The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) is disconcerting. Behind high walls oil money has created another world, seemingly not part of the Strip – yet its ideological power-house. On a clean, orderly, tastefully landscaped campus stands an assemblage of soaring buildings (much concrete, more glass), some stark and severe, most incorporating classical Islamic embellishments that don’t quite come off. The overall effect is of an ultra-modern factory complex – perhaps pharmaceutical? Here young Gazans are programmed to be ‘correctly’ Islamic and each building’s design caters for segregation. Males and females enter the campus by different gates, enter the library and other facilities by different doors, relax in rigidly demarcated areas of the litter-free, well-watered grounds where lawns are green, flowering hedges delight the eye and herb-beds delight the nose. A bilingual guide-booklet explains:

IUG is keen to offer the best environment for students by including green places and parks which will surely make a comfortable atmosphere that encourages students to spend the most of his time at the Campus.

Off campus, there’s an ever-present danger: young men and women might talk to one another as they do at Birzeit and An-Najah universities on the West Bank. However, on my several visits to IUG the students invariably looked cheerful and busy. In surroundings so utterly unlike the rest of the Strip they may well feel this is their share of that ‘normal’ world seen daily on TV and YouTube. The abnormality of IUG, by twenty-first-century standards, they seem not to resent. I asked Anwar about this. Dryly he replied, ‘For most of them, the programming works.’

When the PLO denounced President Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel a vengeful Egypt closed its universities to Palestinians, prompting the Muslim Brotherhood to found IUG in 1978. At first it was under PLO control, then came an urgent need to seek funds from abroad – through the Mujamma. This meant a not-so-gradual assertion of Islamic influences; Mujamma student groups ousted the nationalist/PLO candidates in student council elections, often using violence or the threat of violence. Thereafter the quickening pace of religious revivalism, throughout the OPT, debilitated Palestine’s liberation movement. In January 1980 the Islamists, having lost an election to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) council, were further enraged at the suggestion that the secular/nationalist al-Azhar college might be expanded to rival IUG. A long-bearded mob set out to burn the PRCS office and library in Gaza City, pausing en route to wreck alcohol-selling cafés and video shops. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers sat watching the mayhem from parked jeeps. When Gaza’s military governor, Brigadier-General Segev, was later challenged about their inactivity he blandly replied, ‘Our enemy today is the PLO.’

At that date the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal was to wean Palestinians off secularism in their daily lives and off nationalism in their political thinking. By the beginning of the First Intifada it was firmly in control of IUG and all Gaza’s cinemas and purveyors of alcohol had been closed.

IUG’s ten faculties provide 55 undergraduate programmes, 40 postgraduate programmes and eleven higher diplomas. Sara Roy has described it as ‘arguably the most visible expression of social penetration through institutional means’. She points out that by now it has educated thousands of religious leaders for Gaza and (until the blockade) the West Bank and hundreds of civilian leaders for most sectors of Palestinian life. Yet for all its brave face (listing international honours won by professors and links with foreign universities) it must limit coming generations if they hear the same message from home, mosque and university. The founders of Mujamma/Hamas, who all studied abroad, were better equipped to confront European and American antagonists and make the most of foreign friends. One postgraduate male student told me, ‘You’re wrong about independent thinking, it’s not correct Islam. We’re not allowed to argue with parents or teachers.’

IUG’s security is much tighter than the Department of Foreign Affairs’ – one doesn’t stroll in casually, as to an Oxford college. Two armed men guard each narrow entrance and on my first visit Deeb had to escort me. When I paused on the pavement to hide my white locks beneath a hijab borrowed from his wife the bushy-bearded sentries glowered at the brazen infidel. Uncovered, I (aged eighty!) would have been refused admission.

On Sunday 28 December 2008 Israel marked IUG’s significance by totally destroying the Science Labs building and the Engineering and Technology building. Within moments, 74 research centres, containing a wide range of complex and delicate appliances and apparatuses, lay beneath hundreds of tons of concrete and metal. Nothing could be salvaged. Prince Torkey Ben Abdul Aziz and the Islamic Bank for Development had invested US$15 million in this equipment. The academic careers of a majority of IUG’s 20,000 students had also been wrecked or at best severely disrupted. I can think of no better recruitment ploy for the Qassam Brigades, Islamic Jihad et al. Nine other buildings were partially destroyed but have been more or less restored.

When Deeb as a male could go no further Suhair appeared, an English-speaking member of the administrative staff whose beauty was equalled by her self-assurance. She wore a special badge authorising her to enter male territory and led me to the vast crater where once had stood the multi-storeyed victims of Israel’s fanatical (and ultimately self-destructive) aggression. No trace of rubble remains; all has been reincarnated in scores of camp homes. The photographs taken next day are painful to look upon, even for an outsider.

Suhair gave me a leisurely conducted tour of the campus, starting with a 1,000-seat conference hall where – the guide-booklet tells us – ‘IUG conducted Graduation Ceremonies annually to complete the happiness of students among their family and parents. About 29,000 students have been graduated since 30 years of establishment.’ This building is perfectly suited to adaptation as theatre, concert hall, debating chamber – all forbidden activities.

Dr Moheer, Dean of the new Medical School, entertained me generously in his large, expensively furnished office on the top floor of a rather pretentious edifice. Finishing touches were being put to enormous rooms – reminding me of nuclear power plant control centres – where international video conferences would be held and other esoteric cyberspace capers could take place to outwit the blockade. (Or so I was told.) Hi-tech lecture halls and sophisticated labs were about to go into action. In some corridors high quality furniture was being unpacked and giveaway sand trickled out of those crates. For the unpacking of one small parcel two elderly, excited professors came panting upstairs. Only they could do this job. Expectantly we waited, until a boring little machine appeared – for the medical genetics department, price US$58,000.

To me this exuberant spending, within a cat’s spit of extreme poverty and overcrowding, felt inappropriate. The medical school’s fancy design seemed shockingly wasteful; given such extravagance, is it not hard to beg convincingly for more funding? I reckoned the electronic pencil-sharpeners summed it all up – one attached to the edge of each desk. Too Gulf State …! On the other hand, if oil-sodden princes and bankers have so many surplus dollars why not spread them around by employing armies of construction workers and buying incalculable quantities of construction materials – even if the end product does look excessive to someone who thinks in tens rather than millions.

