Hi. The UCLA conference on Palestine continues today. See yesterday's
mailing for details. -Ed
Daniel Day-Lewis : Inside scarred minds
The Sunday Times Magazine March 20, 2005
Authors in the Frontline*
(On his first visit to the Gaza Strip, Daniel Day-Lewis meets the
Palestinian families living in the heart of the danger zone - and the
psychologists who are counselling them.)
Mossa'ab, the interpreter, leads the way, carrying a white M�decins Sans
Fronti�res (MSF) flag. Its psychology team, myself and photographer Tom
Craig are in full view of an Israeli command post occupying the top floors
of a large mill. It is draped in camouflage netting, as is the house close
by. It is to this house that we are heading, across 200 yards of no man's
land; the last house left standing in an area once teeming with life.
Civilians have been the main victims of the violence inflicted by both sides
in the Middle East conflict. In the Gaza Strip the Israeli army reacts to
stone-throwing with bullets. It responds to the suicide bombs and attacks of
Palestinian militants by bulldozing houses and olive groves in the search
for the perpetrators, to punish their families, and to set up buffer zones
to protect Israeli settlements. It bars access to villages, and multiplies
checkpoints, cutting Gaza's population off from the outside world. MSF's
psychologists are trying to help Palestinian families cope with the stress
of living within these confines; visiting them, treating severe trauma and
listening to their stories. Their visits are the only sign sometimes that
they have not been abandoned.
Israel's tanks and armour-plated bulldozers can come with no warning, often
at night. The noise alone, to a people who have been forced to suffer these
violations year after year, is enough to freeze the soul. Israeli snipers
position themselves on rooftops. Householders are ordered to leave; they
haven't even the time to collect pots and pans, papers and clothes before
the bulldozers crush the unprotected buildings like dinosaurs trampling on
eggs - sometimes first mashing one into another, then covering the remains
with a scoop of earth. Those caught in the incursion zone will be fired on.
Even those cowering inside their houses may be shot at or shelled through
walls, windows and roofs. The white flag carried by humanitarian workers
gives little protection; we'll have warning shots fired at us twice before
the week is out.
Sometimes a family will not leave an area that is being cleared, believing
if they do leave they will lose everything. It is a huge risk to remain.
Sometimes a house is left standing, singled out for occupation by Israeli
troops. The family is forced to remain as protection for the soldiers. Last
year an average of 120 houses were demolished each month, leaving 1,207
homeless every month. In the past four years 28,483 Gazans have been
forcibly evicted; over half of Gaza's usable land, mainly comprising
citrus-fruit orchards, olive groves and strawberry beds, has been destroyed.
Last year, 658 Palestinians were killed in the violence in Gaza, and dozens
of Israelis. This ploughing under, house by house, orchard by orchard,
reduces community to wasteland, strewn and embedded with a stunted crop of
broken glass and nails, books, abandoned possessions. As we weave our way
towards the home of Abu Saguer and his family - one of several families we
will visit today - we are treading on shattered histories and aspirations.
Abu Saguer's own house is still standing, but its top floor and roof are
occupied by Israeli soldiers. His granddaughter Mervat is with us, a sweet,
shy seven-year-old with red metal-rimmed glasses, her hair in two neat
braids held by flowery bands. She wears bright-red trousers and a denim
jacket. Last April her mother heard an Israeli Jeep pull up briefly at the
military-access road in front of their house. Some projectile was fired and
when Mervat reappeared - she had been playing outside - she was crying and
her face was covered in blood. They washed her. Her right eye was crushed.
A month later in Gaza an artificial eye was fitted. It was very
uncomfortable,
so a special recommendation was needed from the Palestinian Ministry of
Health to finance a trip to Egypt for one that fitted properly. Mervat needs
this eye changed every six months, so the ministry must negotiate with
Israel each time for permission to cross the border. Fifty cars are
permitted to cross each day; each must carry seven people.
