Laura Kraftowitz

Then he’d picked up a tomato from the pile of fresh vegetables on a granite countertop in the kitchen and cut me a wedge. It was unbelievably sweet. “Fresh, from garden.” He’d handed me a knife and a cucumber and chopped the rest of the tomato, clearing peelings to make room for me. Through the window, the tower was disappearing into a darkening cloak of sky. It was night, and by his own definition, dangerous. But who was I to judge, I wasn’t the one who cooked every meal in view of a sniper, I was just his guest. I swallowed hard and cut the cucumber.

We slept in our clothes in case we had to flee. The family had removed most of the furniture from the house, but they didn’t have the money to leave. “I was like a rich man and now I am a farmer,” Abu Jameel shrugged. “I drove a Fiat and now I ride a donkey.”

*

I stayed with the family again that night, and it was dusk when the bulldozer finally drove off. Noura nursed Bassant while Abu Jameel and I sliced cucumbers and tomatoes in the dangerous kitchen, mixing them with mint and cilantro, salt and bits of lemon.

He placed the salad on a mezze platter of spicy stewed tomatoes with egg, fried eggplant and chickpeas crushed with lemon juice and garlic, and we sat on a blanket in the living room, dipping into the bowls with warm flatbread. The toddlers, Nancy and Jameel, maneuvered a plastic replica of a military Caterpillar bulldozer across the floor. A whistling sound interrupted, followed by several explosions that rose over a wind of gunfire, but nobody flinched.

That night, I dreamt I was in my parents’ sea green dining room, eating my mother’s Moroccan stew with dried apricots, my sister giving me mischievous looks while my father talked about a minor workplace disagreement. Something caught my eye, and I looked up. There was no ceiling, only cloudless sky. I looked over, and there was no front door, only the open threshold framing a green lawn. My sister got up to carry dishes to the kitchen, as sounds from another kitchen drew me away, mingled with children’s voices and the smell of sage and eggs.

On his way out the door, Abu Jameel snapped at me and Noura to get the children’s clothes that were hanging from the half-destroyed balcony outside the kitchen. It wasn’t like him to speak that way, but I didn’t challenge him. I knew I’d signed up for this. I’d been there long enough that I was no longer a guest, but a friend, and that meant fielding my friend’s anger when the taunting bulldozers could not be stopped, and when the internationals, with their passports and convictions, were unable to stop them.

Wearing orange vests, waving white headscarves like surrender flags, Noura and I climbed through the red metal makeshift door to the street and climbed the ruins of the wall of her home. There was nothing between us and the sniper tower but daylight, nothing to shield us from the whims of soldiers, no cameras or witnesses. I absorbed the acute feeling of being caged in, that outside your door, instead of a yard, you have a no-man’s land that you may look at but not walk to. The Wall was a hundred meters away, but the real border was right here, we were walking on it.

I became aware of the fragility of my body. I held onto the hope that my presence as a foreigner would make a difference to the army, that it might make a difference to Noura. It was harder to climb than I’d expected, like scaling boulders, but we finally reached the balcony, which sloped, broken, into

the mound of rocks, and pulled at heavy pieces of cement, unearthing little shirts and pants that had been drying on the line. We dusted them off, looked for holes. I worked tentatively, preoccupied by my fear. Noura’s hands moved steadily, efficiently, and it struck me that she’d hung clothes from this balcony for years until the army demolished it, each time exposed in this way. We rescued a small pile of fabric that she took inside to soak in a blue washing basin. They floated to the top amid soapy bubbles.

“I have to convince Abu Jameel to buy new clothes for the kids,” she joked. “He’s so cheap!”

It was a relief to laugh. “Buy them when he’s on the farm.”

The bulldozer came back each afternoon for nearly a week and never again. I spent every morning in the coffee shop, writing emails with new urgency to a growing number of readers. Writing didn’t require a group of international activists. It didn’t require a direct confrontation with the army. Without a bullhorn or a banner, it was one thing I could do, one thing the army couldn’t take away. My listserv grew, I gave more interviews to journalists, local TV shows, a radio show in Berkeley. Before traveling to Gaza, I’d thought of writing as a creative indulgence for emails between friends and occasional navel-gazing, nothing more. But Gaza transformed language into a material as essential and urgent as gauze, which had been named after Gaza where it was invented and was now in short supply. Words became a conduit between the closed-off world where I was living and the world outside. A record of a world that was being erased.

“We don’t know when they will come for the rest,” I wrote, “tomorrow or in two weeks or a few months. There was shooting and shelling all day, morning to early evening. The shelling continued, relentless background noise.

Abu Jameel said he wanted to make a new sign for the roof. He said the sign he made when I first got here—Please Don’t Shoot, A Family Lives Here—was no longer sufficient. The new sign would announce: We Will Not Leave.

2

Armored bulldozers gave way to armored cranes that drove steel panels into the ground. The sound of hammering echoed as panels wrapped around Abu Jameel Street, until the sun fell behind brown metal, until all we could see of Egypt was the top of trees. Sniper towers that had stood like disconnected fortifications in the desolate, destroyed fields were transformed into connecting points in a grid of control. Gaza’s prison gate closed, a feeling of finality replacing dread.

Then the army moved on to Rafah Crossing Point, where it made short work of the Palestinian administrative buildings. It occurred to me that the army’s brutality was, if nothing else, more honest than the charade of peace negotiations, which only gave the world an excuse to continue ignoring the humanitarian crisis. The Palestinian Authority administrators went home to collect unemployment, which was no doubt more satisfying than their job of rubber stamping Israel’s decisions, performing Israel’s secretarial duties, and adding to the illusion that all was well.

