Despite embargoes by Israel and bans from Hamas, the business of daily life goes on, writes MICHAEL JANSENin Gaza
GAZA IS hot and steamy, the air scented by sea, sewage and jasmine.
Our minibus rushes along the rutted road from Israel’s vast Erez terminal to Beit Hannoun where we pause at a crumbling clinic due to be enlarged, upgraded and refurbished by medico international, a German non- governmental organisation.
Friendly, inquisitive children crowd around the bus, asking our names, where we come from, what we want here.
The clinic door is secured with a large padlock; its doctor is treating patients in Khan Younis to the south. The roofs of the breeze-block houses are asbestos or metal sheets held down by blocks of cement or rocks. The road is a sand track.
The people who live here are of Bedouin stock, their homes, like the tents where they once dwelt, are temporary.
“Beit Hannoun has been destroyed many times by the Israelis,” my old friend Omar remarks later in the day.
On the drive into Gaza City we meet donkey carts carrying rubble from destroyed buildings gathered by desperate men and boys. They are living on the pittance they can earn from braving Israeli bullets to collect chunks of cement and twisted iron bars from destroyed buildings close to the thick, high wall that separates Gaza from Israel.
The rubble is crushed and recycled. Building materials are scarce because of Israel’s siege and blockade. Only the UN and international organisations are permitted to import construction goods into the strip for specific projects approved by Israel.
Traffic thickens in Gaza City. Policemen attempt to direct vehicles at the busiest crossroads.
Shops are open but few people are to be seen on the well-swept streets. Tidy deposits of rubbish occasionally decorate street corners, awaiting collection by Gaza’s elderly garbage lorries. Men with brooms, dust pans and donkey carts handle neighbourhood clean-up.
In 2006, Japan donated 22 garbage lorries to the UN development programme to replace the fleet brought in before 1996 – but they are sitting in a West Bank warehouse. Israel never gave permission for their transfer to Gaza.
At Marna House, one of the oldest hotels in Gaza, men are smoking shisha (water pipes) at half a dozen tables in the covered garden cafe. Basil Shawwa, the manager, has transformed the guest house, built in the 1940s, into a thriving business with shisha, imaginative sandwiches, rich cakes and lemonade laced with mint.
Basil is planning to put up colourful, quilted Egyptian tent material to provide a change for customers who come in the evening to break their fasts during the month of Ramadan. This year it falls in August, making abstention from water particularly painful.
Asked what he has done about a proposed ban on women smoking shisha, Basil replies: “I banned it before Hamas tried. Now women smoke shisha everywhere but here.”
His wife, Norma, sits quietly at the table in the drive smoking a cigarette. He shrugs when I ask about the rationale behind the ban. “He taught me to smoke, so I smoke,” Norma says.
Other women also smoke cigarettes but not shisha. Basil is Basil.
As I walk along Omar Moukhtar Street, Gaza City’s main thoroughfare, to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, men and women smile and issue greetings. Gazans are always happy to see outsiders. We inject a sense of normality or potential normality to the place.
The pavement is broken in places, overlaid with sand in others. Upkeep is daunting in a sanctioned city built on sand.
Gaza City denizens work (or not) by day and go to the beach or visit relatives by night. The sea and the family are the two positive constants that keep people sane and the negative constant – the hovering Israeli presence – at bay.
Shops are open late. Vendors display huge piles of luscious grapes, juicy cherries and water and yellow melons. Cafes and waterfront kiosks are busy. Generators clack and sputter wherever rotating eight-hour power cuts are in force.
Gaza may be a prison for most of its 1½ million politically disillusioned citizens, but they have not given up. Gazans have survived along this stretch of coast for thousands of years and they plan to continue doing so.