ENCOUNTER IN GAZA
Rosenblum, Michael
ENCOUNTER IN GAZA BY MICHAEL ROSENBLUM Only moments ago I had been alone on the beach at Gaza. Now I found myself suddenly surrounded by thirty or forty adolescent Palestinians, most of them...
...We were all laughing now...
...Over the years, the original neat rows of one-room houses were expanded to fill the needs of a growing community...
...wait until we're back in the compound, Schraga said...
...But though Gaza is less than thirty-five miles from Tel Aviv, touristsAmerican or Israeli—hardly ever get to see the place...
...The men, women, and children born blameless into this life behind the barbed wire have been condemned to spend the rest of their lives there...
...Maybe you know him...
...After a long pause, someone said, "Arafat a little crazy...
...How we live...
...Where was I from, she asked...
...There are fewer autos than in Israel, but many donkey-drawn carts...
...We want only to live in peace...
...Always killing too many people...
...Terrorists make livelier copy...
...The rooms were large and cool, with marble floors, high ceilings, and great french doors that opened onto balconies overlooking the Mediterranean and the beach...
...She smiled at that...
...You know Chicago...
...What was the purpose of my visit...
...Tell me...
...he asked...
...The terrorist...
...my inquisitor asked...
...Still, it retains its British Empire grace and beauty—a remnant from another era caught up, like the rest of the Strip, in a swirl of political tides that have left it beached, with no past to recall and no future to anticipate...
...You are a Jew...
...She told me that few tourists come to Gaza...
...All the street signs are in Arabic, and so is all the street conversation...
...And you speak Arabic...
...Big Apple...
...In that case, you must tell them...
...The Jews, especially the American Jews, are afraid of the Palestinians because they don't know them...
...Perhaps later, I said, after I had taken a look around the camp...
...He wore a small pearl-handled revolver at his waist and carried his issue M-16 rifle...
...At the end of my week in Gaza last summer, I was invited to the home of Samy Abu Nada's family...
...I began to explain, first in English and then in Arabic, that I was a journalist...
...It can get pretty dangerous in there sometimes...
...I had, in fact, been in Gaza for almost a month, living with a family in the Gaza Beach Camp just outside of town...
...Most of Samy's family lived in the Ja-biliya camp, five kilometers north of Gaza...
...I unpacked quickly, changed into a bathing suit, and headed for the beach for a quick swim...
...It is like the hotel...
...Thriller...
...Captain Schraga's tour was as predictable as his running commentary...
...The camps in Gaza were built by the United Nations Relief Works Agency in 1948 as temporary shelters for those who had been displaced by the war that erupted over Israel's independence...
...They had taken me into their confidence only to have me reveal myself as one of their oppressors...
...Samy and Hussam proved to be both...
...Samy said we would be welcome in the man's home for coffee...
...Unfortunately, nothing changes here...
...In East Jerusalem, by the Arab bus station near the Damascus gate, the Mercedes share-taxis, the Sheruts, gather in a small parking lot...
...On hot days, the stink pervades the entire camp...
...Stopping only long enough for me to change clothes, we set off by taxi...
...Gaza is the closest thing there is to a Palestinian state, though it is under omnipresent Israeli military occupation...
...It was the same camp I had been living in, but I said, "Sure...
...He was a senior in the local high school...
...Americans tend to think it is dangerous, and even my Israeli friends warned me to stay away...
...Well, whenever we find a member of a family who belongs to the PLO, we knock down the whole house...
...Where you from in America...
...Except for the Israeli military headquarters encircled by barbed wire in the middle of town, this is a totally Arab city—and not just Arab but Palestinian...
...At one time the place was owned by Margaret Nassar, an Englishwoman married to a Palestinian, who operated it as a luxury hotel...
...You must tell them what you have seen here in Gaza...
...The Israeli occupation headquarters at the center of the town of Gaza is a large, squat compound, surrounded by several layers of barbed wire and razor wire...
...It is considered the worst of the camps-angry and ready to explode at any minute...
...How is it possible...
...The Shawwas are the kind of people who never seem to be quoted in The New York Times or on the CBS Evening News when Palestinian issues come up...
...America—yes, yes," others agreed...
...Jabbing a finger at me, he declared that he was not an animal on display in a zoo...
...Since 1948, Gaza has been home to thousands of Palestinian refugees...
...During my first visit to Gaza, as I was eating lunch at a small kebab stand near the Israeli headquarters, I was joined by a man in a uniform who identified himself as Captain Schraga of the Israeli army...
...You must go back and tell the Jews in America what it is to have to live your life in Gaza...
...Now I found myself suddenly surrounded by thirty or forty adolescent Palestinians, most of them quietly listening while an older boy with a fair command of English subjected me to interrogation...
