Three

Vik’s closest Gazan friend was Mohammed al-Zaim, a tall, handsome, elegant intellectual who for some weeks had been helping Tom, a volunteer from the United States. Tom was making a video about a Gazan family and Mohammed suggested I accompany what the Israelis describe as ‘that propaganda network’ – the ISM video-makers. (Once back home, ISM-ers try to educate their neighbours about what is really going on in Gaza.)

In 1948 Naser’s newly married grandparents had fled from their home near Beersheva and squatted outside the village of Juhor al-Dik, close to what was to become the Erez border crossing. For many years the grandfather laboured in Jaffa, gradually saving enough to buy a patch of land and build a two-storey house measuring 100 square metres. After Israel’s seizure of Gaza Naser’s father had married, found work in a settlers’ factory, lived frugally and by 2001 had acquired three cows, a small flock of sheep and goats and a shed full of hens. All were killed during the Second Intifada when the IDF dumped some of the carcasses in the family’s two wells.

From the end of a motor track Mohammed, Tom and I followed Naser along a pathlet between unweeded fields of peppers, squash, some leafy green vegetable and a dunum of ominously dehydrated maize. Naser’s house stands alone, only 400 metres from the border. When the IDF shelled it on 13 July 2010 Naser was living there with his widowed mother, his wife Ghada and their five children. Ghada, sitting outside the door with her two-year-old son, was killed instantly and two visiting relatives were badly injured.

Despite major structural damage, UNRWA couldn’t help because the house had not been totally destroyed. While repairing it as best they could, the family moved into the village where Ghada was buried. Two nights later Naser woke to find only the two-year-old remaining in the children’s bed. As he was rushing out of his one-room shack a neighbour arrived – the missing four had been found in the cemetery, crouching around their mother’s grave shouting ‘Wake up!’ Next morning Naser took the children back to their damaged home, two miles away, where his younger brothers were camping while rebuilding.

In February 2011 Naser remarried – his perceived duty, to provide the children with a step-mother (and no doubt several half-siblings). The original fatal shell had been fired from a tank on a nearby hillock. At 9.15 pm on 28 April 2011, after dark, six more shells were fired from the same place, four finding their target and leaving it uninhabitable. Six adults and the children were then living there. Shrapnel severely wounded ten-year-old Alaa Adin’s head and abdomen; he spent seven weeks in hospital. Shrapnel also penetrated the chest and abdomen of five-year-old Misa, who needed a month in hospital. Naser’s brothers suffered face and leg injuries. An ambulance arrived within thirty minutes, after unusually rapid coordination between the International Red Cross (ICRC) and the IDF. Otherwise Alaa Adin might have died, as so many do when coordination is delayed. (Ambulances rushing to the rescue without coordination are often attacked by the IDF – the vehicle destroyed, the paramedics killed or wounded.)

Approaching the thrice-shelled house, we could see a donkey, a cow and a handsome pony tethered near a stack of hay bales (ersatz hay, more weeds than grass). On the only chair in the roofless hallway sat Naser’s sixty-five-year-old mother – hunched forward, leaning on a stick, her face expressionless, seeming not to register our presence. Naser explained that she refused to leave her home again and slept under the remaining fragment of roof, at the back of the hallway.

Cautiously we ascended the semi-shattered cement stairway to two little bedrooms, one with an intact bauble-decorated dressing table against a half-demolished wall. The children’s mattress on the floor was heavily blood-stained. Beyond the ‘buffer zone’ two army jeeps were visible, trailing dust along the ridge. From the closest watchtower a soldier – doubtless angered by Tom’s filming – yelled through a megaphone before firing a shot in the air. In December 2010 the kitchen opposite had been hit by a solitary shell which just missed the cooking gas cylinder.

At the foot of the stairs we sat on stools of concrete blocks while the brothers boiled a tea kettle on their Primus stove; they were camping beside their mother. Three of her twelve children were dead, another three were being held without charge in Israeli detention camps. As we talked a helicopter gunship flew low enough to stop the conversation and the army jeeps reappeared. Then Tom asked Naser, ‘How can you go on living here, never knowing when the next attack will come?’ Quietly Naser replied that after all his family’s efforts to buy land and build a home no one could intimidate them into moving. This is a Palestinian quality not understood by Zionists, comprised of courage, obstinacy and a calm sort of pride. The IDF have the weaponry, the Palestinians have samoud.

