A GAZA DIARY
Harper's Magazine, Oct2001, Vol. 303 Issue 1817, p59, 12p
Author(s): Hedges, Chris
Scenes from the Palestinian uprising
Thursday morning, June 14, Jerusalem
The artist Joe Sacco and I are driving up through the Jerusalem Hills to Beit Agron, the government-run press building. Beit Agron was the first place I visited in 1988, when I moved to Jerusalem as the Middle East bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. I had no office, no staff, and no experience in the Middle East. I had arrived from Lausanne, where for four months I had studied Arabic. My teacher, an Egyptian, used to write on the board phrases such as "The Arabs are good. The Jews are bad." I later took the Hebrew University conversational Arabic course, taught by a kind and gentle Palestinian professor, Omar, who became a close friend.
Arabic is a delicate and beautiful construct. The language is poetic, magical, with calls and responses, ornate greetings and salutations, for everything from eating to entering a house. When someone brings you food you say, "May God bless your hands." If offered a coffee you say, "Coffee always," meaning may we always drink coffee during moments like this. Seven years later, now the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, I had spent 600 hours of study and reached the conclusion that mastery of Arabic was a lifelong pursuit. A little of it, though, goes a long way. After being captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard in Basra in 1991 during the Shiite uprising following the Gulf War, I was able to recite strings of bad Arabic jokes and talk about my family. I wrote Omar a thank-you note when I was released.
Joe and I pass the rusting hulks of crude Israeli armored vehicles, left as a monument to the 1948 war that made possible a Jewish state. We skirt the old walled city, its quadrilateral shape and network of streets laid out by the Roman emperor Hadrian. In the distance stands the Jaffa Gate, where, in 1538, in ornate and cursive Arabic, an inscription was placed by Suleiman, the second Ottoman ruler of Jerusalem:
In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Great Sultan, King of the Turks, Arabs, and Persians, Suleiman son of Selim Khan--may Allah make His Kingdom eternal--gave the order to build this blessed Wall.
Beit Agron is a dirty yellow stucco affair in the center of Jerusalem with tiled floors and poorly lit corridors. It has the feel and smell of a public high school. The reporters and photographers whose lives intersected mine here more than a decade ago are mostly gone now. Some I see only rarely, bumping into them in various shattered comers of the globe; others are dead.
The stories we worked to tell, which flashed briefly across a screen or a front page before receding from the public's consciousness, are, for us, still vibrant. A shooting at a road junction in Gaza--a brief item on the wire--remains hard to retell. Years later we recount the mishaps, the funny anecdotes that, taken at face value, made our life a romp. The real stuff is alluded to only in brief, almost codelike asides and silences.
It was in Gaza, where I lived for weeks at a time during the seven years I spent in the Middle East, that I came to know the dark side of the Israeli Defense Force. During the first Palestinian uprising, begun in December 1987 and ended in 1993 with the Oslo peace accords, the army had little interest in crowd control. It fired live rounds at boys hurling rocks. And on a few occasions the Israeli soldiers, angered at the coverage, turned their weapons toward groups of photographers and cameramen. They shot rubber bullets into their legs--doing it with a self-congratulatory arrogance that came to define the occupation for me.
In Beit Agron I run into familiar Israeli press officials. They are efficient: our press cards are ready in minutes. They welcome me back. They ask about New York. They hand out cell-phone numbers and tell us to call if we need assistance. Joe and I get up to leave, but we are blocked at the door by a man in his early sixties wearing a gray leisure suit. His name is Yusuf Samir, and he is a reporter for the Israeli Arabic service. He tells us that he was kidnapped recently in the West Bank by Palestinian gunmen and held for several weeks.
"The Palestinians are animals," he says. "They are less than human. They are savage beasts. Israel is a land of love. People in Israel love one another. But the Palestinians do not love. They hate. They should be destroyed. We should put fire to them. We should take back Beit Jala, Bethlehem, take back all the land and get rid of them."