Abu Saguer has five sons and four daughters - "You'll go broke with more
than that," he says. He lives near the big checkpoint of Abu Houli in
southern Gaza. He wants the photographer, Tom Craig, to take his picture
and put it on every wall in England, Germany and Russia. He is 59. At 12 he
went out to work, and at 16 he began to build the house he had dreamt of,
"slowly, slowly" as a home and as a gathering place for his extended family.
He had grown up in a house made of mud in Khan Yunis, which let the water
in whenever it rained, and all his pride, hope and generosity of spirit had
invested itself in this ambition. He had worked in Israel, like so many
here, before the borders were closed to all men aged between 16 and 35.
For over 20 years, Abu Saguer had his own business, selling and transporting
bamboo furniture. During the second Gulf war all his merchandise was stolen.
After that he relied on his truck for income. He had cultivated 300 square
metres of olive trees, pomegranates, palms, guavas and lemons in the fields
around his home. After the start of the second intifada (Palestinian
uprising) his crops were destroyed by the Israeli army - for "security". A
road that services the Israeli settlements of Gush Katif had been built, and
during our visit the traffic passes freely backwards and forwards, along the
edge of the barren land where his orchards once flourished.
On October 15, 2000, Abu was at home with his wife when Israeli settlers
emerged on a shooting spree. He and his family fled to Khan Yunis. After
four days he returned. He was hungry. There was no bread, no flour. He
killed four pigeons and prepared a fire on which to grill them. The soldiers
arrived suddenly, about 20 of them, and entered the house. He followed them
upstairs. "Where are you going?" he asked. One smashed his head into a
door, breaking his nose. They kicked him down stairs and out of his house.
They kicked half his teeth out and left him with permanent damage to his
spine. "If you open your mouth we'll shoot you," they said. They left,
returning in a bigger group an hour later, to occupy the top of his house,
sealing the stairway with a metal door and razor wire. The family has lived
in constant fear ever since. The soldiers urinated and defecated into empty
Coke bottles and sandbags, hurling them into his courtyard. They menaced
his children with their weapons. After two years of this an officer asked:
"Why are you still here?" "It's my house," he replied.
For four years, Abu Saguer has been afraid to go out, afraid to leave his
wife and children alone. He is a prisoner in his own home, just as the
Palestinians are prisoners within their own borders. The facade of
self-government is an absurdity. The Strip, with its 1.48m Palestinians, is
a vast internment camp, the borders of which shrink as more and more
demolition takes place, and within which the population rises faster than
anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile, about 7,000 Israeli settlers live in
oases of privileged segregation. This is a state of apartheid. It's taken me
less than a week to lose impartiality. In doing so, I may as well be
throwing stones at tanks. For as MSF's president, Jean-Herv� Bradol, has
said, "The invitation to join one side or the other is accompanied by an
obligation to collude with criminal forms of violence."
The late Lieutenant-General Rafael Eitan, the former chief of staff of the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), once likened the Palestinian people to "drugged
cockroaches scurrying in a bottle". In 1980 he told his officers: "We have
to do everything to make them so miserable they will leave." He opposed all
attempts to afford them autonomy in the occupied territories. Twenty- five
years on, it seems to me that his attitude and policy have been applied with
great gusto. Every movement here in any of the so-called sensitive areas,
which account for a large, ever-increasing proportion of the Strip (borders,
settlements, checkpoints), is surveyed and reacted to by a system of
watchtowers.
These sinister structures cast the shadows of malign authority across the
land. On our third day, as we stood at the tattered edge of the refugee camp
at Rafah, the forbidding borderland between Gaza and Egypt, bullets bit into
the sand a yard and a half from where we stood. It was in this place - was
it from the same watchtower? - that Iman el-Hams, a defenceless 13-year-old
schoolgirl, had been shot just weeks before. She ran and tried to hide from
the pitiless death that came for her. I felt her presence; the sky vibrating
with the shallow, fluttering breath of her final terror.
