FEELING GUILTY AB OUT GAZA
Gerda Cohen eyes Israel's
`blacks', the most unwanted people in the world
Jerusalem 'YOU not get tear-gas in the eye?' en- quired a ferrety man lounging outside the Fifth Station Souvenir Shop (proprietor Ibrahim Wazwaz). 'You not get tear-gas in the nose?' Sorry, I could certainly detect a reek of dried pee, also roasting coffee beans, but no tear-gas. He seemed dis- appointed. There was a demonstration going on near the Damascus Gate. `Tonight', said Mr Wazwaz, 'you watch television, you see all.'
We were in the Old City, where the narrow Via Dolorosa makes a bend, by the Fifth Station of the Cross: `Simoni Cyre- naeo crux imponit' read a stone plaque on the caramel-colour stone wall. The usual turmoil all about: clanging bells, bellowing muezzin, hawking, spitting; a group of Saga Holiday pensioners in soup-green anoraks, from Ilford and Bournemouth, colliding with another group of Swedish Lutherans, very serious, while several portly rabbinic characters go scuttling by, their resplendant fur hats in plastic hoods against a possible shower.
The only unusual feature is the Muslim souvenir shops heavily shuttered, green steel shutters padlocked for a whole week now. 'Too bad for business!' By the Second Station of the Cross, Mr el-Ansari peeked out from a half-open shutter and let me in. `You want icon? I have the best.' Amazing icons led back into the dark, their huge reproachful eyes burning from black eye- sockets. Some were Greek, others made by the Greek Orthodox nuns who lived oppo- site. 'The trouble now bad, bad for busi- ness!' An extremely fat man was sitting perched cross-legged on a little chair bub- bling into a nargileh with blissful sucking noises. 'We need peace, we not need riots at Christmas.'
A step away, between the Fifth Station and the Damascus Gate, one could see Mr Sharon's arrogant branched candlestick stuck on a domed roof high over a dainty little minaret. Five border police, scruffy and bored, were guarding Mr Sharon's new residence in the Muslim quarter. The corpulent ex-general has managed to anger almost everyone by setting up house in this cockpit. Smiling like a wicked baby, he went on television to say his move would protect Jewish residents in the Old City. 'We know what Sharon wants„' the Muslim shopkeepers crowded round me, 'he wants the Jews to push us out completely.'
Down at Herod's Gate, a soldier in full battle gear was eating a cheese sandwich and watching the dustmen sweep up broken glass. The place seemed fuller than usual with exotic garbage, dustbin cats, torn Arabic posters and half-eaten bread. 'There was an incident,' said the soldier, 'a few kids throwing stones.' Next morning, the local papers carried big headlines: 'Worst rioting ever' in East Jerusalem. But I had been there, chatting to Mr Wazwaz! Could this Palestinian revolt be a camera war, as the Israeli Cabinet constantly imply? Worried, I walked down to Barclays discount bank, whose badly-damaged fron- tage appeared on the front page. Barclays' staff and customers appeared normal, ex- cept that they were sitting open to the street, computers and all, their plate glass windows having gone. 'Business as usual,' said the manager, who wore an Orthodox Jewish skull cap, and came from Brighton; his colleague, a tall handsome Egyptian, wore an oyster-grey tweed; they assured me that Barclays clerks were similarly mixed, Jewish and Arab regardless. 'There is no hate,' murmured the Egyptian, rather magnificently, but the windows had vanished and it was like a Bunuel farce. On Salah-e-Din Street, near the stout Tudor tower of St George's Anglican Cathedral, the border guards were loung- ing about, slung with fearsome wooden cudgels, cheese sandwiches, tear-gas canis- ters, chocolate biscuits, and assault rifles of deadly accuracy. One border guard, chat- ting to me in poetic Hebrew, said he had been in the army a year and was longing to get out and study literature. Why didn't he use rubber bullets, I asked. 'When they throw rubber stones, we will fire rubber bullets.'
