I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (7 page)

When people find out I grew up in an overcrowded refugee camp, they often ask me what it was like. They presume that even with all the deprivation and anxiety, young boys would still be young boys. How did we play? What sorts of fun did we have? Well, we locked friends in the outdoor toilet as a joke sometimes, and we played other tricks and cavorted endlessly in the forty-degree heat with the water pipes on the street, spraying each other as well as unsuspecting passersby with blasts of water. Yet our games sometimes had perilous consequences. I fell on the water pipes one time and sliced my bare foot open. My mother had to
drop everything and take me to the United Nations health centre to get the gash in my foot stitched, scolding me all the way.

The truth is, my most powerful memories of my boyhood in Jabalia Camp are of the stench of the latrine, the gnawing ache in my hungry stomach, the exhaustion from selling milk in the very early morning to earn that little bit of money that was so essential to my family, the anxiety I felt rushing to get to school on time. I had developed arthritic pain in my joints and when I was tired the pain in my legs was relentless. So even the fun was often not that much fun. It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don’t remember marvelling at sunsets or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival doesn’t allow time for poetic reflection. In those years I was focused on one thing: getting an education and getting out of there.

Education was the only way out of the circumstances we were in. And as the eldest son, I felt that I was the one to lead them. But it was hard. I’d sit on the floor of our one-room house doing my homework by the light of an oil lamp as my siblings tumbled about me. I could tune out the noise and focus on the task, but sometimes concentration just wasn’t enough. I recall one rainy evening when I was carefully printing the answers to my homework—tidiness was very important to my teachers—and suddenly there was a drop of water on the paper, then another, and soon enough the words were blurring and blotching and running down the page. The leaking roof had let the raindrops spoil my homework, and I had to start again.

There was no summer camp or team sports or videos in my growing-up years. Mostly they weren’t available, but I also was exclusively focused on learning, and when I wasn’t in class or studying, I was earning money in order to stay in school.

My mother was like a lioness when it came to protecting us. But she was demanding as well. She expected me to give as much
as she did to the effort of improving our situation, and when I failed, I paid for it with beatings. The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She’s the heroine, the one behind the successes. She feeds everyone before taking food herself, she never gives up, and she pushes at the barriers holding her children back. For my mother survival was always paramount. School was important, but it didn’t carry the same value as a job. If I could earn money, she’d encourage me to skip classes to do it

There was one curious incident that stays in my memory although I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened to me until I was grown. In 1966—a year before the Six Day War would end the Egyptian administration of Gaza and replace it with the Israeli occupation—my cousin on my mother’s side invited me to go to Egypt with him. I was eleven years old and absolutely ecstatic about the idea. He was a trader, my mother told me, and he took goods from Gaza to sell across the border in Egypt. I had enormous dreams for what I would see on this trip to Cairo: the pyramids, the anniversary celebrations of President Gamal Abdel Nasser that everyone was talking about, and I desperately wanted to go to the zoo. I’d never been outside Jabalia Camp except to go for a day to Gaza City. I’d only seen photos of zoo animals and the pyramids in picture books. And President Nasser was discussed all the time—Nasser this and Nasser that. Imagine, I could see this man whom everyone talked about.

My cousin prepared me carefully for the trip across the border. My mother gave me a special jacket to wear, into which she’d sewn extra pockets. She also gave me a pair of size nine shoes that were much too large for me. My cousin stuffed the pockets inside the jacket as well as the oversized shoes with many pairs of socks he wanted to trade. I didn’t have a clue what he was up to, and thought it was just a clever way for one person to carry
a lot of items. What I didn’t realize was that Gaza was a duty-free zone and my cousin was trying to avoid paying taxes when he crossed into Egypt to keep the cost of his goods low. I also thought I was helping him with his job, which in fact I was, and felt very grown-up to be selected for the task.

My cousin set off to Egypt with one of his partners by car, and he put me on the train that would go across the border accompanied by his other partner. When the customs officer came onto the train to inspect the passengers and their parcels and asked me if I was bringing in anything that needed to be declared, I confidently said, “No.” The truth is, I didn’t know what he was talking about. The officer didn’t believe me, opened up my jacket and found all the socks. He smacked me across the side of the head. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and now he was holding me by the ear and yelling at me. I was scared to death. There was another man sitting in the same train compartment, a military man, a peacekeeper from India, who took pity on me and said, “Let the kid go.” When my cousin’s partner augmented that request with a small amount of cash, the officer did. I shook all the rest of the way to Cairo.

When I got off the train in the city, I could hardly believe what my eyes were feasting on. There was no electricity in Jabalia Camp, but the city of Cairo was a festival of lights. I thought I had arrived in the capital of the world, or gone from under the ground all the way up to the moon. It was colourful, noisy and, in the eyes of a child, a glorious sight. But as I soon found out, I would have no time to enjoy this grand city. My cousin’s partner took me to the low-rent hotel where the traders met to do business with the locals, where we met my cousin. And that’s where I stayed the whole time, watching the customers come and go, sitting around while my cousin did his business.

So on my one trip out of Gaza as a child, I smuggled goods for my cousin. What’s more, he knowingly sent me into danger, from
which I was saved only by the efforts of an Indian military man and his partner whose bribe also helped persuade an Egyptian customs officer to let me go. My only reward? I got a watermelon from Ismailia, capital of Egypt’s Canal region and renowned for its melons, which I brought back to my family. When I told my mother what happened, she laughed as if she’d known all along that I was being used as a courier.