I read this transcript before I left home; the cold facts ran through me
like a virus. It is a radio communications exchange by the Israel Defense
Forces, Gaza, October 2004. Four days later, crossing into Gaza, I'm still
shivering: what the hell is this place we're going to?
Soldier on guard: "We have identified someone on two legs [code for human]
100 metres from the outpost.
Soldier in lookout: "A girl about 10." (By now, soldiers in the outpost are
shooting at the girl.)
Soldier in lookout: "She is behind the trench, half a metre away, scared to
death. The hits were right next to her, a centimetre away."
Captain R's signalman: "We shot at her, yes, she is apparently hit."
Captain R: "Roger, affirmative. She has just fallen. I and a few other
soldiers are moving forward to confirm the kill."
Soldier at lookout: "Hold her down, hold her down. There's no need to kill
her."
Captain R (later): "...We carried out the shooting and killed her... I
confirmed the kill... [later]... Commanding officer here, anyone moving in
the area, even a three-year-old kid, should be killed, over."
A military inquiry decided that the captain had "not acted unethically". He
still faces criminal charges. Two soldiers who swore they saw him
deliberately shoot her in the head, empty his gun's entire magazine into her
inert body, now say they couldn't see if he deliberately aimed or not;
another is sticking to his damning testimony.
Every weighty bag of flour for Abu Saguer's household must be broken up and
lugged across the 200 yards of wasteland. Everything must be carried. We are
smoking apple-flavoured shisha in the courtyard after a lunch his wife made
of bread, tomatoes, olive oil, olives and yoghurt, all from the small plot
left to him. "Take some puffs so you can write," he says. He speaks with
great urgency and my pen lags behind. On November 7, during Ramadan's
month of fasting, a three-tiered perimeter of razor wire was laid,
encircling his
house. This forced him and his family to use the military access road,
walking his children past tanks to get to school. It's a much longer and
more dangerous route. After a week of this he was shot at from the
watchtower. Abu Saguer gathered his wife and children, then they sat down in
the road. All afternoon they sat.
"I didn't care if they crushed us there and then. I wanted a resolution," he
said. Jeeps passed, nothing happened. After dusk they went in to break their
fast. The next day a senior officer approached them in the road.
"What's the problem? Are you on strike? What is it, are you upset?"
"Yes."
"A lot?"
"A lot, a lot, a lot."
"Are you upset with us?"
"I'm upset with the whole lot of you."
"Why?"
"You're forcing my wife and children to walk in front of tanks and
bulldozers - I want a donkey and cart."
"Big donkey or small donkey?"
"Big, to pull a cart."
"Impossible." (Abu Saguer, his eyes twinkling, smoke streaming from his
nose and mouth, says: "If they'd said yes, I'd have bought a very big
donkey to bite his nose, and donkeys that bite are very inexpensive.")
"Give me a gate, then."
"We don't have gates."
"I'll make one."
He makes a gate from two pieces of wood and a wire grill. They ask him to
buy a padlock. He buys one. A soldier supervises as he cuts through the
bottom tiers of razor wire (they won't allow the top one to be cut) and he
installs his little gate. "If the gate is left open and anything happens, we
will shoot you."
Sue Mitchell, the MSF psychologist, asks: "What's it like for you to tell
this story?"
"I release what I have in my chest," he says. "I can't sleep. I woke this
night at 1am. I thought it was sunrise. I woke the kids and told them to go
to school. I look around and see that my life has been ruined. I'm like a
dry branch in the desert."
Psychologists have been visiting the family since shortly after the
occupation of their house began. Each time, they have to apply for access
to Israeli authorities; it's usually granted three times out of four. Sue, a
41-year-old Australian, has a wonderfully gentle presence. She quietly
steers her patients to and fro between the pain of their memories and a
recognition and acknowledgment of their dignity, courage, generosity and
good humour in the face of this desperation. She encourages them to voice
their fears, tell their stories and, particularly with the children, act out
their experiences.