The Israeli press officers are beaming.
"He is a great man, a poet," one says as we leave. "He is a man of peace."
Thursday afternoon, June 14,
en route to Gaza City
I fall asleep in the taxi to Gaza, and Joe rouses me when we come to the Erez checkpoint, in the north of the strip that separates Gaza from Israel. Erez is deserted. The multilane highways that once allowed goods and traffic to travel back and forth now resemble unused runways. The low sheds and warehouses, once used to corral Palestinians as they waited for buses to take them into Israel, are vacant.
Israeli soldiers hunker down in concrete bunkers, the black nozzles of their machine guns poking out between the sandbags. Gun battles between Palestinians and Israelis are frequent here, especially after dark. I hoist on my body armor, which has the word PRESS emblazoned across its front. The twenty-six pounds of Kevlar plating make me feel as if I were wearing a body cast.
We approach the Israeli office, where our passports and press cards are checked and our luggage is screened. I mount our bags on a little wheeled cart, the kind you use in airports, and pull it behind me as we walk the quarter mile of empty asphalt to the Palestinian side. High concrete walls hem the lanes. I will drop to the ground next to these walls if firing breaks out.
We cross the checkpoint at about 4:00 P.M. At the last Israeli guard post, the blue-and-white flag with the Star of David on a pole overhead, the young soldiers peer out and tell us jokingly to have a nice trip.
I point to the word PRESS on my chest.
"Shoot me here," I say, laughing.
And then I point to my head.
"Not here."
Friday morning, June 15, Gaza City
Joe and I share a room at the Diera Hotel in Gaza City, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The Diera was built after Yasir Arafat returned to Gaza in July 1994 to set up the Palestinian Authority under the terms of the Oslo peace agreement. His limited rule was, most hoped, meant to lead to a two-state solution. The assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin scuttled any chance of that.
Over the last seven years Arafat has become isolated and unpopular, largely because the promised economic improvements and freedoms have not materialized. Only his refusal to accept the mutated statelets offered to him at Camp David has saved him from complete pillory.
The hotel is thus a symbol of what should have been, an airy, elegant place with domed roofs, muted-sienna stucco walls, deep blue tiles, and balconies looking out at the sea. It resembles, with its arched doorways, the beach hotels in Tunisia. In the fall of 2000, after Islamic militants burned down all the liquor stores in Gaza and all the hotels that sold alcohol, the Diera hastily padlocked its bar. Wine can still be ordered discreetly. It is served in white teapots. There are small screw-top wine bottles in the refrigerator in our room. But the hotel has the feel of a proper Islamic establishment. Arafat's senior officials gather here in the evenings to sit on the terrace with their wives and girlfriends, few of whom sport traditional head scarves.
In the morning, as Joe and I are loading up on omelettes and bread to avoid having to eat at the dirty stalls in the Khan Younis refugee camp, we are joined on the terrace by my friend Azmi Kashawi. Azmi--who with his girth could easily play Falstaff, were he not a devout Muslim who does not drink--is a fellow reporter. We have been through a lot together. In October 2000, at the Nezarim junction in Gaza, we were caught in a brutal Israeli ambush. A young Palestinian about fifteen feet from us was shot through the chest and killed. Since then we have always driven by the junction with a slight shudder, a sudden coldness. Azmi, involuntarily, will sometimes mutter the word "remember."
Without Azmi many doors remain shut. I am grateful that he has agreed to accompany us to Khan Younis.
We sit looking out at the sea. Azmi has a tea. The black silhouette of an Israeli gunboat lies menacing and still on the horizon.
Friday afternoon, June 15, Abu Holi
Joe and I lift our body armor into the small trunk of Azmi's car, where Azmi keeps his own vest and a television camera, and head down the coast road for Khan Younis. Azmi beats the wheel with his fingers and hums along to a tape of the Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez. He keeps urging us to look at the coast; he himself drives with his head turned to the side, watching the rolling white surf, praising the sea. We weave around trucks and buses. One must trust Allah and Azmi's horn--used in lieu of brakes--when one climbs into Azmi's small, yellow car.