Naser was a tall, well-built man, clean-shaven and dressed in his best for the video but looking much older than his years. He began to limp slightly while escorting us back to the taxi; it was parked beside three rudimentary tents holding four single beds donated by an Islamic charity. Here lived most of the family and the two convalescent children sat together on a bed, playing with a string of beads, the scar still visible on Alaa Adin’s scalp. Courtesy required us to wait for Naser’s new wife to brew tiny cups of Turkish coffee with a kick like a mule. As a drone passed overhead, and three more jeeps patrolled the ridge, Naser drew our attention to newly planted olive saplings, replacing a grove bulldozed in 2008. An adjacent bushy patch half-hid the village’s communal beehives. Gazan honey is superb and I was paying the equivalent of £11.50 per kilo in the Rimal grocery store. These villagers sold their harvest, in bulk, for little more than £3 per kilo.

In 2005 the ‘withdrawing’ IDF declared a ‘free-fire’ buffer zone, some 500 metres wide, on Gaza’s side of the border. After Cast Lead this was extended to a kilometre or so, encompassing 30 per cent of the Strip’s cultivable land. ‘Free-fire’ means Israeli soldiers can shoot, without warning, any who venture into the zone. Of necessity many Gazans take this risk and among farmers and rubble collectors the death toll has been high. ISM-ers regularly accompany such families and remain close to them all day, making random murder less likely. The international reaction to the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall (ISM-ers killed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003) affords foreigners a degree of protection.

The Strip’s ISM-ers, like their West Bank comrades, also support the weekly non-violent protests held at strategic points. In northern Gaza a talented group of activists organises Tuesday demos not far from Erez. ‘Local Initiative Beit Hanoun’ also run educational and cultural events; they attribute their high energy level to memories of a November night in 2006 when an artillery shell killed nineteen sleeping Beit Hanounians. On that occasion the IDF apologised – ‘a faulty target device’, the shell had been aimed at a nearby rocketeers’ base.

One Tuesday morning I joined the ISM-ers. We were first at the meeting point on the northern edge of Beit Hanoun outside a bombed Agricultural Research College where a lone donkey wandered through the rubble finding a weed here and there. Within the next hour serveeces delivered a few score young men and a dozen young women, several carrying megaphones. Sitting in the limited shade of a crumbling wall I talked to a petite twenty-year-old wearing jeans and a carelessly tied hijab. At intervals she stood up to shout – ‘I hate non-violence!’ With relish she mentioned the previous week’s casualty, a young man kneecapped by IDF forces from a watchtower.

Eventually the ‘Local Initiative’ minivan arrived, driven by an older man with an air of authority. He distributed yellow jackets and supervised everyone’s possessions – apart from megaphones and flags – being stowed in the van. Then our noisy, flag-waving march, led by three brothers carrying a sheet-sized banner, straggled down a rough slope, past a noisome smouldering garbage dump, along a laneway between prickly pear hedges – now within sight and earshot of IDF watchtowers. Our chanting became more defiant as we crossed a field of thorny scrub brightened by a tall weed with golden flowers – land no longer cultivated, so many local farmers had been shot. As we stood in a line on a long ridge of earth, some 500 metres from the fence, there was no reaction: nothing and no one moved on the army road or in the watchtowers. My companions began to look a little foolish and turned up the volume on their taunting chant – apparently calculated to provoke a response which could later be rightly described as ‘excessive’. Soon we retreated – more slowly, in small groups – and Tom teased me. This anti-climax was all my fault: seeing an ancient female International, the IDF chose to hold their fire.

On the West Bank I had felt uneasy about certain ISM-ers and other Internationals who seemed too eager for angry confrontations to ‘enhance’ their video albums. Sometimes I wondered – do these set-piece protests, often attended by small groups of sympathetic Israelis, achieve anything? The publicity generated has slightly benefited a few communities but such demos can’t Stop the Wall – or halt house demolitions – or curb settler outrages. Since 2008 they have been organised by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC) which since October 2009 has been receiving from the PA a monthly subsidy of 50,000 shekels – adding up to US$125,000 annually. However, I felt no such reservations on the Strip, where the ISM-ers I met were protecting fishermen at sea and farmers in the buffer zone – an enterprise very different from ‘professional’ demonstrating.

As we passed the reeking garbage, tons were being loaded into three metal trucks (Second World War models) for transport to – where? Nobody knew. Perhaps to be dumped offshore because Beit Hanounians had complained about the fumes.