...The streets are unpaved and the sand washes back and forth on the hot streets as if Gaza were some sort of Saharan Venice, lapping at the homes and stores and mixing with the salt and stink to give the air an almost solid texture...
...Not good...
...The only other contact most people have with the nation in which they live is the Israeli military occupation...
...Then meet me here tomorrow morning at seven and we'll take the tour," Schraga said...
...Would you like to see the camp...
...Michael Jackson—we like Michael Jackson...
...Arafat...
...The trip down from Jerusalem to Gaza takes about an hour in a share-taxi and only costs $4, but it is a voyage to another country, another culture, another time, and the other side of the barbed wire...
...The next morning, he arrived in an Israeli Army jeep with a machine gun mounted on the front...
...I felt better...
...Each morning, large work crews appear near the old British train station in town to wait for the Israelis who will gather them up in trucks and buses...
...Chicago...
...But he saw Samy and recognized him at once...
...Because the Jews are not evil, though you may think it...
...And she escorted me into the small office to sign the guest book...
...Be careful," Schraga cautioned me, resting his hand on his sidearm...
...The people seem sullen, and who would not be after living like this for almost four decades...
...I encountered her playing with her young granddaughter...
...You can't," the woman behind the counter repeated, and she wouldn't say any more no matter how many different ways I asked...
...Hokay man...
...I myself am a Jew...
...crowd fell silent, straining to hear my answer...
...At the center of the camp, an open pit fifty yards across and God only knows how deep serves as a cesspool...
...Can I help you...
...Getting to Gaza is in some ways the easiest and in other ways the most difficult of things to do in Israel...
...To get inside the camps and talk to the people there, one needs an entree and an interpreter...
...Unlike the West Bank, Gaza has few Israeli settlers...
...The bulldozed piles of rubble that had once been houses...
...A little...
...It is only a few blocks from one of the most spectacular beaches on the Israeli coast, but the beaches are now filled with the jumble of refugee housing and Marna House almost always stands empty...
...You know him...
...Then she sipped her tea and smiled...
...Additional rooms of cement or wood or corrugated metal were tacked on until the town became a jumble of sprawling shacks and cottages and cement barracks...
...They looked genuinely shocked, as if I had said I was from another planet...
...The small buildings date from the British Mandate period or precede it...
...New York," I said, drawing an instant look of recognition...
...Groups of four to six uniformed soldiers wander through the camps and towns of Gaza, in constant radio contact with someone, bearing their M-16 rifles or Uzis at the ready...
...The Michael Rosenblum is a producer for WNET television in New York...
...My interrogator's name was Samy Abu Nada...
...Soon the cesspools would be a thing of the past, along with the massive garbage dumps...
...she asked...
...My tour with Captain Schraga had taken place seven years ago...
...It seemed I knew hardly anyone in the States...
...Again the room was filled with silence...
...America, I said...
...In the streets, peddlers sell everything from plastic shoes to fresh, hot coffee—which is not bad if you don't mind sharing the common glass...
...He and his friend Hussam Aoukal had lived all their lives in Gaza...
...Shawwa, a member of the most powerful political family in the Gaza Strip...
...There would be no protection, they said...
...There was a pause while she studied me...
...The life resembles that of migrant farm workers in the United States...
...I have a cousin there—Muhammad...
...But you will see more if you do not tell others that you are Jewish...
...My God, had I stumbled into one of those hard-line rejectionist groups whose members believed Arafat was soft on Israel...
...he asked in what seemed, under the circumstances, to be an almost menacing tone...
...You are a Jew...
...Most of the men who live in Gaza find employment outside the Strip as day laborers in Israel—often doing agricultural work for marginal wages in nearby Mos-havim and Kibbutzim...
...Naturally, the talk turned to politics...
...New sewage lines were going in all over town...
...You shall see what Gaza is like...
...The small markets are crowded with Arab women in veil or Bedouin dress...
...On paper, at least, the Gaza Strip is a part of Israel proper— and traveling about in Israel is no more difficult than traveling about in, say, Connecticut...
...As is the way in any small village when word of a visitor from far away gets out, many neighbors and relatives came by to visit...
...It is isolated from the rest of the Arab world by the Sinai desert and the sea, isolated from Israel by the Negev desert and the sea...
...But tell us, Michael," Samy's father asked, "Why have the Americans, which are such a rich and powerful people, allowed the Jews to do this to us...
...More silence...
...There was no idea when these houses were built that they would become permanent homes for thousands of people...
...Those who sit in front of their television sets and wonder what drives young men to become terrorists, to seize planes and ships, to murder helpless men, women, and children, ought to visit Gaza...