When I got back from that misadventure, I continued with my survival routine—going to school and trying to earn a few piastres for the family. I sold ice cream and seeds and geraniums after school. I accepted any work that came along, and never tasted the sweetness of a summer holiday. For a while I had a job at a brick factory, where I had to line up bricks, water them down so they’d harden, and carry them to a pallet and stack them. I was paid two piastres for every hundred bricks I stacked; I worked there after school each afternoon until the factory closed. Consider that there are 100 piastres in an Egyptian pound and it takes 2.3 Egyptian pounds to make a U.S. dollar. Hauling those bricks didn’t give me much, but I took what I could get and though sometimes I was reluctant (what child wouldn’t want to keep some of the money he earned), I always handed the money over to my mother.

School was the place where I got my rewards. When I was in the sixth grade, in 1967, I was selected to become the school broadcaster, which was tantamount to class president. The teacher prepared the news each day, and I read it over the intercom for the entire term. I liked that. I liked almost everything about school, because the teachers—not all of them, but the most important ones—persuaded me that with an education I could do anything I wanted. I worked very hard to earn their praise, to stay at the top of the class. I remember the June day the results for the final exams for all grade six students in Gaza were supposed to be
announced: it was the day the Six Day War started. At first I was more upset about not hearing the results of my exams than about having to endure a war. Perhaps it was because I understood so little of actual war when it started. But I learned.

It wasn’t the first war of my lifetime, but I was only an infant during the 1956 Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression or Sinai war, in which Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt on October 26, 1956. Egypt and Israel had been sparring with each other ever since 1948, when Israel declared nationhood. My father told me the entire region was on tenterhooks the whole time, that there was always a border dispute or the threat of attack. So people weren’t surprised when the Sinai conflict actually began, sparked by Egypt’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal after the withdrawal of an offer by Britain and the United States to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam. People just didn’t know what shape the war would take, how it would alter their lives. But like most wars, not much was accomplished in the Sinai War that would change the way of life in Gaza, except that it was a brutal episode that led to six months of occupation by Israel. And in the aftermath we formally came under Egyptian administration, a state of affairs that would last eleven years. (Later I would learn that it was during this war that the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, rose to prominence and that this was also when the United States established itself as the chief negotiator in the Middle East.)

The Six Day War of 1967 was something very different. From my twelve-year-old perspective, it came out of nowhere. I was waiting impatiently for the grade six exam results to be posted at the school, as I wanted to see my name at the head of the class. But instead, my Palestinian teachers were so preoccupied by the growing tension between Egypt and Israel that they only posted a pass-or-fail list. Although there was always plenty of talk among
the adults about avenging the 1948 Nakba, to me, a schoolboy who was forever on the hunt for a job that would pay cash or in-kind donations to feed my family, such talk was merely background noise. But then the whispering about war in the refugee camp turned into loud cheering that this war was going to be a total defeat of the Israelis.

It wasn’t. It started on June 5 and ended on June 10. In a mere six days, the Israelis destroyed the Egyptian air force before the planes even got off the ground and turned back the neighbouring armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the Arab states of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, all of whom had contributed arms or soldiers to the battle.

It was actually unfinished business that had led to the war. After the 1956 Sinai War, peacekeepers had been left behind to keep the warring factions apart. In May 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser requested the withdrawal of the United Nations peacekeepers from Egyptian territory and the Gaza Strip, and closed the Straits of Tiran to any ship flying the Israeli flag or carrying materials that could be used for war. Arab countries fell in line to support the Egyptian initiative. Israel called up 70,000 reservists and its cabinet voted to launch an offensive, which led to a standoff of several weeks. Then full-out war began, and in an astonishingly small number of days, Israel had won—and had assumed control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this disruption in my community was pivotal in various capitals around the world, the evidence being the number of names the war still goes by. The Arabic term is Harb 1967. The Hebrew is Milhemet Sheshet Ha-Yamim. The rest of the world, divided into supporters of one side or the other, calls it variously the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Third Arab-Israeli War, or a Naksah (setback).

The Six Day War affects the geopolitics of the region to this day. But it wasn’t those geopolitical consequences that made the war a crossing in my life. I was only twelve years old. The war wasn’t something that happened on a transistor radio or was described by way of the rumour mill at the refugee camp. It happened right in front of my eyes, and it looked like the end of the world to me.

Israeli tanks rolled right onto our street. The shelling, the shooting and the fires breaking out all over the camp were completely terrifying. Parents were fleeing, some leaving their children behind; there was chaos, noise, panic. Most of my family headed for a fruit farm in Beit Lahia, north of Jabalia Camp. Hundreds of others did the same, but when we got there, we realized that some of the children had become separated from their families and some family members hadn’t come at all. The effort to escape was so disjointed that some of my own brothers had been left behind. Parents, including my own, started screaming. There was absolute pandemonium.

We stayed in the fields for three or four days, slept on the ground, ate the apples and apricots in the orchards until it was over. When we returned cautiously to our homes, we found out that some people who had had no place to run had dug holes in the ground and jumped in and covered themselves with pieces of tin. Many of our neighbours were killed or missing. We also discovered that the Israel Defense Forces were now occupying Gaza: there were tanks all over the streets and soldiers who pointed their guns at us while we walked home. I’d never seen Israeli soldiers before. When loudspeakers suddenly announced that all the residents should gather at the public square in the middle of Jabalia Camp, I was certain we were all going to be killed. The square was also the major water collection basin for the whole camp, but since this was summertime, the water hole was dry. The soldiers
made us line up around the empty waterhole. I was sure we would be forced to jump into it and be shot.

But all the soldiers did was to arrest some young men I didn’t know and take them away to prison. Then they told us to return to our houses and not to break any of the rules, the major one being that from now on there would be a curfew from six p.m. until six a.m. For me, that was the end of the Six Day War.