Drinking the Sea at Gaza by Amira Hass

Author:Amira Hass
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466884533
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Bring Home the POWs

Abu Jamil and Abu Nader liked to sit over a plate of hummus at one of the string of beachfront restaurants that had opened in the last few years. Their restaurant of choice was a favorite of mine too, in spite of the food—it was one of the few places a woman could sit alone without people staring. The seashore offered a rare corner of escape where one could watch the fishing boats set sail for the twelve nautical miles open to Gazan fishermen and turn one’s back on the old Israeli military court building and the police headquarters circled by concrete blocks and ugly reels of barbed wire. And now, after the IDF pullback, the restaurant stayed open past 7:00 P.M. and was blissfully quiet, free of the incessant noise from the police loudspeaker, which had blasted Hebrew songs and soldiers’ duty schedules throughout Rimaal and al-Shatti refugee camp.

The entrepreneurs had built the restaurant, one of the first along the shore, with a loan from a Palestinian investment and development agency, confident that the chronic shortage of places for leisure and relaxation, coupled with the needs of Palestinians returning from exile, young people resuming studies, and ex-prisoners who were picking up the threads of their lives, would make the venture a sure success. On a mound rising up from the shore, the owners had laid tiles for a patio and set up large beach umbrellas; one balmy summer day in 1995 I shared a table with Abu Jamil and Abu Nader. The view had changed: several beachfront hotels had sprung up, the military court had been transformed into a Palestinian fire station, and the old police headquarters, stripped of the concrete and barbed wire, now housed “Arafat’s orphans,” children whose parents had fallen in the pursuit of the PLO cause and whom the chairman had “adopted.”

Abu Nader picked at his hummus while Abu Jamil sipped a bowl of lentil soup. For a long minute Abu Jamil held the spoon in the air as his eyes took on a glazed, contemplative look. “This reminds me of the soup in Ansar,” he said suddenly, talking about the mass detention camp Israel had set up in the Negev desert to deal with the popular uprising. I was taken aback by the nostalgia in his voice, a tone I had heard from other ex-prisoners as well. I remembered the time that Jalal, a taxi driver, had picked me up at the Erez checkpoint. As we drove to Gaza City, we discussed the dangerous rift that had opened between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Jalal, a four-term detainee and dyed-in-the-wool Fatah man, interrupted our talk to point out the new sidewalks (paved with flagstones from Gaza) and praise a park near the Unknown Soldier monument, laid out with bushes and palm trees and benches. “Look how nice it is,” he said. “Inshallah, God willing, there’ll be plenty more parks like this.” He spoke of Abu Amar—Arafat—with love and reverence and talked of his hopes that all these developments pointed to the emergence of a Palestinian state.

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