Abu Saguer is a man of great affability. Because of his resilience, his wit,
his tenderness with the children, it's easy to think of his survival in
heroic terms, but often he has periods of deep depression, disorientation
and forgetfulness. "I'm not scared any more, I can't explain it, I just
don't care. There's one God, I'll die only one time."
The soldiers have decamped for the moment, but the family is never sure
when they will come back. Part of their home has been lost to them. We walk
through those rooms that the troops occupy. The curtains chosen with care
by Abu Saguer's wife long ago billow inwards, in unsettling contrast to the
camouflage netting in front of the window. His gate is visible from here. I
imagine him approaching across the broken ground, struggling with a bag of
flour, stooping to unlock and open that little gate.
As we leave, Sue calls her base. Each visit must be registered with and
approved by the District Civil Liaison (DCL). We hear that a doctor has been
shot dead while treating a wounded boy at a crossroads in Rafah that we
passed yesterday.
Entering Gaza for the first time at the Erez checkpoint, we saw some Israeli
kids in army uniform - we'd seen them on the way from Jerusalem, hitchhiking
or slouching at bus stops, dishevelled, their uniforms accessorised with
shades and coloured scarves. Weapons were slung across their backs.
They looked like they should have been on the way to school. One girl at
Erez wearing eyeliner and lipstick, friendly with the implied complicity of
"We're on the same side," said: "I'm laughing all the time - I'm crazy."
Most of them appeared indifferent, almost unseeing. We walked through the
concrete tunnel separating these two worlds. In the eyes of their bosses, we
are a menace because we're witnesses. All humanitarian workers are
witnesses. The UN has been on phase-four alert, the highest level before
pulling out completely.
They're a little tired of being shot at. We travel south from Erez toward
Beit Lahiya through the area "sterilised" during "Days of Penitence". That
was Israel's 17-day military offensive in northern Gaza that started on
September 29, after a rocket fired by the Islamic militant group Hamas
killed two toddlers in the Israeli town of Sederot, a kilometre away on the
other side of the border. These home-made rockets have a five-mile range,
so Israel sent in 2,000 troops and 200 tanks and armoured bulldozers to
set up a 61/2-mile buffer zone and "clear out" suspected militants. Days of
Penitence killed 107 Palestinians (at least 20 of them children), left
nearly 700 homeless, and caused over $3m in property damage.
Towards the end of it, even Israeli military commanders were urging Ariel
Sharon to stop. He wouldn't listen. So there is not a building left standing
that hasn't been acned by shells and bullets, many of them with gaping
mouths ripped out by the tanks. A vast area has been depopulated and
ground into the rubble-strewn desert we find wherever we go. A Bedouin
encampment has settled, impossibly, on one of these wastelands. Half a
dozen smug-faced camels and a white donkey stand behind the fence waiting
for Christ knows what; the air is heavy with their scent. The families have
constructed hovels of sheet plastic, branches and jagged pieces of rusting
corrugated iron. They look like the last scavenging survivors of doomsday.
As
we head southwest towards Gaza City, the Mediterranean Sea appears like a
mirage, shocking in its beauty: Gaza's western border.
We arrive at the MSF headquarters in Gaza City for the daily logistical
meeting. Hiba, a French-Algerian about to complete her mission, has perhaps
the most stressful job of all: to daily organise and monitor the movements
of each of the six teams working here. She has to seek "co-ordinations",
which, in the veiled dialect of occupation, means permission to enter and
leave any sensitive area. This she achieves, if possible, through an Israeli
DCL area commander in the department of co-ordination. We'd met one of
them - just a kid like the others - at Erez. "Oh, Hiba, she takes it all too
personally," he'd said. As if the whole thing were a game, with no hard
feelings, between consenting adults. Even with this "co-ordination", an MSF
team may arrive in the area only to be refused access by the local Israeli
officer in charge (or, in some cases, to be shot at). No reason need be
given. "Security," they're sometimes told.
