Meet Me in Gaza (6 page)

In Ramallah, local West Bank Palestinians crack jokes about Gazan peasants with rough accents (and about men from Nablus in the northern West Bank being closet gays and those half-wits from Hebron [in Arabic, al-Khalil] down in the southern West Bank). Gaza lies just 25 miles from the southern West Bank as the crow flies, but the local accent here is tinged with inflections from neighbouring Egypt.

Ustaz
Mounir tells me what he thinks. ‘We Gazans do have a slight accent from our Egyptian neighbour,’ he says during one of our lessons. ‘But our Arabic is softer than the Egyptians’, more like the language of the Lebanese and the Syrians.’

Arabs are Semitic people, originally from the Arabian peninsula and its surrounding area. In some ancient Semitic languages, ‘Arab’ can mean the desert, a raven, a nomad or the verb to mingle. Arabic, the language of the Arabs, is the most widely spoken living Semitic language, its history pre-dating Islam by centuries. Inscriptions of Arabic texts from at least 200
BC
have been unearthed in Saudi Arabia. The earliest known Arabic literature was poetry, and the pre-Islamic poets included the Su‘luk – rebellious, ragged vagabonds who wandered the deserts of northern Arabia reciting verses in praise of solitude and railing against the conservative confines of tribal life. Some Su‘luk began their recitals with a mournful ‘standing at the ruins’ prelude, evoking a beloved’s scorched desert home. Many of the ancient Semitic languages eventually died out or became merely ceremonial. But from the mid-seventh century
AD
onwards, Arabic flourished alongside the dramatic rise of Islam.

The different histories of Gaza have been laid one over the other, like layers of rich sediment. It’s easily forgotten, but before the Muslims swept in, most Gazans were actually Christian. And before Christianity they were pagans, with domed temples across the city dedicated to deities like Dagon, whom they worshipped first as a symbol of fertility, later as the god of rain, grain and fishing. Christianity arrived in Gaza in the first century
AD
– after all, Jerusalem was just up the road, so to speak. But it wasn’t until the end of the fourth century that Gazans began taking the religion seriously, following the arrival of a zealous, middle-aged Orthodox Greek bishop called Porphyry,
¹⁴
who obtained an imperial decree to destroy Gaza’s eight major pagan sites.

When the Christians torched the main Pagan temple with pitch, sulphur and fat, it blazed for days. Afterwards, beating back the pagans with clubs and staves, they used the blackened temple stones to pave the city streets and built a church over the heathen ruins – where, to this day, Gaza’s small Eastern Orthodox community congregates every Sunday. Though some Gazans were converted by these violent tactics (or faked it to save their own skins), many Gazans despised this pious new religion being forced down their throats. Pagans rioted inside the city, slaughtered groups of priests and nuns and fed parts of the bloated, stinking corpses to the local pigs. The surviving Christians were undeterred; persecution was part of their mission. How do you defeat men for whom death is an act of faith?

Mark the Deacon, a thin-lipped monk who arrived in Gaza with the Greek bishop, came upon local pagans who doggedly refused to accept Christianity. He described them boldly worshipping a life-size marble idol in one of the city squares. It was, he said, the ‘image of a nude woman, with her pudenda exposed – [and] held in high esteem by all the citizens, especially the women who kindled lights and burned incense in its honour.’
¹⁵
This voluptuous beauty, with her rope of golden hair, was Venus Anadyomene, ‘Venus Rising from the Sea’, the pagan goddess of love and sexuality, who shared her devotees’ dreams and inspired women to find good men as husbands. Mark the deacon was having none of it. He stoutly declared that when a holy crucifix was held in front of the naked idol, she shattered to smithereens.

Back in the present, Mounir has suggested two Arabic lessons a week. And he does indeed take me right back to the beginning, guiding me through the three vowels and twenty-eight consonants of the modern standard Arabic alphabet. The consonants are divided into two groups of fourteen, known as sun and moon letters. Basically, sun letters assimilate with the preceding article and moon letters do not. Mounir is a grammar fanatic. When I groan, he shakes his head.