The gaiety of our drive is cut short when we reach the Israeli-controlled junction at Abu Holi, about fifteen miles outside of Gaza City. The landscape here is lunar. For acres around, fields have been bulldozed, houses demolished, and olive trees felled and hauled away. In the distance sits a conical cement tower manned by Israeli soldiers. On either side of the checkpoint long lines of cars wait to cross. The coast road is the only way to get to southern Gaza and Khan Younis, and at this point it crosses a highway used by Jewish settlers and the Israeli army. When the settlers speed by in their white armored cars, all Palestinian traffic is stopped. Weeks can pass with the intersection closed or the soldiers letting through only a thin trickle of traffic. One of Azmi's friends, who lived in Khan Younis and worked in Gaza City, gave up trying to make the commute and moved in with friends in Gaza.
Azmi shuts off his tape player. He insists that everyone open a window. We do not speak. We unbuckle our seatbelts. In all war zones everyone needs a door and a swift way to roll out onto the ground if shooting breaks out. We creep forward in the stop-and-go traffic until we face the tower. Azmi leans forward over the wheel. He narrows his eyes and concentrates on a disembodied hand poking out of a slit in the bulletproof glass. The flat palm means stop. A bad read, a lurch past the tower when the Israelis do not want you to move, could see your vehicle raked by gunfire. Suicide bombers, who conceal explosives in donkey carts, view spots like these as prime targets. We do not move. We wait. Finally the hand behind the thick Plexiglas flutters, motioning us through.
Azmi, sweating now in the heat, begins to drive cautiously over the speed bumps. Joe sketches the scene in his notepad. We cross the settlers' road--Palestinians are not allowed to use it--and pass the long line of cars waiting on the other side. It is several minutes before Azmi agrees to roll the windows up and restore the air-conditioning. None of us feels like talking.
Friday afternoon, June 15, Khan Younis
Khan Younis is a dense, gray, concrete shantytown, the black waters from sewers running in thin rivulets down the middle of alleys. There are no gardens or trees. There is no place for children to play, other than the dunes in front of the neighboring Israeli settlements. Vendors in small, dingy stalls sell roasted corn on the cob or falafel. Hunks of meat hang on giant hooks, alongside wooden tables piled with tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, and green beans. During the rains the camp floods with wastewater. Crude septic tanks, called percolating pits, lie outside homes, covered only by a thin layer of sand. When the pits overflow, the dirty water may slosh into the dwellings. The drinking water, which often does not flow for more than a couple of hours each day, is brackish and brown. It has left many in the camp with kidney problems. Only the lonely minarets, poking up out of the clutter, lend a bit of dignity to the slum.
The latest intifada erupted in September 2000, when Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli opposition leader and now the prime minister, visited the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, with about 1,000 Israeli police. Arafat pleaded with then prime minister Ehud Barak to help stop the visit, fearing the violence that would surely erupt, but Barak could do nothing. Since then nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed, along with 100 Israelis and a dozen Israeli Arabs.
Khan Younis is one of eight refugee camps in Gaza. It is surrounded on three sides, like a horseshoe, by Israeli military positions. The soldiers there fire down on the roofs of the concrete shacks--asbestos mostly, held down by piles of rocks, cement blocks, and old tires. Bands of Palestinian gunmen, who often initiate the shooting, fire back.
A blistering white sun beats down on the camp. Our shirts become damp. Our shoes are soon covered with dust. We walk in single file through the concrete maze, jostling our way past groups of Palestinians. Finally we are afforded a look at the dunes hugging the camp. They are dotted on top with Israeli gun emplacements, sandbagged bunkers, large concrete slabs, and a snaking electric fence. Armored green jeeps and tanks roar and clank along the fence's perimeter, throwing up clouds of dust. Knots of nervous Palestinians stand gazing in the direction of the behemoths until they pass out of sight.