Hiba is constantly assessing, reassessing, adapting. At any moment the
heavily fortified Israeli checkpoint at Abu Houli, in the centre of the
Strip, can be closed, effectively dividing Gaza into two parts. It may
remain closed for four, six, 10 hours. It might be a security alert or an
officer's whim. Yasser, Sue's Bedouin driver, once waited for three days to
cross. We were held up there. A Palestinian officer, identifiable by the
size of his belly, had overridden his leaner subordinates and waved us to
the front of the queue. A babble of aggressive commands was disgorged from
the IDF bunker through new burglar-proof loudspeakers. Recently a gang of
young boys had made a human pyramid and stolen the originals. "Wah, wah,
wah," the boxes yell at you from within their razor-wire cocoons.
Hiba rests only when the teams return safely to their bases in Gaza City, or
in the south where another MSF apartment allows visits there to continue if
the checkpoint is closed.
At the southern MSF base in Abassan I'm awoken on our third day at 4.30am
by the call to prayer, then again at 7am by the surprising sound of children
in
a school playground. In any place, in any language, the sound is
unmistakable. Gleeful and contentious. When you're in bed and you don't have
to go to school yourself it's delicious. Are they taught here, among other
things, that they have no future? The windows on this side of the apartment
overlook a playground of pressed dirt with a black-and-white-striped goal of
tubular metal at each end. The school, conspicuously unmarked by bullet or
shellfire, is a long two-storey building, built in an L-shape along two
sides of the pitch. It is painted cream and pistachio and resembles a motel
in Arizona. (Later, in the refugee camp at Rafah, we'll drive past one
riddled with bullet holes, and meet a grinning 10-year-old who proudly shows
us the scars, front and back, where the bullet passed through his neck one
day at school.)
After waking, I move to the back of the flat, to the kitchen. At the far
side of a hand-tilled field warming itself in the early sunshine stand two
pristine houses, white and cream, like miniature palaces. The field is
hemmed at one end by a row of olive trees, and at the other by a large
cactus.
A middle-aged man and woman in traditional clothes move the drills in
unison. The distance between them maintained, gestures identical, they
advance, bent at the waist, planting one tiny onion at a time plucked from a
metal bowl. If an occupying force were ever in need of an image to advertise
the benevolence of their authority, this would be it. I wonder what awaits
them. I try but fail to imagine the roar of a diesel engine, the filth of
its exhaust, as a bulldozer turns this idyll to dust.
Later, sipping cardamom-flavoured coffee, I look down on a fiercely
contested football game. Half the kids have bare feet. There's a teacher on
each side, in shirt and tie. One tries a volley which, to shrieks of
delight, sails over the wall behind the goal. Two little boys watch, arms
around each other. They turn and hug for a long time, then wander off still
arm in arm. Sue Mitchell arrives. The co-ordination we needed has come
through. After the warning shots fired at us from the watchtower at Tuffah
yesterday, we'd thought maybe the Israelis would refuse it.
Yasmine is a grave, self-possessed 11-year-old. She emerged from her coma
after a nine-hour operation to remove nails embedded in her skull and brain.
An exploding pin mortar had been fired into her house. Her father was hit in
the stomach and can no longer work. I've held this type of nail in my hand.
They are black, about 1� in long, sharpened at one end, the tiny metal fins
at the other end presumably designed to make them spin and cause deeper
penetration. We sifted through a pile of shrapnel at the hospital, all of it
removed from victims. These jagged, twisted fragments, some the size of an
iPod, were not intended to wound, but to eviscerate and dismember: to
obliterate their victims. Yasmine lives a short drive away from Abu Saguer,
in a ramshackle enclave with a courtyard shaded by fig trees. Across a
sterilised zone lies her cousins' house, but it remains inaccessible (the
cousins, including the most withdrawn child Sue Mitchell has ever met, are
also her patients).
