Madison Rafah Journal

Laura Gordon, March 22, 2009

Abu Jameel was waiting in a white pickup truck by the side of the road with the same beard he grew in Ramadan 2003. He was glowing and listening indulgently, waiting for my cab driver to run out of steam with how he’d driven me an extra three or four blocks and all I’d given him was three extra shekels. He kissed me on both cheeks and put me in the truck with three little smiling girls in the front seat and the cab backed out of the dirt road and Abu Jameel drove forward. I asked him whose girls they were and he said they were his. Nancy and Bassant and Haneen. Aseel was at preschool and Fatima the baby was with Nura at home and Jameel was with his grandmother. It was one of those moments of five years passing. Last time I’d seen them, Nancy had been a tiny hairless two-year-old and Bassant in a baby chair and Haneen and Aseel hadn’t been born. I did one of those extended family double-takes. Here were these little babies, all grown up overnight, laughing and talking with braided ponytails, and here I was telling them how last time I saw them they were this big, and they were loving being told how small they had been. He parked the car and we walked through a courtyard with trees and there was Nura, holding a blond, blue-eyed baby and looking exactly the same, wearing mismatching headscarf and a bright, comfortable dress for hanging out inside the house and being a mom surrounded by little girls.

In all the reuniting, there have been a number of bittersweet encounters with people whose lives have dead-ended or people who have settled for something less than they wanted in life and you really feel the five years. One friend got married, moved into her husband’s beautiful but isolated house with her two kids in a city where she knows no one and never goes out. Her husband, pleasant but boring, lost his government job when Hamas took over, and like the other government employees in the same situation collects a salary from the rival government in Ramallah to sit around at home and do nothing. Another friend’s brother’s house was destroyed and keeps getting his visa to the UK rejected and wants to know why I haven’t been in touch.

With Nura and Abu Jameel and the girls it was different, simple and direct, like we’d just seen each other yesterday. Life has been hard for them, too, harder than for many of my old friends, but they’re just that kind of people who absorb people easily, without pretense. It was a perfect sunny morning. We sat in the living room around a tray of bread and cream cheese and tea, eating breakfast.

My Arabic is still broken, but it’s much better than it was in 2003, and one of the joys in coming back is being able to talk a little easier with people. I had heard from mutual friends that the home they built on their farm had been destroyed a week after the bombing was over but I hadn’t heard the whole story. They had been living in different houses, Abu Jameel with his sister and Nura and the girls with her family, for two months while they looked for a new place to live. It’s not easy to find places to live anymore in Gaza. Since so many people have lost their houses, there’s been a huge housing crisis. They finally found this new place and have been living there for less than a week. It’s a beautiful one-story surrounded by a courtyard with fruit trees.

I always use their story as the quintessential Gaza housing story. They are the first family I ever stayed with when I came to Gaza, and a big part of the reason I decided to live here – just because they were such lovely people and living in great danger. Abu Jameel had worked in Tel Aviv for 18 years, developed close relationships to Israelis and a taste for cranberry ice cream and the Tel Aviv beach. He drove a fiat and wore sunglasses and Italian suits. He built up several blocks of stores and cafes with his two cousins that extended from his first home in Salah ad-Deen to the Egyptian border. Half their stores were demolished in the first Intifada and the rest in the second. From then on, their house was one of those front line houses, facing the border and the 12-meter wall and the Salah ad-Deen tower that shot down their street almost every night. Abu Jameel’s Israeli work permit was one of the thousands taken away at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and although he kept up a warm phone relationship with his Israeli boss, his boss was never able to get him another permit.

Abu Jameel gave up his fiat for a donkey cart. He named his donkey Mosaada, or “help.” He drove his donkey to his uncle’s farm everyday, which he had inherited, where he grew about 20 vegetables that he never sold much of. Sometimes he would get paid as a day labor harvesting carnations or cherry tomatoes. He turned in his Italian suits for sweats. He became paranoid about his house, the last thing he had built that still stood. He would escape from it as often as possible. The farm became an excuse to leave. Nura was on virtual lockdown in the house with her three kids. Bassant, the baby, had been born in the street during an invasion. She couldn’t leave the house. There was a halfway accurate belief that if a house was empty the Israelis would come to demolish it. Their relationship soured.

That house was demolished two days before I left in 2004, along with most of their street. The whole family was there when the army came, showing that you didn’t have to leave your house for it to be demolished. Now the whole neighborhood has been destroyed and is used exclusively for the smuggling tunnels.

After their home was destroyed, the family moved to the farm and Abu Jameel built the tool shack into a home over a few years. His relationship with Nura improved. They had two more babies, Aseel and Haneen. A mutual friend, a neighbor of theirs who had lost her home on the same day, pointed out dryly that the best thing that ever happened to their marriage was losing their house.

They lived through the December-January attacks, listening like everyone else to the planes in the sky, thinking they might not live through it. When the war ended they breathed a sigh of relief.

A week later, Abu Jameel was sleeping at his sister’s house, and Nura with the kids on the farm. Nura had become so accustomed to gunfire and explosions, she didn’t hear the plane in the sky or the first bomb it dropped in the front door. If Nancy hadn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom they would all have been dead. Nancy, seven years old, woke up her mom and sisters. They ran out of the house. When they had gotten 20 meters away, the plane dropped another bomb on the house, destroying it. They watched it burn.

Either because they have seen too much at this point to get all broken up about another near-death situation and another house, or because they’ve finally found another place to live, or because we were all so happy to see each other, they told me the whole story with big smiles. Then Abu Jameel got up to work on the farm. Nura and I played with the girls. Haneen and Bassant danced to kids’ music videos on TV and blew balloons and I took pictures. Nura seemed genuinely happy. We ate chocolate and looked at pictures, and Nancy and Bassant and I talked more about how little they had been five years ago, while Nura breastfed Fatima (nickname fatoum), and Haneen tried to eat the pictures and hung on my neck.

Then it was time for Nancy and Bassant to go to school and I wanted to go to the Saturday market. Nura walked us all to the asphalt road down the street and hailed us a cab. The cab driver yelled good-naturedly at Nancy for poking his head when he was trying to drive, and Bassant sat my lap. Another school girl hailed the cab. The cab driver swerved, pretend-threatening to hit her. They knew each other. He yelled at her and she punched his arm and yelled back. Everyone was smiling. The kids got out at school and I went to the market to buy flowers, where I ran into more people I hadn’t seen in five years and bought the little electric oven I have been searching for since I left Gaza. You can make pita bread in it, or cook chicken, or brown almonds, or heat up rice. For whatever reason, I can’t find it in Chicago, or even Beirut. The rest of the day I fielded comments from more friends I hadn’t seen in five years – the white girl knows how to make Arabic bread? Just marry a Palestinian, make bread, have kids, and khallaaas. Forget America. I laughed with them and ate piles of rice and Israeli chicken – like most everything in Gaza these days, all the chickens have been bombed and if you want meat you have to get it from Israel or the tunnels. We drank lots of sweet things and I put on another few pounds. It was Mother’s Day.

Lora Gordon is a Jewish American who worked in Gaza for a year (2003-4). She has written and reported for WBEZ’s Eight-Forty-Eight and Vocalo.org, the Chicago blog Gapers Block, Peace Under Fire (Verso 2004), “Electronic Intifada,” RustBelt Radio, Flashpoints, and Free Speech Radio News. A student at Northwestern University, she is completing a manuscript for the literary agency Susanna Lea Associates. She is also the author of the blog Snippy.