The campus’s purdah quarter has a conventual tinge because of all the hijabs and jilbabs. Even the traditional Palestinian flowing gown (the thobe, often exquisitely embroidered) doesn’t satisfy Shari’a fashion demands. Instead, women students must wear the jilbab, an ankle-length coat of uniform design, high-necked and long-sleeved, fitting closely around the wrist. The approved jilbab is black; just occasionally a rebellious young woman ventures out in milk-chocolate brown which makes quite a loud statement. Many poor students receive clothing vouchers, donated by one of IUG’s oily patrons and only valid for the purchase of jilbabs and hijabs. As someone abnormally heat-prone, I found it personally uncomfortable merely to see these unfortunate women going about the streets in temperatures up to 38°C. All those with whom I commiserated assured me they were used to it, didn’t suffer; yet I noticed that indoors, when their homes were male-free, they wore the infidel summer garments one saw hanging in all markets – including tanktops and very short shorts. The wide availability of such fashions must mean a high percentage of Gazan women appreciate them.

Suhair made much of the fact that 62 per cent of IUG students are women. (A common statistic in Islamic universities elsewhere.) Was this not proof of equality? Similarly, Dr al-Zahar – looking smug – told me his wife had been a teacher before the IDF broke her back, and their first daughter was an engineer, the second a teacher of English, the third an accountancy student. I was not impressed. The Islamist emphasis on equality of educational opportunities, and women’s freedom to practise in the professions, can confuse the issue for newcomers – and soon one realises it is meant to do just that.

Rather meanly, I asked Suhair why IUG segregates its students. Promptly she replied that an Englishwoman (name forgotten) has proved (sic) that ‘coeducation is bad because girls are more intelligent than boys and when they learn together boys resent this and disrupt the girls’ work’.

‘That may be,’ I replied, ‘but it’s still a pity they can’t relax together when not learning.’ Whereupon Suhair changed the subject, informing me that IUG takes no fees from handicapped students and ‘all coming from poor families get free books and materials. Also the government tries to help us. We’ve internship arrangements with the Department of Industry for engineering students and with Finance for accountancy students. But that help is very little. Most of our graduates, with good qualifications, have nowhere to go.’

Before I left Suhair agreed to meet me at the entrance, to escort me past the sentries, whenever I returned to spend time in the library.

That evening I read through the IUG guide-booklet and learned that ‘the Library Services hold over 100,000 printed items, and vast quantities of materials in many other electronic formats’. Also –

IUG launched a new satellite TV channel named ‘Al-Ketab’ which aims at promoting values, spreading good morals and participating in solving the problems that face the Arabic and Islamic communities focusing on the Palestinian community. Through this channel, IUG hopes to expand the educational process from its geographical limits to reach out to every house in the world, in addition to broadcasting some other varieties.

And then there’s the Business and Technology Incubator (BTI).

What sort of unhinged person will hatch out in this incubator?

Subsequently I spent long sessions alone in IUG’s library, the most agreeable building on the campus. Like An-Najah’s newish library in Nablus, it is short of books because too much was spent on the building. (Some West Bank UNRWA schools are short of teachers and equipment for the same reason.) There was little new stock; at the time most volumes dated from the 1990s or before. Beside the few ‘English’ shelves, I met Jannath, taking notes for an essay on Jane Austen. Afterwards we walked together down the long corridor to the women’s entrance and I began yet another ‘Women’s Rights’ debate. Jannath fumbled around my argument that the Islamists’ ‘Gazan traditions/local custom’ smokescreen deserves to be mocked. The grandmothers of contemporary students – and their mothers as teenagers – were free to go bareheaded and bare-armed, wearing short skirts, if they so wished; the fact that many preferred customary garb is beside the point.

‘But now,’ said Jannath, ‘traditions and customs have changed!’

‘Quite so,’ said I. ‘Changed by whom? And why?’

Jannath laughed, then invited me to visit her in Jabalya on the following Friday morning. She wrote her address on something interesting – the top flap of a cigarette packet. Could it be that she was a secret smoker?

On 15 January 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, I had taken a minibus taxi from Ramallah back to Nablus and on the way we heard al-Jazeera radio reporting attacks on four Gaza City hospitals. When I looked around at my fellow-passengers’ faces they variously showed anger, disgust, contempt and what can only be described as incredulous horror. One man recalled that in the Lebanon, in 2006, some of Israel’s worst war crimes were committed on the eve of their withdrawal. And he recognised that Cast Lead must end before President Obama’s imminent inauguration.

One of those four targets was the deservedly famed and honoured al-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation Hospital which in 1979 began as a nursing home for the destitute aged left without family. By 1995 it had become the Strip’s first and only in-patient rehabilitation centre, dealing with head and spinal cord injuries and other neurological afflictions. It collaborated with Israel’s Tel Hashomer Hospital and with a number of relevant Norwegian NGOs; IUG trained its physiotherapists. In 2008 it was at last able to expand – just in time for the IDF to target it with eight artillery shells which completely destroyed the men’s ward and did so much damage all patients had to be discharged. Since my arrival in Gaza I had heard al-Wafa mentioned a dozen times, with gratitude and affection, by the most disadvantaged people on my visiting list. And now I had been given an introduction to its Director, Dr Khamis Elessi.

As an ISI (Islamic Social Institution) al-Wafa naturally has links with Hamas; over the years some of its management team and probably many of its staff will have been members or sympathisers. This however does not affect their professionalism. Al-Wafa’s record proves that it is not swayed by political or religious leanings. It exists to do the best it can, with the limited resources at its disposal, for all Gazans who need its expertise. In an immensely valuable book (Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza) published shortly after my return from Gaza, Sara Roy writes: ‘Hamas’s social support structure played a key role in building up popular support for the organization [but] this was not the same as mobilizing people into an activist constituency based on the political ideology of Hamas.’ Here is reliable confirmation of my own (necessarily superficial) impression of how things are on the Strip. The West Bank, too, had shown me conflicting currents: gratitude for an ISI like the Nablus clinic where my damaged hip was X-rayed, coexisting with resentment of increasingly Islamic influences on the socio-political scene.

Tragically, such subtleties are beyond official Israel’s grasp. During Cast Lead, a senior Israeli government representative told the New York Times:

The operation’s central aim is to destroy both aspects of Hamas – its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing … In a war, its instruments of political and social control are as legitimate a target as its rocket caches.

Back-up came from Reserve Major-General Amiran Levin:

(In case you’ve forgotten – between 2001 and 2011 rockets from Gaza killed 22 Israelis and one immigrant labourer.)

No wonder the Goldstone Report described Cast Lead as ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’.