...The longer we sat and talked in the house of Abu Nada, the more people joined us, until at length the room was filled...
...No one said a word until Samy's father finally spoke...
...Mrs...
...I told her I had been to Gaza many years before, and that I wanted to see what had changed...
...Most men wear the ubiquitous kaffiyah...
...I didn't...
...No one liked the camps, but they were really a legacy of the Egyptian administration...
...Here was the bad housing...
...Her uncle is the mayor of Gaza, a vigorous spokesman for the Palestinian cause...
...Good," she said...
...Someone will direct you to the right car...
...one youth inquired...
...The hotel is owned today by Mrs...
...Very good...
...At each corner of the compound and at specific security points a watchtower looms over the town with an armed guard standing watch, rifle at the ready...
...That was where I was surrounded by the young Palestinians who asked so many questions...
...Where you are from...
...There are small shops, mosques, and schools...
...Yassir Arafat...
...Their future looks no brighter than their present...
...The new arrival in Gaza understands at once how foolish it is to speak of incorporating the Strip and the West Bank into Israel...
...After a long silence, I said, "It is not the Jews who have done this to you...
...Yes...
...Why doesn't Israel leave us alone...
...Arafat very good," I said...
...No, no, much too dangerous here in the camp...
...I was immediately confronted by an angry man in his thirties who demanded to know what I was doing there...
...I was, indeed, the only guest in Marna House...
...America very good," several said, smiling...
...I just wanted to know where I could get a public bus to Gaza...
...But I worried that I might have broken an Israeli law just by being in Gaza, so I told Captain Schraga I had just arrived...
...Above the entire compound flies the Israeli flag...
...The Sherut for Gaza leaves very early in the morning, generally before six, or very late at night...
...Here was the new housing the Israelis were building for the Palestinians...
...This was no time, I decided, for an intensive political discussion...
...The Israeli military presence is unchanged...
...It wasn't easy to get into the camp, and without Samy and Hussam it would have been impossible...
...You are, of course, welcome to stay here," she said...
...No one moved...
...I explained that I didn't want a sightseeing excursion...
...I wanted to stop for a photo...
...He asked me what I was doing in Gaza and how long had I been there...
...The water supply and sewage system are hopelessly inadequate for a community of this size...
...You are our only guest...
...We sat in a large, open room, sipping tea and eating course after course of fruit and cakes...
...Thus armed to the teeth, we descended into the Beach Camp, where I had lived peaceably for the past month...
...And Gaza remains hidden—hidden from the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live only an hour away from the camps and from the hundreds of thousands of American tourists who come to Israel each year...
...Shawwa seemed a bit surprised to find me wandering in her gardens...
...She offered me a seat in the garden under a grape arbor...
...Well, you can get to Gaza, but it isn't easy...
...That we want only to be left to live in peace...
...You may have any room you like...
...The murky, stagnant mess seeping slowly into the sand is like a giant lake of raw sewage...
...These Palestinians, I thought, were as ignorant and unfeeling about the Israelis and the Jews as many Jews were about Palestinians and the Muslim world...
...America," I answered hesitantly, wondering how the crowd would react...
...I felt anger and frustration rising in me...
...If American Jews, and even Israeli Jews, could come to Gaza and see what it is like, meet you, talk to you, and have you talk to them, they would be as distressed as I am today...
...The fanatic leader of a faction dedicated to driving the Jews into the sea...
...But the overwhelming impression is one of people—and sand...
...Terrorism is spawned in places like the Strip, among people who have to live this way, without a past and without a future...
...I would be at the mercy of the Palestinians and the PLO...
...To find it, you simply wander into the parking lot and shout, "Gaza, Gaza...
...When I returned to Gaza last summer to see what had changed, I found the Strip in even worse shape than before—the garbage piled high in the August heat, the cesspool larger...
...Their English was good, and when they learned I had come all the way from America to find out what life was like in Gaza, they offered to become my tour guides...
...I've never had the pleasure, I replied, feeling quite at ease now...
...The Israeli government makes it hard to go to Gaza...
...The streets of the camp are narrow and generally choked with the antique, light blue Peugeot taxis that get most people around the Strip...
...Most of the construction is of cinderblock set on the sands of the beach...
...Oh yeah...
...A local taxi took me to Mama House, a magnificent home on a hill that overlooks much of the Gaza Strip...
...Here I was in their home, eating their food, drinking their tea...
...That tends to discourage membership, and we find that it works pretty effectively...
...On my first visit some years ago, I asked at the Government Tourist Information Office in Tel Aviv how to get to Gaza and was told, "You can't...
...I told her I was looking for a room...
...I was a journalist eager to see the town...
...Thriller was good...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
