A Month by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

our electricity plant in ’06 when the World Cup started. My father told me everyone invented different ways to watch –
many
ways! Same with tunnels, through so much dangerous sand. Gazans are good for inventing things.’
    Jabalya camp is famed for its militancy and boasts (a contested claim) that the First Intifada began here, on 9 December 1987, following the deaths of several workers in a collision with an Israeli driver near Erez. Within a day the uprising had spread throughout the OPT and it continued for more than six years. A memorial to the crash victims in a local cemetery is said to be worth seeing but Atef jibbed at trying to find the way, inching through streets blocked by carts and traders’ stalls.
    Instead we drove towards the Karni crossing, another militaristic monument visible from the Strip’s central road and approached across treeless farmland strewn with war litter. At this crucial crossing all goods entering Gaza from Israel, whatever their origin, must be inspected by Israelis. No imports are allowed by air or sea or through the Rafah Gate. Therefore Karni’s closure or malfunctioning leavesGaza economically paralysed – not that it can ever be nimble. After the 2005 ‘withdrawal’, Karni was open for 222 days but on 166 of those only a quarter of the truck lanes functioned for limited hours. From June 2007 closure was total for a year, until the ceasefire brought about intermittent openings. Meeting no traffic, we assumed a closure – this, after all, was Naksa Day. Soon we passed a few more recently shelled houses; in the smallest, two men were struggling to repair a shattered gable end. Noticing us, they paused to shout advice. We would do well to keep away from Karni, the squad now on patrol were looking for trouble.
    ‘We go to Rafah town,’ decided Atef.
    Back on the coast road – the sea dancing brightly a few yards away, the sandy roadside vegetable fields densely green – I marvelled at the absence of any building. That evening Nabil explained: an acute shortage of fresh food made it essential to protect this fertile stretch where native Gazans maintain an ancient tradition of using morning dew to supplement an ever-dwindling water supply. Those few miles reminded us that Gaza, when normally populated, had its own sort of tranquil beauty.
    Turning inland, we drove through a few camps on the wide bisecting roads built to Sharon’s orders, causing the destruction of some 2,000 homes – mere shacks, of course, but to their occupants they were homes. In 1971 the Zionists were keen to abolish ‘refugee’ status and they rented land compulsorily from Palestinian landlords for 99 years. Then they offered the minimum of basic construction materials to any family willing to build themselves new homes and surrender their UNRWA card. I was to visit some of those families during the weeks ahead. By now many thousands have left the camps.
    Around Deir al-Balah groves and avenues of tall palms soften the camp’s bleakness. Then a dirt track winds through Israeli settlement remains, tons of weed-fringed rubble interspersed with rows of white plastic tunnels.
    ‘When I left,’ said Atef, ‘Palestinians walking here got shot.’ He remembered regularly driving past on the Area B road to visit his grandparents in Khan Younis. The settlers’ sapphire swimming pools, emerald lawns and spreading shade trees were clearly visible to thousands of their water-rationed neighbours (as is now the case on the West Bank). If Gaza has indeed become a ‘hotbed of fanatics’, why be surprised?
    Initially Israelis hesitated to move into the Strip; wherever they built, camps would be close. Then, in 1978, the Zionists, calculating that a settler presence would be useful, began to unofficially encourage (illegal) settlement. They could help to keep the maritime border with Egypt under surveillance and to disrupt inter-camp communications, thus frustrating any attempt to establish a Palestinian state on