Having stopped cooperating with the Palestinian Authority, the army introduced a waiver for foreign visitors—Conditions of Entry into the Gaza Strip. “In the current circumstances,” the paper stated, “the IDF cannot guarantee the personal safety of foreign nationals.” The Guardian’s headline put it more bluntly—“Gaza visitors must sign waiver in case army shoots them.”

Angela, an American activist based in Nablus, decided to test the closure. Though she was only a few hours away, her journey took two days: a dozen checkpoints in the West Bank, a bus through the Negev, another bus through the Sinai to Rafah Crossing Point, where Israeli border guards stamped “Denied Entry” on her passport and turned her away. She called with the sound of defeat in her voice. “I guess I’ll go to Cairo?”

“No one can get in. No one can get out,” I emailed home. “The Palestinian Liberation Organization Souvenir Shop in Gaza City sells mugs that say ‘Welcome To Gaza, The Largest Prison In The World’ with a yellow smiley face and bold black letters. The owner tells us the mug is ‘very funny’ and sells it next to another mug that says ‘Stop Raping Gaza,’ which he claims is ‘also funny’ and popular with UN workers.”

It looked like my colleague Mohammed and I were going to be alone for the foreseeable future, and beneath my outrage at the siege, I was quietly relieved. We’d worked closely for months without a break as the city faced continual assault. But now, for a moment, I could hit pause on the anxiety of not knowing where my life was going. The urgency of other people’s pain quieted the uncertainty of being young and alone. I’d get better at Arabic, spend nights on Abu Jameel Street and days with Mohammed, who I adored, as a friend, or a brother, or…it wasn’t worth exploring. Wearing a hijab was not the same as knowing how to date in another culture. And in Rafah, there wasn’t dating, there was only marriage, preferably arranged. So I ignored my feelings, and soon, we received our first monthly checks from Bethlehem—$150 each, plus rent—to coordinate the branch, write reports, and host any visitors who made it in. We walked out of Cairo-Amman Bank holding envelopes of crisp shekels, and Mohammed gave a little shout. “We got paid! How about sugar cane juices, I invite you!”

He stared down starey men as we walked to the little juice bar where we were the only customers, the neon sign spelling out “Freshest Juice” in Arabic, the red swivel bar chairs and hanging baskets of oranges, stalks of sugarcane leaning against a black countertop as the sound system boomed Arabic pop.

The juice bar’s owner ground the sugarcane and handed us pulpy glasses. Mohammed asked him to turn up the music and sang along, shaking his shoulders like a belly dancer as I drank the sweet liquid through a giant straw, laughing with the owner at my goofy friend.

*

It was still light out when we got to Abu Jameel’s garden. Rows of prickly pear cactus lined the road, bulbous green hedges expanding the boundaries between gardens. Cement box houses punctuated the land. It was the season for corn, and stalks reached high as somebody’s head. Watermelon vines covered the earth, weaving around eggplants.

“This all, no chemicals.” Abu Jameel’s face lit up as he ushered us to his almond grove, handing us leathery, green-gray fruits from a branch. I bit into the crunchy, lemony flesh as he launched into a lesson in almond cultivation.

“I think this is not farm, this is escape,” said Mohammed, amused, kneeling down to pull a yellow flower from the end of a kousa squash as men trickled in on donkey and on horse and on foot as the warm sun set. End of the day, greetings and tea, soft air. We were there to experience gursa, a Gazan farmer’s summer feast.

The men gathered prickly pear stalks and set them alight on a charred circle of earth. Plants threw long shadows, sharp flames consumed the shriveled skeletons. Abu Jameel strung softball-sized watermelons on a wire like pearls,

twisted the ends and placed the fruits, and the fire grew bright and died. Blackened balls lay in a bed of ember and ash. Two men washed the burnt skin in basins and the water darkened, leaving small white balls like dinosaur eggs.

Abu Jameel lay a thick slab of dough on the embers, raked glowing embers over it. When the bread was crisp, he beat it with a spatula, setting off clouds of ash. He pulled off bites for us to try, and it was chewy, like half-cooked cornbread. Around a large metal bowl, we sliced the roasted watermelon and fresh tomatoes, mashed lemons and hatta peppers and so much garlic, and mixed the cold mess with our hands. We ripped the bread and tossed it in, and it soaked up the salsa and we started eating, and the only sound was the quiet satiating of hunger. We were on the border but it was a quiet night.

A man with a green knitted beret rode up on a horse. Abu Jameel said he was an old friend. The man told me, in Hebrew at the insistence of Abu Jameel, who’d started accusing me of neglecting my Hebrew, that he'd spent twenty years as a stunt man in Israeli cinema and a kibbutz peace circus. Like everyone else here, he was now a farmer without a work permit. Like everyone else here, he remembered good times.

Now he widened his pose on the bench and he began his show. A water bottle turned a shekel blue. A sliced lemon revealed a star of almonds. Cigarette ash passed through his palm to the back of his hand. I looked up at the darkening navy, around me at the deepening green. For once, my thoughts were nowhere else.

Then he got Mohammed with a spray of water in the face, and we rolled around giggling, as Mohammed made an effort to contain the indignity.

When it was starry, it was already too late. Abu Jameel set aside plates for his family, who couldn’t attend because someone had to stay home. If you left your border house empty, went the local lore, a well-paid informant would call the army who would come with bulldozers and take it away. So Noura was homebound, on twenty-four hour bulldozer watch while Abu Jameel lived on his garden, hiding from what was happening to his home, the house he'd built with his own hands, large enough to hold not only his own, but his children’s families. A lifetime’s work, the dreams of future generations, desecrated nightly. And in the end we all knew what no one said above a whisper. We all knew how this story would go.

Later, Mohammed and I walked home. It was a long walk, mostly peaceful. The only sounds were the hollow echoes of a distant gunfight between rows of cacti.