The Israelis’ sustained imposition of all-out collective punishment is by any standards a very frightening phenomenon. For decades they have been attacking defenceless populations through curfews, closures, sieges, house demolitions, olive-grove bulldozings, well poisonings, shootings, bombings, torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial. One of my Gazan friends proposed that this Israeli obsession, this conviction that collective punishment is the way forward, may well be a hideous hangover from the Holocaust when Jews were collectively punished for being Jews. The logic behind this proposal escaped me. But then my friend argued, ‘We’re not talking about logic! We’re talking about something very deep and dark and twisted. Something so sick the international community is afraid to go near it.’

Several years ago, the same comparison was drawn by Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur in the OPT, a Princeton international law authority and himself a Jew. He said, ‘Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.’

Perhaps this grim analogy no longer shocks because Zionist criminality is becoming ever more strident and arrogant. Now a retiring head of Israel’s security forces feels free to brag on TV that ‘Our successful operations have made political assassinations internationally acceptable.’

In my serveece to al-Wafa a retired professor of English sat beside me and insisted on paying my fare. His brain-damaged grandson lay comatose in the Rehabilitation Centre; a wall had fallen on him as he sought to salvage stones from a recently shelled house. The professor’s specialty was George Bernard Shaw but I soon steered him off John Bull’s Other Island and onto the Strip. He blamed ‘Protestant sentimentality about biblical places’ for the Balfour Declaration. And he, too, spoke of Zionism’s ‘humiliation campaign’ against Palestinians as having Nazi roots. ‘It’s how they were treated in the ’30s.’

Habitually I arrive too early (a perverse form of unpunctuality) and at 8.30 a young doctor, seeing me on an outside bench, invited me into a small stuffy room off the hallway. Here several young men sat around discussing case notes, drinking tea and eating home-made chocolate cookies from a huge box in the centre of the table. It was someone’s birthday, an occasion not traditionally celebrated in the Arab world but now adopted. They were a friendly bunch, apart from one physiotherapist whose very long, very thick black beard must have taken a lot of maintenance. I had come to associate disapproving stares with that sort of beard.

The only English-speaker told me about donated wheelchairs seized from the 2010 Flotilla and taken to an Ashdod warehouse where they were cunningly vandalised – rendered almost useless – before being delivered to the ICRC at Erez. One’s first reaction is to disbelieve such stories (‘must be propaganda!’) but the Zionist exercise of wanton cruelty, which I had so often witnessed on the West Bank, made this story only too credible.

To greet me, Dr Khamis Elessi stood up behind his makeshift desk: a small man, balding, round-faced, soft-spoken, kind-eyed. He comes of a notable Gaza family and one soon senses a noblesse oblige attitude (not very common among Palestinians) to the Strip’s least privileged. No money had been wasted on this rather cramped, utilitarian Director’s office.

Dr Elessi opened the conversation by deploring all violence, whatever its source or motive. A tediously trite statement, you might think – yet it’s contestable in Occupied Palestine where there are plausible arguments in favour of violence as an assertion of people’s right to freedom. Indisputably, as Dr Elessi said, ‘All forms of retaliation must increase suffering and bitterness.’ Yet he could understand, as I cannot, the sort of martyr’s mother who rejoices because her son has ‘given himself’ for the cause and is now being rewarded by Allah – while his community is being collectively punished by the IDF. Dr Elessi also conceded that to an extent attacks on Israelis, military or civilian, do boost communal morale in territories with a 60-year backlog of impotent rage. ‘Which means,’ he said, ‘the Occupier is corrupting the Occupied.’ I remembered then Anwar literally shuddering as he described an Islamic Jihad street party spontaneously organised to celebrate a ‘successful’ suicide bombing in Israel – ‘like you see in normal countries when the local team wins’.

Dr Elessi agreed with me that the world should not be allowed to forget a fact now hidden behind stacks of Israeli hasbara. On 23 December 2008 Hamas offered to renew for at least ten years the truce violated by Israel on 4 November. Their condition was that Israel would fulfil the two original clauses of the ceasefire: a complete stop to hostilities and lifting the blockade of Gaza. Zionists genuinely interested in a ‘Peace Process’ would have discussed this offer; Hamas has a deserved reputation for sticking to agreements and had jailed some of its own militants for breaking the previous ceasefire. However, Cast Lead had been planned soon after the IDF’s shaming Lebanese experience in 2006. ‘And it was timed,’ said Dr Elessi, ‘to reward warmongers in the Knesset [February 2009] election.’ I now learned that the no-expenses-spared planning included a Gaza City mock-up beside a remote training camp in the Negev. Nothing Hamas said or did could have prevented Cast Lead, which had very little to do with deterring home-made rockets – or even Iran-made missiles. It was a continuation of the Nakba by other means.

The barrenness of youngsters’ lives in the Strip’s most deprived areas – such as that around al-Wafa – greatly distressed Dr Elessi. Many more football clubs were needed – but where to kick? He told me then about al-Jazeera Sports Club for the disabled, started by himself and a few colleagues. Before the blockade locked them in, its members had won several medals in international competitions – achievements which gave a tremendous boost not only to the competitors’ families and friends but to their whole community. Now, with the Rafah Gate open again, the club could begin to plan and fundraise for further endeavours in foreign stadia. But would Rafah remain open? And even if it did, would the Egyptians facilitate the exit and re-entry of disabled Palestinians and their escorts? Deeb had put it rather well – ‘Gaza’s future is a forest of question marks.’

While showing me around (discreetly: one doesn’t want the severely disabled to feel like tourist fodder) Dr Elessi introduced me to several of the staff and what I glimpsed of their relationships with the patients set off good vibes, confirming my observations while visiting other clinics with Nita. Al-Wafa’s rehabilitation work is unofficially extended beyond the physical. The Director only mentioned the bombing en passant; rebuilding was almost completed, one had to live in the present, not brood over the past or despair of the future. As he escorted me to the nearest taxi route, along a pavement seething with small children, he admitted to finding the Zionists’ demographic fears quite rational. Already the Palestinians, if united in a show of non-violent strength, could end the Occupation and move the problem onto another plane. ‘Binationalism?’ I suggested. But Dr Elessi pretended not to hear. People in his position can’t step forward as political leaders. Al-Wafa is there for everyone imprisoned on the Strip who is misfortunate enough to need it.

In the taxi I thought about that ‘if’ … If the Palestinians could unite – a possibility made ever less possible by energetic schemers. And the very next afternoon afforded a disturbing example of such scheming.

At al-Wafa I drank tea with an exhausted-looking nurse who habitually works overtime for no extra pay (so said one of her patients). She had urged me to visit her cousin, Director of the Ministry of Health’s Central Drug Store which was reporting ‘zero stock levels’ for many essential medications. Nita came too and we crossed an empty car park to a hastily rebuilt (after bombing) warehouse – surprisingly open and unguarded. ‘There’s not much to guard,’ Nita reminded me.

