A Month by the Sea Read Online Free PDF

medical cases (with the right connections) have been allowed through.
    Erez’s grimly militaristic infrastructure includes one passageway for labourers and petty traders and another for the elite. Those neglected buildings and their IDF-ravaged environs seem to symbolise the cruel futility of ‘collective punishment’. At a pole-barrier two semi-uniformed, short-bearded Hamas policemen spurned Atef’s attempt to engage them in friendly conversation. Gesturing angrily, they shouted something my companion declined to translate. As he hastily backed, turned and jolted away on a tank-torn surface, I could see figures moving within an IDF watchtower sporting outsize Israeli flags.
    Soon we were passing a cluster of abandoned factories, once attached to an Israeli settlement and employing more than 3,000 from nearby camps. Then, briefly, we got lost in territory that would have been forbidden to Palestinians before the ‘withdrawal’.Our rough rocky track traversed a desolation of sand dunes and war rubble and smouldering mounds of household garbage. Here the most destitute of all Gazans somehow survive, unnoticed, amidst low, dusty bushes that half-hide ragged tents and clumsily contrived shelters – sheets of rusty tin propping each other up, with plastic sacking doors. We overtook a small skinny boy on a cantering donkey – riding bareback along the sandy verge, urging his steed on with his heels, singing loudly, a smile on his face.
    ‘See him!’ exclaimed Atef. ‘He’s happy! These Negev people don’t expect much, they’re OK in their tents.’
    I had to protest. ‘You’re forgetting something – in Gaza they can’t replace their tents or run their herds.’
    Atef wasn’t listening. Beyond a long sand dune the border fence had appeared, less than 200 yards ahead, and an IDF jeep had halted to address us through a loudhailer. Atef, looking tense, stated the obvious: ‘We must go back.’ He couldn’t understand the message but it was either a landmine warning or a threat to shoot us if we drove on. All along the fence Gazans are forbidden to use their sparse dunums (1000 square metres) of cultivable land, appropriated by the IDF as a ‘security zone’ – another of its many Orwellian phrases.
    Turning towards the coast, we detoured around sand dunes to avoid a Volvo-endangering stretch of track abused by tank traffic. Here were a few shelled ruins, two-storey dwellings semi-encircled by fire-blasted fig and lemon trees. Near one, the family was living in tents donated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Olive saplings, newly planted on their tiny patch of land – overlooked by an IDF patrol road – could not thrive for lack of water but seemed a magnificently defiant flourish. Ten days later I returned to this area on foot, with a new friend from Jabalya camp, and was shown two poisoned wells. The IDF had thrown dead dogs and cats into this more-precious-than-gold water.
    As Atef remarked, one can’t readily distinguish between Jabalya town and Jabalya camp (population about 130,000). Both look like places that shouldn’t exist in the twenty-first century. Yet the multitudinous children seemed cheerful enough, as did the old men sitting chatting in their doorways (another reminder of Cuba). However, the generations of men in between – the hopeless jobless, silently slumped wherever there was space to sit – gave off another sort of vibe. These of course were superficial impressions; Atef didn’t like my suggestion that we stop to talk and buy tea from a peripatetic chai-seller aged about ten. ‘They’ll beg if we stop,’ he objected. On my future visits to Jabalya, as a pedestrian, no one ever begged and several people bought me tea.
    ‘Gazan people make the best of things,’ continued Atef. ‘They go on living like they were in a normal country. They have weddings, play with kites, go to the beach, pretend it’s OK. Israel bombed