‘If you do not understand the grammar, Louisa, you will never grasp this language. You think it is hard but it is not. Arabic is pure logic. Learn the logic.’

But he sometimes smiles now during our lessons. And I do my homework because I like the challenge and am determined, damn it, to crack the grammar. I enjoy Arabic because I love the way it sounds and the way that Arabs feast on words the same way they feast on their food. Arabic is poetry; how else do you describe a language which has a word –
m’nowrah
– to describe a woman who is shining; and a name like Bassem, meaning ‘he who is so often smiling’?

But Gazan Arabic is salty too; tinged, like every aspect of life here, by the Mediterranean. Mounir surprises me one lesson by asking whether I know any local insults.

‘If you ever have trouble on the streets with
shabab,
you might need a few strong words,’ he says with the merest spark of a twinkle in his hard eyes.
Shabab
are youths, and in Gaza, like everywhere else in the world, they loiter, spit and curse on street corners. There are a lot of Gazan
shabab
(the median age here is just 17 and three-quarters of the population are aged under 25), but they rarely bother me. I know some filthy Arabic words by now, but censure myself, telling Mounir I’m familiar with just one or two of the classic insults, such as
‘Ishrab min al-bahr’
– Go drink from the sea – which basically means, ‘Go to hell!’
¹⁶

He nods. ‘Yes, we’ve been saying this in Gaza for so many years. But my advice, if any of the
shabab
are bothering you, is to tell them “
Igliboh
” and I’m sure then they will leave you alone.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Capsize!’

My twice-weekly lessons with Mounir are a mixture of grammar and conversation. Despite being almost the same age, we are in many ways polar opposites. He is a conservative, religious, married Muslim in his early forties, and father to five children. I’m in my late thirties, unmarried and nomadic, with no children and no orthodox religion. But we are both curious people who ask a lot of questions and we always find lots to talk about.

Mounir is proud of the differences between Arab and Western culture.

‘We Arabs are not Westerners and I don’t think we should imitate Western culture or be expected to imitate it,’ he says. He is passionate about the communality of Arab culture, and traditional male respect for modesty among women, and believes all Muslim women should cover their hair. His wife is a
muhajaba
(a Muslim woman who covers her head and most of her body) and he says she sometimes chooses to wear the
niqab
, or face veil, too.

‘Before I was engaged to my wife, I told her parents that I could not marry a woman who didn’t cover her head in public,’ he tells me during one of our lessons. ‘Her parents told me they could not allow their daughter to marry a man who doesn’t go to the mosque regularly to pray. We were all in agreement, including my wife. I attend the mosque and she never goes outside without her head covered, out of respect for herself and her religion.

‘You know, I have visited your country, Louisa. I was in London about five years ago – and I was not impressed with the way that men treat women in Great Britain. I think many of the British men do not respect women. The freedoms that you have in England and Europe are the freedoms that men want you to have for their own benefit – and what kind of freedom is that, really?’

‘I know that men do not always respect women in Britain,
Ustaz
. But I still feel free there. I don’t think women here in Gaza have much freedom. Men tell them how to live.’

‘Yes, women have less freedom here. But we treat them with more respect.’

‘So why can’t women have freedom
and
respect,
Ustaz
?’

‘I told you, our culture is different.’

We both stand our ground in these discussions about sexual politics that we never call sexual politics. Sometimes I get frustrated, and occasionally really pissed off, with Mounir, for his conservative patriarchy and traditional views of women. He gets frustrated and pissed off with me too. Sometimes we both raise our voices, insisting on being heard. But we carry on talking and listening to each other. One of the reasons I enjoy his company is because he’s
not
a liberal, and very often we don’t agree with each other. I like the challenge and I’m learning a lot about Gaza from him. Many of our debates, which flow from Arabic to English and back again like the local tides, take place in candlelight. Often there is no electricity when Mounir arrives, or else it cuts out within the first few minutes of our lesson. He tells me how lucky I am to have electricity when I come home from work. In his home, near Jabalya refugee camp, they get their ration of electricity late at night, after his family have all gone to bed – and he can’t afford to buy a generator.