In a dingy office, lined with shelves of files, the Director and four of his colleagues were gloomily conferring. When Nita introduced me he stood and bowed slightly (no hand-shaking) – a compact, grey-haired, clean-shaven man, his expression compounded of tiredness, irritation, sadness and a determination to be cheerful. In response to his formulaic ‘How are you?’ I replied, ‘Depressed because Gaza is suffering so much.’ He laughed. ‘Sit down! Sit down and be happy! You must be happy because Gaza is liberated! We are free – here no Israeli soldiers or settlers like on West Bank – be happy with us!’

Nita said something to stop this Hamas patter and at once the Director stood up again to lead us down a long grey corridor, smelling of damp concrete, to an enormous, almost empty storeroom. This is the distribution centre for all the Ministry of Health’s medications for the Strip’s 13 hospitals and 54 primary health care clinics. Here the Director let us see the depth of his own depression. This crisis began in January 2011 and the store was now short of 180 types of crucially important medications. Gazans suffer from the range of diseases one would expect in any malnourished population of 1.6 million – plus complicated IDF-induced injuries and illnesses. Every day news came of needless deaths. Tunnel-derived medicines were costly and often dangerously unreliable. The varieties that might occasionally come in otherwise were even more costly and no more reliable. Substitute medicines were gaining in popularity – their effects usually dire and quite often fatal. For some reason the sight of all those empty shelves touched me more than the standard ‘Appeal’ photographs of starving children.

Israel was not directly to blame for this collective punishment. The missing donated medications had long since arrived in Ramallah where the PA, living up (or down) to its ‘quisling’ label, was withholding them from Hamas-governed Gaza. In Jerusalem in December 2010, I had heard Mahmoud Abbas’s security services being praised for their merciless manoeuvrings to demoralise and discredit Hamas’ administration and Hamas’ West Bank supporters. The PA police had probably impressed the CIA by arresting six faculty members at An-Najah university, all voluntary workers for an ISI, therefore accused of ‘assisting a front for Hamas’. More serious because even more divisive, 1,000 schoolteachers had lost their jobs – some Hamas members, some related to individuals suspected of Hamas leanings, some who refused to promote Fatah. One of my Nablus friends belonged to that last category and I knew he disliked Fatah and Hamas equally. But he still lost his job.

Nita admitted that being collectively punished by fellow-Palestinians was the unkindest cut of all.

At IUG Dr Moheer had described other health-care impediments. Because of an acute shortage of specialists, many complicated cases need to go elsewhere but most are unable to leave the Strip. For the lucky few, it can take a long time (sometimes too long) to find a suitable Israeli (or other) hospital willing to accept them and to arrange payment through the Ministry of Health – or a private benefactor, if such is available.

There is also a shortage of experts to maintain equipment and the lack of one tiny, irreplaceable part can leave a $50,000 machine crippled. The irregular electricity supply ruins sensitive machines, when suddenly the power drops below or shoots above the required voltage. (In my flat, dependent on the family generator, I had noticed that this often happens.) I suggested seeking voluntary experts from among the Palestinians’ many foreign friends (ISM-like people) but according to Dr Moheer ‘commercial confidentiality’ rules this out. Each firm’s cherished know-how must at all times be protected, even at the cost of patients’ lives. Another complication: many of the firms’ own experts won’t travel to Gaza, either for ideological or fear reasons. Alternatively, they may be so expensive to import it makes more sense to buy new machines with guarantees covering one or two years.

Bureaucracy and corruption (or both combined) present major problems. To minimise their effects the rich donor (individual or group) arranges for the manufacturer – preferably with a branch in Israel – to send the gift directly to the Gaza hospital after the manufacturer (not the donor) has done all the tortuous paperwork in Israel. The donor pays by sending money straight to the manufacturer’s bank account. ‘In this way,’ explained Dr Moheer, ‘we keep it absolutely transparent. These manufacturers are big multinationals so no one can suspect them of dishonesty.’ It seems Dr Moheer has a lot to learn – I hope not the hard way.

A serveece set me down in the middle of Jabalya town early on a Friday morning when the streets were quiet and all the shops shut; the ramshackle drabness and littered gutters seemed peculiarly depressing without the usual jostling throngs and noisy tangle of motor/equine/hand-cart traffic. Jannath had given ‘Jabalya camp’ as her address, which was misleading. When I showed it to a few astonished-looking men, wearing white mosque gowns and prayer caps, they directed me this way and that (by gesture: no one spoke English) – until finally a ragged, friendly youth led me through a maze of laneways to a long, high mud wall overhung by the mature trees within: fig, palm, lemon, flame-of-the-forest. The refugees’ dwellings had grown up around an imposing two-storey mansion built in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire by Jannath’s great-grandfather. My guide pulled hard on an old-fashioned bell rope and as we heard a metallic clanging he smiled at me and waved and hurried away. I had learned that in such circumstances, when help has been spontaneously offered, a tip can cause offence – however ragged one’s helper.

A small shy boy opened the gate as Jannath came sauntering across a parched lawn – bare-headed and wearing tight lime-green slacks and a low-cut cherry-red blouse. She introduced the boy as Mahmoud, a cousin, one of twelve family members now living in a house with ample space for forty. We sat on a wide verandah, enjoying the strong breeze coming from the sea across open ground, the property of a neighbour who was ‘keeping it undeveloped as an investment’. Meanwhile food was being grown there: lettuce, fennel, spinach. On the far side a few skeletal dwellings marked the site of a March 2008 IDF attack on Jabalya.

At the end of February 2008 a forty-seven-year-old resident of Sderot in Israel was killed by a home-made rocket and, for the first time, other Qassam Brigades missiles reached Ashkelon where they did little or no damage. A week or so later the IDF killed 61 Jabalya camp residents in one day – among them two of Jannath’s cousins (Mahmoud’s sisters) and their mother. Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, found it easy to explain this mass slaughter of (mainly) civilians. ‘Everybody needs to understand that Israeli citizens are being terrorized by rockets coming from Gaza Strip. This is something we cannot live with.’