The walls of the houses facing the settlements, especially in the El Katadwa neighborhood, on the western edge of the camp, are pockmarked with bullet holes. Jagged chunks of masonry have been ripped away by tank fire. Barrels filled with sand and stacked one on top of the other for me, an eerie reminder of the Balkans--deny Israeli snipers a view of the streets.
Beyond the fence we can see a mobile crane, from which dangles a yellow metal box draped with camouflage. It lumbers inside the Israeli compound like a jerky robot. I am told that the snipers fire down from the box while suspended over the camp.
We turn down a crowded alley and come upon a group of older men seated on chairs in a patch of sand, playing backgammon. A black plastic water tank and a TV antenna loom over them. A radio, perched on a window ledge behind metal bars, plays Arabic music. At dusk these men, and the families that live along the perimeter, will move deeper into the camp to seek safety with relatives and friends. Bands of Palestinian gunmen will creep up to shoot at the Israeli positions, and the crackle of automatic fire will punctuate the night air.
Saturday, June 16, Khan Younis
The Israeli positions on the dunes virtually surround the Jewish settlements, whose whitewashed villas and manicured lawns and gardens look as if they have been lifted out of a southern California suburb. Inside the fence are warehouses where cheap Palestinian labor once stitched together clothes for export or tended rows of vegetables in huge greenhouses.
We set off to find Fuad Faqawi, who runs the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Refugees office in Khan Younis. Azmi leads us down one narrow passage and up another. We finally find the dwelling, a low concrete house surrounded by a cement wall, and bang on the metal door.
Faqawi greets us in a short-sleeved shirt and black loafers covered with a thin film of dust. A packet of Parliament cigarettes pokes out of his shirt pocket. He leads us under a corrugated roof that shades worn chairs and stools, their legs thrust into the sand. He clutches a walkie-talkie.
Faqawi was born in Khan Younis, which was established in late 1949 to provide aid to the some 200,000 Palestinian refugees who had fled the advancing Israeli army in 1948, an army that pushed displaced villagers toward Gaza. Like most refugee camps, Khan Younis was at first a vast tent city, a temporary encampment, set up for 35,000 refugees until people could return to their homes. The tents were replaced in 1953 by boxy concrete structures. The Egyptians, who first controlled Gaza, would not allow the camp to expand, nor would the Israelis, who gained control of Gaza after the war in 1967. Although roughly the same size as it was in 1949, Khan Younis now houses almost twice the number of registered refugees--58,891--that it did five decades ago. The population growth rate for the Palestinians is one of the highest in the world--3.7 percent compared with 1.7 percent in Israel. This is, simply, one of the most heavily populated spots on the planet.
The Palestinians in Gaza, 1.1 million of them, most of whom lack the means to leave, live in a 147-square-mile area. Twenty percent of that territory belongs to the sixteen Jewish settlements, home to about 6,000 Jewish settlers. In other words, one fifth of Gaza is in the hands of .5 percent of the people who live there.
Faqawi says that there was a point two decades ago when UNRWA, which runs schools and health clinics and distributes monthly sacks of flour and food, seemed as if it might have outlived its purpose. By the late 1980s some 40 percent of the men in the camp had jobs in Israel as menial laborers, and unemployment in Gaza was relatively low. The pay was not great, but it allowed them to buy food, televisions, and refrigerators. Israel's decision to impose restrictions on tens of thousands of workers during the first uprising, and a further curtailment when Arafat supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, reversed the gains. Unemployment is now 40 percent, up 11 percent from last year. The U.N. estimates that one in three Palestinians lives on less than $2.10 a day. Palestinian economist Samir Hulaileh estimates that more than two thirds of the Palestinians in Gaza will be living below the poverty line by the end of this year.