‘We Gazans used to dream of freedom,’ he says. ‘Now we dream of having electricity and enough fuel to make dinner on our kitchen stoves.’

Almost 70 per cent of Gazan families are refugees who were expelled from other parts of Palestine by the Zionists in the years leading up to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Registered Palestinian refugees receive assistance, protection and advocacy from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). There are eight refugee camps across the Gaza Strip.
¹⁷
Jabalya camp, where Mounir comes from, is up in northern Gaza. After he was married, Mounir taught in a local Jabalya camp school and he and his wife saved to build their own home outside the camp, the ambition of many young couples from refugee families.

‘You cannot imagine how hard life was in Jabalya camp,’ he says. ‘Really we lived in fear, especially during the second intifada. So many times I was frightened that my wife and children would be killed in front of me.’

I’ve been to Jabalya camp, a sprawling ghetto of more than 108,000 people crammed into just over half a square mile – and a traditional Hamas stronghold, where militants use open areas around the camp to launch rockets and mortars towards southern Israel, and where the Israeli military strikes with an iron fist. It is a concrete jungle with no trees, where children grow up with fearful parents inside anxious walls.

‘I worked hard and saved hard,’ Mounir continues, ‘and finally a few years ago I was able to build my own house and we moved out of the camp. We have to stay near Jabalya camp because the rest of my family is there – and in our culture families stay together, or near to each other. I do not want to live on the other side of Gaza from my family. But now we are in Beit Lahiya and it’s a better place to live. But I have been kept awake so many nights in Beit Lahiya too.

‘I have five children now, and there have been times at night when the situation with Israel was so bad I thought we would be killed in our beds. Some of those times I told my wife to dress the children, and we left the house and got into my little car and we drove away from the north in the middle of the night. Because my family is all in Jabalya, and my wife’s family is from Egypt, there is nowhere else for us to go – nowhere safe to protect my wife and children from what might happen. We have slept some nights in my car on the street in Gaza City, in these streets near your apartment – because this is the safest place in Gaza. Can you imagine the feeling of knowing you can’t even protect your own children? It is like being eaten by fear.’

That evening, after Mounir has gone, holding onto the banister so he doesn’t topple down the dark stairs, I sit alone on my couch as the candle burns down, picturing a man spending a night in a car with five cold children, his wife too scared to cry as explosions rock the streets around them. I stub out my cigarette, thinking how darkness takes many different forms.

Towards the end of winter, a Palestinian blows himself up in a shopping centre in the Israeli city of Dimona, dismembering an elderly woman as she is making her way to her local bank. This is the first Palestinian suicide attack inside Israel for more than a year and it really rattles me because I do not hear a word of pity for the dead woman from anyone. I do not hear people rejoicing at her killing or celebrating the death of a Palestinian
shahid
, or ‘martyr’; I just hear them hoping the suicide bomber is not from Gaza. Because if he is, then God help us, they say: Israel will make everyone here inside Gaza pay for it. During our next lesson, I blurt out my agitated confusion to
Ustaz
Mounir.

‘All killing is wrong,’ he says, ‘including killing Israelis. This was not a good Muslim.’

He is the only person I hear condemn the suicide bombing.

With three hours tuition a week, and so many lessons devoted to conversation, my Arabic does really start to improve. And so does my confidence about walking the streets and interacting with people I meet along the way. I greet people easily and get to know many of the local shopkeepers by name. At the Centre my colleagues notice the difference too. I can banter with them in Arabic a little – and even answer them back. Every day I learn a few new words. It is like having another sense begin to fully awaken.

On my way back home from work one afternoon, carrying a bag of fresh warm pitta breads from the bakery just down the street, I pass by a posse of
shabab
. I’ve seen this lot before, but this time I can hear them egging each other on until one shouts, ‘Nice arse!’ The others start braying like the local donkeys and soon they join in too: ‘Nice-arse-nice-arse-nice-arse …!’

I stop dead in the street. Turning on my heels, I remove my sunglasses and stare them down. Then I launch into a slow, loud tirade of Arabic.