Two years later Jannath and her sister Ayshah (aged respectively twenty-two and twenty-three) unwillingly migrated from their UAE birthplace to settle in Gaza. Their father (‘managing a big business in Abu Dhabi’) had been widowed in 2006 and remarried in 2007, his new wife not much older than his daughters. In that purdah quarter the atmosphere soon soured – though Jannath said their stepmother had a good relationship with the five brothers, all younger than the girls. In January 2010 the sisters were despatched to Gaza to live with their grandfather in the ancestral home, study at IUG and get married. Now all was well. Their previously unknown extended family had welcomed them enthusiastically and they were allowed more personal freedom on the Strip than in the paternal home.

At that moment Ayshah joined us, wearing shorts and T-shirt, keen to show off a month-old infant in an expensive carry-cot. She had married a second cousin soon after their arrival, a young man who was making his mark at IUG as a ‘researching agronomist’. When I complimented both on their fluent English Ayshah explained, ‘Abu Dhabi is bilingual – has to be, with most of the population foreign!’

Jannath looked at me and suddenly seemed embarrassed. ‘We should apologise for the university’s booklet in such bad English! It makes me angry and when I see Internationals laughing over our mistakes it makes me sad. So much money comes from Saudi, they could hire a qualified translator. It’s damaging our reputation. If bad English is OK, maybe we’re not so smart as we say about other things?’

Then the bell rang. Mahmoud hurried to the door and shouted ‘Ahmed!’ – so the sisters had to scurry inside before the visitor could be admitted. Ahmed was a tall, bony young man with lingering acne and a slight squint. He shook hands and greeted me in halting English, then sat down and helped himself to tea. When the women returned, wearing colourful hijabs and all-enveloping plain cotton gowns, he was explained as Jannath’s first cousin and fiancé. Before marriage he must never see her hair uncovered or her curves discernible. I provocatively recalled Mrs Halaweh’s reminiscences of swimming parties on Gaza beach. Everyone looked shocked and after a moment Ahmed, frowning, pointed out that in Mandate and Egyptian times British customs prevailed and the Holy Koran was not properly interpreted. Now correct interpretations guide Gazan life. I persisted, remarking that West Bank women are less controlled than Gazan women. By now Ahmed looked indignant. On the West Bank, he sternly reminded me, there is a Jewish influence and also many more Internationals and some weak people want to copy their behaviour and harm is done too in some mosques where the Holy Koran is not interpreted by correct imams.

Soon Ahmed went indoors to pay his respects to their mutual grandfather and Jannath said, ‘I’m happy, I worried a bit coming here, about would I like him. It’s fine, he’s a nice kind person, I’m very happy.’

Ayshah said, ‘Some of our age group get the idea, from outside, about girls choosing husbands. A few years ago I was confused, thinking maybe I should be more independent. But really I know I couldn’t, I’d be afraid to make a mistake!’

The baby woke, whimpered once and was taken under the maternal gown. Both sisters made banal remarks about Israel and the blockade but neither was interested in any form of activism, or speculation about future possibilities. As we chatted on in a desultory way I wondered if they were unaware of the risk involved in all these cousinly matings or if they had been warned but preferred to ignore the risk. The day before, at the Al-Nasser Paediatric Hospital, I had learned that from the Palestinians’ high consanguinity rates come abnormal levels of (among other afflictions) IEM – Inborn Error of Metabolism. Out of the hospital’s 18 cases of this rare condition (causing skeletal deformities and mental retardation) 17 were the children of cousin marriages. In three of the Gazan families I visited regularly, IEM cases were sadly obvious – relatively mild cases, yet a source of much parental anxiety. In one family, not only were the parents first cousins – both came of consanguineous marriages. And this is not as unusual as one might hope. The young paediatrician with whom I talked wanted a thorough study done of the Strip’s incidence of IEM, as preliminary to a major anti-consanguinity campaign. In general her advice to parents was rejected, seen as ‘Western’ interference with an ancient custom that had served the Palestinians well by reinforcing clans’ assets. She herself had become estranged from her own parents – the unhappy consequence of a refusal to marry a first cousin.

I was saying goodbye to the sisters when Ahmed reappeared and escorted me, as is the custom, to the nearest taxi route. This gesture provoked a mixed reaction: appreciation of the courtesy, resentment of the implied dependency or vulnerability of women. Life among the Palestinians was taking its toll. A decade ago the appreciation would have been unmixed.

Two serveece rides took me to Yara’s family home, where I was expected at noon.

I first met Yara in a sub-office of the Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD), a group severely handicapped by its title: even the initialism is a tongue-twister. It was established in 1981, inspired by a damp squib – the Arab Charter on Human Rights – which banned all discrimination against women but was not put into force because at that date only Iraq would ratify it. I was shown the figures which PWWSD helps to gather for the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. In 2006 50 per cent of Gazan women and 69 per cent of West Bank women suffered psychological violence. For physical violence the figures were 25 per cent and 26 per cent. When I objected that ‘psychological violence’ is too vague a term Yara replied sharply, ‘You know it when you live with it. Here it often means forced marriages.’ Events since 2006 have impeded the statisticians.

Yara was tall and too thin: not beautiful but with an arresting face, strong and mobile, showing volatile emotions as a landscape changes under swift clouds. She spoke fluent English, self-taught with BBC World Service assistance, and worked for PWWSD as a part-time volunteer. Her ‘earning job’, as she called it, was demanding: no sinecure. Her hobby was wood-carving, ‘to prove I’m a feminist’. She refused to shake hands with Muslim men – ‘Let them feel what it’s like when women are up against mysophobia!’

I had to ask, ‘What’s mysophobia?’ When Yara replied, ‘A morbid fear of defilement’ I at once remembered my first day in Gaza. Mehat had introduced me to a reliable money-changer, a charming old man who graciously apologised for not shaking hands. He asked Mehat to explain that since marrying fifty-five years ago he had never touched any woman but his wife. In Mehat’s view, this was an edifying boast. Yara said, ‘Some people see it as a neurosis needing treatment.’

For her mother’s sake Yara wore the hijab. ‘I’d take a chance – she has nightmares about acid in my face. A blinded disfigured daughter!’ But she wouldn’t wear the thobe, never mind the jilbab. ‘What’s wrong with trouser-suits? They show no skin, I’m covered to the ankles and wrists!’

Aged twenty-six, Yara had married at nineteen, been divorced at twenty-five. She saw her three sons once a week, on Fridays, and invited me to meet them in her parental home. At first she seemed to me stoically resigned to her situation – a sad one, but not uncommon.