So this is the Palestinian revolt, rich in deadly ironies. Schoolboys are being shot, but they are well-fed, well-educated, very sturdy schoolboys. Schoolboys are being shot, but the random process of their execution is recorded by the first-class reporting team; the Hebrew press are doing an excellent job, perhaps a touch too zealous, because Jewish writers love self- flagellation, and the columnists get far more space than their English counter- parts. In addition, 350 foreign correspon- dents are permanently stationed here; some thousand visiting journalists, and a phalanx of camera crews ensure that shoot- ings get fair coverage.
The obvious thing is to keep the cameras out, a tactic constantly threatened by Mr Shamir, whose own television image is none too fortunate. Poor man, his pugna- cious little features resemble an irritated lapdog. 'Not fair, not fair,' he yaps; but every night on the nine o'clock news (for Israel television models itself on the BBC) we can see schoolboys hurling pebbles at soldiers armed with sub-machine-guns. Or we can watch a fuller version on the Jordan English News at Ten — quite a balanced and professional programme. Without the cameras, this revolt would be a back-alley affair of nasty punch-ups and amateurish road-blocks — a few petrol cans and a bit of rubbish set alight. The physical impact is minimal: one can go from Galilee to Eilat without realising anything is untoward. `What revolt?' asked a pilgrim who hadn't seen the papers. It has been perfect weath- er for a rebellion: a pure sun shining from a satin sky.
On screen, the Gaza Strip looks an absolute inferno. But when you get there, it's disappointingly beautiful. The wide calm Mediterranean whispers up a beach of blinding salt-white sand. Tall date-palms clatter like sabres. To the east, orange groves and lemon trees look black against the blinding pure light. Apart from the little biting flies, and some 600,000 mad- dened residents, this would be a fine place for a beach resort.
And there actually is one, Kattif, with a beach hotel and horse-riding, right next to Khan Yunis. But Kattif is Jewish, one of several new settlements, and Khan Yunis is Muslim. Schoolboys are being shot in Khan Yunis; schoolboys in Kattif are enjoying their Hanukka holiday, to cele- brate Jewish freedom from Hellenistic rule about 2,000 years ago. As the liberal papers here constantly remind them, Jew- ish freedom must not be at the cost of another people's unfreedom. However, the Gaza Strip residents generally do not read the liberal papers: they read a surpri- singly wide and sophisticated range of Arabic and English text-books, for their principal aim is to get educated and emi- grate.
Schoolboys are being shot, but they are well-fed, well-educated, lean and muscu- lar. They are a very healthy bunch, the product of a dedicated effort by interna- tional agencies and Israeli doctors to im- prove the standard of life here. Gaza has a fertility rate among the highest in the world; a birth-rate of 48 per 1,000 of the population, which is now almost double that recorded by the census of 1967, when Israel occupied the Strip. The infant mor- tality rate at that time was over 80 per 1,000 live births. This key indicator has fallen to under 30 deaths per 1,000 live births, and mortality from summer di- arrhoea is much down.
I well remember, in 1968, visiting wards full of shrunken, pitiable creatures scarcely recognisable as human, children of ten who waved stick arms, bloated grotesque bellies on yellow shrunken legs — the result of gross malnutrition. In the camps, women were queuing for rations of rice and flour doled out to them according to the villages they had lived in 20 years before. This ration-doling was a most poignant ritual, each lost village remembered in turn. Then, Gaza was a repulsive slum. Today, it is not Hampstead Garden Suburb, as the Guardian would like, but it is tolerable.
Most wage-earners commute to offices and factories a few miles away in Israel: a source of shame and embarrassment to many Jews. 'They are our blacks, we know, don't tell me about our blacks,' pleaded a moshau farmer growing citrus down the road. There was a scent of lemon blossom, and rain on dust. 'We need rain badly,' he said, changing the subject, because you can't go on forever feeling guilty about Gaza.
What can you do with 600,000 unwanted souls? They must be the most unwanted people in the world. Egypt doesn't want them; nor Jordan. So they might just as well work in Tel Aviv hotels, and earn good money and stay overnight illegally (since their permits do not allow them to stay in Israel after dark) provided that this routine humiliation gets exposed on Israel television. People are weary of program- mes exposing the doss-houses where Arab workers put up: 'You think they should stay at the Sheraton Plaza?' The mood is weariness; intense weariness, and some disgust.
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