The average family in the camp receives five kilos of lentils, five kilos of rice, five kilos of sugar, two liters of cooking oil, and fifty kilos of flour a month from UNRWA. There are 837,750 registered refugees in the Gaza Strip, 54.6 percent of whom (457,426) live in camps.
"Oslo meant almost nothing in practical terms to the people in Khan Younis," Faqawi says. His small yard is filled with children, as ubiquitous in Khan Younis as grains of sand. They stand barefoot, their faces dirty, as they watch us sip demitasse cups of coffee. The smaller ones wear only ragged shirts. The children move in aimless bands throughout the camp, stealing, scavenging, cursing, smoking cigarette butts, and falling into rock-throwing wars. Wealthier Palestinians tend to keep their children indoors.
Faqawi darts into his house and brings out a worn pouch. He tenderly unfolds sepia documents. The papers, from the Government of Palestine, then a British mandate, permitted Faqawi's father to sell tobacco and food in his grocery in Jaffa, He holds out the Register of Lands document, issued under the land settlement ordinance of 1928, that proves title to his father's house.
"Our house in Jaffa exists," he says, offering me the paper. "I have all the documents. Two Iraqi Jewish families live there. I visited them in 1975. We had coffee. They told me they knew it was my house. They said they had left four houses in Iraq. They told me to go to Iraq and take one."
As a boy growing up in the camp Faqawi lived with his eight brothers in a tiny concrete shack. His family built a new structure on the foundations of the old one about fifteen years ago. The boys shared one bedroom. He had no shoes, no schoolbooks, and was plagued by disease and insects.
"U.N. officials would come to my elementary school and tell us to open up our shirts," he says. "They would douse us with DDT.... When I saw pictures in magazines of the way other people lived I was jealous. I was especially jealous of children who could have long hair. We could not let our hair grow because of the lice."
As we speak, a homemade mortar, launched a few blocks away, rips through the air. It, or one fired later, is sure to bring an Israeli response. Groups of Palestinian men and boys are already at the dunes throwing rocks at the Israeli jeeps patrolling the Gani Tal Jewish settlement. The soldiers will open fire and wound eight Palestinians, five under the age of eighteen. At about the same time in Halhoul, a town north of Hebron in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers will wound seven Palestinians, including two medics. The shooting will take place as Palestinians try to dismantle a barricade, built by Israeli soldiers, across the main road leading into the town.
Faqawi goes into his house again, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and returns with twisted scraps of Israeli munitions, including blade, dartlike needles known as flechettes. The fin. tailed flechettes are packed inside shells and spray out in a deadly mass when the shells detonate. Three women in Gaza were killed by flechettes a few days ago.
Faqawi sighs. "We are seeing a lot of divorce, a lot of fighting in the homes, and a lot of shouting in the street," he says. "But I still believe in negotiations."
He looks at his two sons, who grimace when he speaks of compromise.
As we leave the house, Faqawi leans toward me and says quietly, "I can never say that the way to fight the Israelis is to blow ourselves up. I can't allow my children to think like this. I will always disagree with them."
He stops, his eyes weary.
"If I did agree," he says, "I could never tell them."
Sunday afternoon, June 17, the dunes
I sit in the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes, momentarily defeated by the heat, the grit, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage. A friend of Azmi's brings me, on a tray, a cold glass of tart, red carcade juice.
Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper and ragged soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees. Men in flowing white or gray galabias--homespun robes--smoke cigarettes in the shade of slim eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs protruding, are tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.
It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.
"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come !"
I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!.... Son of a whore!.... Your mother's cunt!"
The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.
A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.
Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered--death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo--but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
We approach a Palestinian police post behind a sand hill. The police, in green uniforms, are making tea. They say that they have given up on trying to hold the children back.
"When we tell the boys not to go to the dunes they taunt us as collaborators," Lt. Ayman Ghanm says. "When we approach the fence with our weapons to try and clear the area the Israelis fire on us. We just sit here now and wait for the war." |