Finding Gazan addresses is not easy for the non-Arabic-speaker. I tried my luck in a huxter shop where two youths sat on crates sharing a tin of Coke and talking to the elderly owner, still wearing his mosque gown and cap. He eyed me with disfavour – then, on seeing the well-known family name, ordered a youth to guide me to my destination half a mile away. En route we attempted conversation but got no further than an exchange of names. All UNRWA school pupils learn English – in theory …

From the street Yara’s home was invisible behind a high concrete wall. When she opened the wicket gate I got quite a shock – this was not the Yara who had taken me into the most deprived recesses of Shatti and Jabalya camps on a round of morale-boosting visits to the widowed mothers of disabled children. In six days she seemed to have lost her poise and vitality, to have become uncertain and frightened.

The long three-storey house overlooked a wide, bleak concrete forecourt unrelieved by any fleck of green. ‘We built in 1997,’ said Yara, ‘and it’s three flats. My two oldest married brothers live here. But the planning was silly – too ambitious. Money dried up and inside it’s mostly unfinished.’

A long flight of shallow, semi-circular steps (crumbling at the edges) led directly into an enormous high-ceilinged salon that felt unused. The gaudy Chinese carpet didn’t match the two four-person sofas; ten ornate dining-chairs were symmetrically placed against the walls, equidistant from a central row of glass coffee tables; holy texts decorated two walls. Yara apologised for the three non-functioning ceiling fans and opened a big window opposite the door. From upstairs came a cacophony of small quarrelsome children. ‘My mother is feeding the boys,’ explained Yara. Her father appeared then, returning from the mosque; tall and heavily built, he avoided my eye and greeted me gruffly while passing through the salon. ‘He doesn’t like independent women,’ observed his daughter.

Over the next few hours I heard the full story. When Yara was allowed to meet her twenty-nine-year-old fiancé, a week before the wedding, she instantly disliked him and begged her father not to force the marriage through. He told her not to behave like a spoiled child. To break an agreement with an important business partner, to cancel an elaborate wedding party – merely to cater for Yara’s whim – unthinkable! He reminded her of her eldest sister’s awful fate. Having spurned her father’s choice, she eloped with a university lecturer and found herself the divorced mother of twins in less than a year. And the scoundrel had to be taken to court to secure maintenance of their babies. Whenever Yara’s mother tentatively supported her daughters ‘she was punished’. I didn’t ask what form that punishment took.

Two weeks after the wedding Yara ran home, craving mercy. She exerted every sort of pressure, including a mock suicide attempt, in an effort to escape, to be allowed to live at home. But that too was unthinkable – the shame of it! Within forty-eight hours she had been returned to captivity. For a Palestinian woman there was no Third Way; she must live either with her parents or husband.

The next seven years were tolerable only because Yara was allowed to study at IUG, an alleviation made possible by her mother’s caring for the children as they came.

‘All the time,’ said Yara, ‘I hated him more every hour. Slowly I learned how to show my hate in ways that humiliated him. Last year I escaped but the price is high. He won’t let me have the boys. Shari’a law says mother should have boys until they’re seven and girls until nine. Have you noticed Shari’a is kept for when it suits men? Here is a big house, enough money, everything easy for me to have them. And they hate their stepmother! Next month her first baby comes and she must take care or they’ll kill it!’

By then I had seen enough of those very disturbed children (aged six, five and three and a half) not to scoff at this prediction. Yelling and screaming, they tumbled wildly around the salon, dragging sofa cushions across the floor, jumping from chair to chair, thumping the glass tables to make them reverberate. They were aggressive, rude and angry. Plainly it had been a bad idea for Yara to have a foreign friend intruding on their precious half-day with Mamma.

Yara’s youngest sister, Jindiya, joined us briefly – a worryingly overweight seventeen-year-old who might have looked better in a thobe than in tight shorts and a tank-top. She spoke no English but was intensely curious about me and my family and my strange way of life. Yara’s interpreting for her provoked the boys to slap their mother’s face, pull her ears and kick her shins. Jindiya was betrothed to the youngest brother of Yara’s ex-husband and seemed happy with the engagement though she hadn’t yet met him.

I asked Yara, ‘Why hasn’t she met him? You all live within a few miles of each other!’

‘It’s my father,’ came the reply. ‘He likes the oldest customs.’

I felt helplessly sorry for Yara, who couldn’t cope – alternately she cuddled and kissed her sons with a desperate sort of urgency, then shrilly snapped at them. Once her eldest brother came to the doorway and shouted a protest about the furniture being damaged. He closely resembled his father in build and aura. The boys couldn’t play outside because he objected to their noisiness. ‘He hates children,’ said Yara, ‘even his own and he has seven of them.’

When inviting me, Yara had mentioned how much her English-speaking mother enjoyed talking with foreigners. But now it transpired that her husband had said it was not necessary for her to meet me. I began to feel what might be described as emotional claustrophobia. Glancing at my watch, I murmured about having to move on. ‘No!’ exclaimed Yara. ‘I’ve a big new problem, we must talk when alone!’

There was a fixed routine; at 5.00 pm a taxi came to fetch the boys. Under no circumstances could their time with Mamma be extended. Now Yara rang for another taxi to take us both to ‘a quiet place’. I noticed how her hands trembled as she struggled to put sandals on wriggling boys – no longer screaming but sobbing piteously. Jindiya reappeared, to help drag the trio to the wicket and push them into the taxi. I hurried ahead and sat in the other taxi. As Jindiya persuaded the older ones to stay in their seats Yakob clung so fiercely to Yara that she stood immobilised by the wicket, ashen with grief, until the driver came to prise her son away from the maternal legs and carry him, kicking convulsively, to join his brothers.

I could think of nothing to say as the boys’ taxi sped away and Yara sat beside me on the back seat. At once she lit a (forbidden) cigarette and addressed the driver in English. ‘You haven’t seen this!’ For the first time since my arrival on the teetotal Strip I longed, in a visceral way, for a stiff drink.

Then Yara admitted, ‘Last Friday I made an excuse not to see them. Each week it’s worse – maybe best if they never see me? Children forget quickly …’

The driver intervened. ‘You’re wrong! That’s cruel! Being left trying to forget a mother destroys kids!’ This young man, Yara later explained, was an Eng. Lit. graduate who drove a taxi for lack of more appropriate work.

Our ‘quiet place’ was a large, circular palm-thatched restaurant-café, set back a little from the Strip’s main road, surrounded by palm trees and even at sunset on a Friday almost empty. One-third had been curtained off with loosely woven coconut fibres – a token purdah space, not providing enough seclusion for the strictest. A few elderly men puffed at their hookahs or played backgammon; on the women’s side we were alone. ‘Here I can go on smoking’, said Yara. ‘I started after the divorce and nicotine tranquillises me.’