On the other side of a coil of razor wire, laid within feet of Yasmine's
house, runs a sunken lane gouged out of the sand by tanks. When Sue first
met her, Yasmine was terrorised, screaming and throwing up during the night.
Such symptoms are common. In areas such as this, leaving your house day or
night means risking death; staying there is no more secure. Nowhere is safe.
Under Sue's guidance, Yasmine and countless other cousins have prepared a
show which, after many last-minute whispered reminders and much giggling,
they perform for us. Yasmine is undoubtedly the force behind this. Her power
of self-expression is immense. As she recounts the story of her wounding,
her voice rides out of her in wave upon wave, full of pleading and
admonition. Her crescent eyes burn within a tight mask of suffering; her
hands reach out to us palms up, in supplication. At the end the tension in
her fierce, lovely face resolves into the shy smile of a performer
re-inhabiting her frailer self when the possession has lifted. Then there is
a play, with sober, stylised choreography and a chorus of hand jives. A
silent little girl whose expression is deadpan, unchanging, play-acts being
shot by soldiers during a football game.
This four-year-old has witnessed much of the horror that has befallen the
family. She lies obediently on the ground, splayed out and rigid. The
mourners, curved in a semicircle around her, pretend to weep and wail, but
they're all laughing behind their hands; we laugh too. Then they sing:
"Children of the world, they laugh and smile, they go to sleep with music,
they wake with music, we sleep with shooting and we wake with shooting.
Despite them we will play, despite them we will play, despite them we will
laugh, despite them we will sing songs of love."
Yasmine doesn't join the others as they cluster around us to say goodbye.
Looking up, we see her leaning on the parapet of the roof, smiling down on
us. Silent. Her dark face is golden in the rich, syrupy light of dusk.
Sue Mitchell is one of three psychologists here for MSF. Each will work with
about 50 families during their six-month stay. The short-term therapy they
offer is invaluable, but in some way it seems like a battlefield dressing
with no possibility of evacuation for the injured. These stories are
unexceptional. Every room in every humble, makeshift, bullet-ridden
dwelling, in each of the labyrinthine streets of the camps, contains a story
such as this - of loss and injury and terror. Of humiliation and despair.
What separates those of Abu Saguer and Yasmine is that we carry their
stories out with us. The others you'll never hear about.
HOW CHILDREN LEARN TO SURVIVE ON THE FRONT LINE
Violence and bloodshed are the backdrop to the lives of the children of
Gaza. That they cling to hope and their dignity leaves psychologists such as
Sue Mitchell deeply moved. With one group of young patients, she has
produced a practical guide to help them and children in other war-torn
areas. The children of the Abu Hassan family - 10 of them, aged from five to
13 - were caught in Israel's Days of Penitence offensive. "They'd been shot
at, attacked, some of their houses had been demolished, they'd seen people
blown up, and had been confined in the smallest room of their house for two
weeks by Israeli soldiers," says Mitchell. Faces they drew in the sand
showed inverted semicircle mouths and large tears.
"I was feeling my heart small and I was unable to talk. I thought I was
going to die," said one. Mitchell was inspired by how they coped with the
trauma, and wrote down what they told her. The result is a booklet in the
children's own words, How to Manage the Effects of a Military Attack: Tips
for Children. "Invent games that make you laugh and help you breathe," says
one child. "Look at each other's faces. If you see someone is distressed,
talk to them," says another. And there are dreams for the future: "Eat
olives - the olive tree is the tree of peace."
"They're delighted by the book," says Mitchell, "but they also underplay
their strengths. They say, 'We're not so special; all Palestinian kids know
how to do this.'"
*AUTHORS IN THE FRONTLINE
In The Sunday Times Magazine's continuing series, renowned writers and
artists bring a fresh perspective to the world's trouble spots. The
international medical-aid organisation MSF has helped our correspondents
reach some of these inhospitable areas. To donate to MSF, visit
www.uk.msf.org, or call 0800 200 222
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