco from a hookah. Alon says they hear shooting every night; you have to live with it. Last week, there were ten bombs. He shows me the crater and the walls pockmarked by shrapnel. On the second floor of the yeshiva is the Etaman Library, named after a student who was shot last year while driving from Kalim to Israel.

I’m struck by the peace of the settlement, even when I hear a bomb go off in the distance. A group of children sit on a tractor. The residents drive each other around; all you have to do is stand on a corner and wait for a ride. They have turned the desert green and built a beautiful village.

Menachim is a settler who lives in the hostel where I’m staying. At midnight, I go with him across the border to Egypt to buy a pack of cigarettes from some Palestinians who live in a shack in no man’s land. We have to cross two sets of razor wire to get there. Here I am, past the checkpoint, in a settler’s car, at night. This is how people get killed. I wait in the car, listening to the waves falling against the shore. Paradise. Then Menachim returns with his smokes, and we go back through the checkpoint. “No cigarettes, no sleep,” Menachim tells me in his limited English.

Back at Katif, I find out there was a military operation in Gaza today. An Apache helicopter attacked a caravan, killing militant Hamas member Eilal al-Ghoul. It’s two in the morning. At three, the soldiers return from their mission with dusty fatigues and messy hair. They say they were responding to mortar fire and shot at the perpetrators; they were not aware that one of the men in the car topped the Israeli most-wanted list. The men-boys go off to shower and get some sleep. Only hours after the attack, the Jewish media are already broadcasting the message from Hamas calling for infidel blood.

I spend the morning with Debbie, public-relations director for the settlements in Gaza. She’s showing me around the tip of Gush Katif when three mortar shells land on the small settlement of Kfar Darom, five minutes away. Debbie becomes agitated. She wants to show me the hot-house tomatoes and the cows, but they will have to wait. We’re going to Kfar Darom.

Fewer than three hundred people live in Kfar Darom. Like the settlement in Hebron, it is unsustainable in the long term: too small and surrounded by an angry Arab population.

A tank stands in the road between the two settlements and will not let us pass. Debbie makes a flurry of phone calls while we are stuck. There are three phones in the car, all ringing. Reporters are calling Debbie for the story while we sit on the pavement, unable to see anything. This is how the news gets reported.

Debbie gets word from the camp: a bomb fell on a house. The soldiers say there is also a shooter. An armored vehicle takes off into the field. As the shooting gets closer, we are herded behind the military base.

From behind a steel drum, I can see the shooting in an open field. I see a bullet kick up the red dust near the tank wheels. Then we are pushed out into the open. The soldiers are screaming. We sit with three ambulances, waiting for the outcome. Word from Kfar Darom is that no one was hurt.

Twenty minutes later, the roadblock is lifted, and we speed toward the settlement.

The mortar shell crashed through the roof of the single-family house, ripping a hole the size of three basketballs in the tiles, the cement, the paneling. The floor is covered in rocks and water from a busted pipe. The mother stands with her baby below the hole in the ceiling. The baby’s lips are covered in formula, and she plays absently with a spoon.

The TV crews arrive en masse. We step around the puddles in our sandals. The mother wipes the baby’s mouth. The father offers to run an electrical cord for the cameraman. Outside, shooting breaks out again — rat-tat-tat — but nobody seems much concerned.

Debbie tells me that all eight children were with a neighbor at the time, except for the baby. The mother and baby were five feet away on the other side of the wall, doing laundry. The father reads a prayer. Rat-tat-tat. Amen.

A resident tells me that only religious families live here. I ask if he lives close by. He says there are only fifty houses; everybody lives close by. I ask if they couldn’t move to the larger, more defensible settlement of Gush Katif. He tells me, “You give them Kfar Darom, and they will take Jerusalem.”

In the front of the house, I see the soldiers firing, and three rapid tank bursts. A little girl says, “The same thing happened to my house.”

The mother heard the first mortar shell land outside, then another. The third came through the roof. The army needs to hit the people who did this, she says: to “clean” them. She says the settlers here are not given the same protection as people in Tel Aviv or Haifa, a common complaint among residents of remote settlements.

The children will go away for a few days so the parents can clean up and fix the damage. Then the children will come back.

I ride with the children to Beersheba, where they stay and I catch a bus for Jerusalem. I’m done now. Buy some presents. Go to the museum. Head back to California.

On the bus to Jerusalem, I’m seated next to a soldier whose leg intrudes well into my space. He’s talking on his cellphone. Israelis love cellphones. They never turn their ringers off, and beeps and whistles sound every few minutes. I point to the soldier’s leg with my pinkie and tell him, “First I will take your leg; then I will take Jerusalem.”