There was no smell of food and no waiter appeared. ‘They keep it open for big parties,’ Yara explained. ‘It was popular when new in the ’90s – people had more money. We came here as a family for ice-creams – parents and six children, my father and brothers always on the other side. They could have sat with us, it was allowed, but everything had to be rigid!’

Away from the family environment, Yara was regaining some of her vitality. But then as she revealed that new problem, tears flowed. It all took a long time to clarify and there were several détours down dismal alleyways of family history.

In brief: since the divorce a year ago Father had often talked of remarriage as inevitable though Yara had been resolute – ‘Never again!’ The day after our last meeting she had been told, ‘It’s all arranged.’ One of her father’s closest business associates had a 45-year-old son who married late (by Palestinian standards) and now, five years after the wedding, his wife’s barrenness had been medically confirmed. Divorce was not being considered; their cousinly union had been a success, they were devoted to one another and the wife understood that a second wife was essential. A man must have children! (Oddly enough, I had encountered a similar case when living in Hebron Old City.) Yara knew the barren wife (six years her senior) but didn’t know her well enough to be certain she could share with her a husband and a home. For Father this was Allah being kind: a divorced daughter with three children is not a valuable asset. Yet here was a win-win situation, in Father’s own terminology – an excellent husband for a low-value daughter and a chance to please an important business partner.

Yara, red-eyed, looked at me reproachfully and said, ‘Foreigners don’t understand it can be so much harder for women in business families though they’ve more money. Also they’ve more marriage problems, as goods for bargaining.’

Father had made it plain that if Yara resisted she could not go on living with her parents, nor could she live alone, that would be impossible, so there was no alternative to remarriage. He had come to a decision. She should be grateful that such a suitable man was prepared to overlook things.

‘But he’s bluffing!’ I said. ‘When you make it plain you’re determined to stay single, living at home, earning for yourself, doing your own thing – he’s helpless! He can’t put you out on the street!’

Tears trickled again. ‘He can torture me,’ Yara half-whispered. ‘Remember you wondered about psychological violence? Our men know how to do it!’

That silenced me for moments. Then I asked, ‘What are your options? Emigration if you could get out? And surely you could now, through Rafah? You have skills and training to earn your own living, rent a flat somewhere and be yourself.’

Yara gazed sadly down at her hands. ‘Do I have a self, the way you mean? There’s the Canadian option. My favourite brother, the one like me, got away to Canada in ’05. He married what he calls an Anglo-Canadian. She converted to Islam and says she’s OK about children growing up Muslim – no more than two children and she’ll never live in a Muslim country. That seems a fair compromise. I guess she’s not believing in Islam but pretending to make Omar happy!’

I wanted to say, ‘Isn’t your feminism coming unstuck? Why should the woman be doing the pretending on such a crucial matter to make the man happy?’ However, given Yara’s fragile state that would not have been kind. Instead I asked, ‘What does Omar advise?’

‘I Skyped him twice this week and he says I should settle in Canada, it’s easy with my qualifications. He’s not able to imagine how I’d feel never seeing my sons again. What do you advise?’

With three children in the equation, I dared not put a finger on the scales. Undoubtedly life in Canada, with a congenial brother in situ to provide support, would be best for Yara. But was the taxi-driver right? On the other hand, could a mother so tantalisingly inaccessible do enough for her sons to justify wrecking her own life? We talked on for another hour, inconclusively, and I remembered a passage in Ghada Karmi’s remarkable autobiography, In Search of Fatima. The author, born in Palestine but reared and educated in England, had in many ways been ‘Westernised’ by the age of nineteen. Yet as a young woman she couldn’t oppose her father’s decision that she should become a doctor.

As individuals, Ghada’s father and Yara’s father are not comparable. But the power of the cultural imperative too often prevails, regardless of personalities.

Four months later, I heard that Yara had become a second wife.

On one of our excursions Nita and I hired Nabeel, a young taxi-driver who had moved to Gaza six months previously from the UAE. There his father had ‘found a problem with the government’ and returned hastily to the Strip. Nabeel, aged twenty two, would have preferred to remain in his birthplace but was ordered to accompany the family, which included eight younger siblings; his earning power would be needed.

One afternoon we called into that same palm-thatched café, where Nabeel fetched drinks (water and Coke) and a hookah. Nita admitted then that for years she’d longed to try a puff. Twice Nabeel urged her to experiment – declared young women were free to smoke as much as they wished in the Emirates – wondered why the Gazan way of life was so ridiculous.

There followed another futile debate about culture, religion, tradition, customs, family obligations. Nita couldn’t conceive of doing something which would upset her parents. (They were kind, loving parents: I’d met them a few times.) Nabeel remarked that as we were the only patrons, they would be unlikely ever to find out. Her mother said smoking was bad for the health. Emphatically I agreed – but then why may men smoke? Is their health not equally important? Nita exclaimed, ‘I often think that! But the Holy Koran says women mustn’t.’ She looked puzzled when I pointed out that tobacco came from the Americas centuries after Mohammed took direction from Allah. I was reminded of Khalil’s assertion that not only Muslims but all Jews and Christians were forbidden to drink alcohol. ‘The imam said so, in the mosque.’ He looked disbelieving when informed that Christ’s first miracle was turning water into wine and that Jews drink wine as part of their Sabbath ceremonies – and may have a shot of vodka as an optional extra.

Nabeel questioned Nita about the jilbab – why did all the IUG students have to wear black? Apparently because bright colours draw attention to the individual young woman and thus encourage ‘competition to be noticed’ which is ‘against our religion’. Nabeel laughed scornfully. ‘This is all Wahhabi stuff!’

I asked about the niqb (full face veil) and Nita explained some women (on the Strip an increasing number) choose it because it’s more respectful to Allah. A visible woman’s face can make her seem more attractive to men – especially ‘bad men’. Also it may tempt her to communicate with people outside the family. I asked, ‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘She could smile at people she shouldn’t communicate with, in the market or the street.’

‘You mean smiling is forbidden? When she buys fruit or eggs and smiles at the trader as she takes her purchase – that’s wrong, sinful, against the Koran, offends Allah?’

‘Yes’, said Nita, ‘it’s wrong – maybe not sinful, but wrong, we shouldn’t do it! But of course most of us do, unless we feel we’re being watched by some jihadists.’

‘I think this place needs to go for treatment!’ said Nabeel.

I agreed. Invariably, people voiced anxiety about my walking alone in the dark; I had regular arguments with serveeces reluctant to put me down not directly outside my destination – because of my gender, not my hostage potential. I mentioned this to my companions and wondered, ‘When these sex-related fears are cultivated, what does it do to a society? When girls are taught to regard all non-related men as possibly “bad”, poised to rape given a chance?’

‘Sometimes,’ observed Nita, ‘the related men are the worst.’

I persisted. ‘Isn’t this danger-mongering insulting to Muslim males? Or, if they’re really so dangerous on the Strip, why not start a movement to civilise them?’

‘How?’ asked Nita. ‘By now you know we’ve a big problem, females not correctly dressed are vulnerable to attack!’

Impatiently I replied, ‘So why don’t the world’s “uncovered” women – the majority – have this problem? Where men are so dangerous, they must have been conditioned to see “incorrectly” dressed women as legitimate prey. That’s why I say it’s time to recondition them. But yes, you’re right – that’s much easier said than done!’

Such states of mind, on the part of both predator and prey, are self-perpetuating. For most brain-washed Gazans, reconditioning probably won’t take place within the Strip under its present regime.

In entirely trivial and irritating ways (never mind ethical or pseudo-ethical matters) childhood conditioning can be irreversible. Some of my mature US friends would wet their pants on long motor journeys rather than pee by the wayside – yet these are rational beings in all other respects. (Come to think of it, I myself still feel vaguely uncomfortable if a male accompanying me along a pavement walks on the inside – though no one under seventy would understand why.)

I spent half the next day at Rafah Gate, waiting for someone who didn’t arrive. Normally vehicles enter Gaza via side-tracks by-passing the main gate, which is opened only for departing vehicles. But that morning one VIP’s 4x4 was allowed to use it and we later heard the Person was an EU official on a four-hour visit to Gaza City – ‘an insult!’ fumed several of my friends.

Two youngish English-speakers approached, offered coffee, asked permission to sit with me. They were an interesting pair though I suspect I wasn’t seeing them at their best – and vice versa. The Rafah Gate generates an unquiet atmosphere. Nawaf was a classical guitarist anxiously awaiting his brother, due home after a chemotherapy course in Cairo. His friend was more talkative.

Murad had returned from Sweden three years previously when his father, a former PA security officer, found it necessary to flee to Egypt and dared not come back. Therefore his mother needed her only son at home. Without hesitation he said au revoir to his Swedish wife and two-year-old daughter who could not visit Gaza even if they wished to do so. Ever since the three have been bonded by Skype and Murad said, ‘It makes an ache in my heart’ – he placed a hand on that organ – ‘when Miriam says in Swedish “Daddy come home, come home I want you!”’ However, no inner conflict bothered this parent; as an only son he had to put his mother first – not his own preference, he explained, but Palestinian women are conditioned not to be able to cope without a man. So a Swedish woman suffers … (Or maybe she doesn’t?) Murad couldn’t guess when next he might see his wife and child, both displayed to me on his phone in scores of poses.

As a highly qualified hydraulic engineer, Murad lived well in Sweden; in Gaza he drove someone else’s taxi while saving up to buy his own. He condemned both Fatah and Hamas as ‘power-seekers not caring about ordinary people who only want peace’. (I seemed to be hearing this refrain more and more often.) His wife had introduced him to beer (‘Not much, you couldn’t afford to get drunk!’) but on the Strip he didn’t really miss it. However, he resented the Islamists’ prohibition régime. He himself loved Gaza but even were it possible he wouldn’t want Miriam to grow up on the Strip. At which point Nawaf’s brother emerged from a serveece – bald and pale – and in the joyous relief of that reunion I was forgotten.

Around Rafah, and other southern Strip districts, it greatly alarmed me to see quite a few pre-puberty girls in adult garb, securely concealed and hijab-ed; and in those same areas the niqb incidence was higher. Anwar repeatedly lamented that this tightening stranglehold on women’s freedom is too easy in a Gaza so isolated – not comparatively open, like the West Bank, to the ‘corrupting’ influence of Jews and Internationals. Thus, he argued, the blockade reinforces some of the most undesirable elements in Palestinian society: as undesirable, in their very different way, as the PA’s quisling elements.

This view was apparently validated by the common riposte to my comparison of Gaza’s new hard-linery with the West Bank’s relative moderation – Jewish and International presences have corrupted the West Bank. As one academic put it, ‘You met weak Muslims in other places, here we know how to stay strong, defending the Holy Koran. You should learn that “Muslim” and “Islamic” are different. Some saying “I’m Muslim” are not Islamic, not respecting our Holy Koran.’

Yet the opposite conclusion to Anwar’s may be drawn from Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction by Malise Ruthven.

Does this not mean that the isolation of the blockaded Strip should lessen hard-linery?

‘Not really,’ said Anwar. ‘Gaza is a special case. Remember Hamas has been busy physically resisting the Occupation. And maybe will be again, though we hope not. Without the blockade and the Occupation, Hamas’ moderates would now have much greater influence.’

Incidentally, Anwar regarded Fundamentalism as the most essential guidebook for all visitors to Gaza.

The academic quoted above baffled me. He was an immensely likeable man, an eminent Gazan who had travelled widely in pre-blockade times, being respectfully listened to at international conferences. Yet when the conversation turned to Islam he sounded embarrassingly crude as he raked over all the tedious stuff about women being ‘physiologically and emotionally different’, therefore needing to be ‘protected and respected’. I warned him that life among the Palestinians had belatedly aroused within me those anti-male emotions felt two generations ago by Women’s Lib activists. Also I had become a shameless cultural imperialist, no longer willing to tolerate condescending double standards in deference to their being non-European. Example: ‘It’s for women’s protection’ when the custom in question is blatantly for the preservation of male control. Indignantly my friend protested, ‘Allah made the rules, it’s not men being determined to dominate!’ And the rules cannot be modified, must remain as laid down in the seventh century AD.

When I asked if any women were involved in interpreting the sacred texts I was told only men could interpret, very highly trained scholars of whom there are but a few in each generation. Aware of sounding truculent, I demanded, ‘Why not allow for the unavoidable, undeniable fact that societies and civilisations evolve, change beyond recognition?’

Again my friend repeated, ‘No modifications allowed! The word of Allah is not changed by fashions, reforms, revolutions or trends. It’s for all time, helping men do what is good and right for society. The Holy Koran protects the family. In the materialistic West, people think themselves separate, not responsible for family and community. The more the West seeks to take over the world, economically and culturally, the more we guard our Holy Koran against those trying to make us imitate others.’

This friend was a keen Hamas supporter, though not a party member. It gave me some satisfaction, when we next met, to show him a 1999 statement from Yahya Musa, speaking as head of a Political Bureau (Hizb al-Khalas) linked to Hamas: