A Rebel in Gaza

al-Ghoul, Nassib, Mitchell

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780998777085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gaza has always been rebellious... stubborn, addictive, I'm her daughter and I look like her.

A Palestinian journalist who grew up in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, Asmaa al-Ghoul offers a rare view of a young woman coming into her own political and secular beliefs amidst the region's relentless violence and under Israeli occupation. She has been called "too strong minded, " frequently criticized for not covering her hair and for being outspoken. As a journalist and activist, she has led demonstrations and been vocal in her opposition to Hamas and Fatah, which has led her to family strife, imprisonment, brutal interrogations, death threats and attacks.

A Rebel in Gaza is Asmaa's story as told to Franco-Lebanese writer Selim Nassib over the course of the "Arab Spring" through meetings, phone calls, Skype, and even texts during the siege of Gaza in 2014, when Israel conducted Operation Cast Lead in response to several rocket attacks by Hamas and she was locked in the "open air prison" that her homeland had become. Both determined and dedicated to its liberation through writing, education and culture, she paints the sensory portrait of the native country she passionately loves, which over years has become a cauldron of wars and fundamentalism.

Asmaa al-Ghoul (b. 1982) was given the prestigious Courage in Journalism Award by the International Women's Media Foundation and is described by The New York Times as a woman "known for her defiant stance against the violations of civil rights in Gaza."

Selim Nassib (b. 1946), journalist for Libération and novelist is the author of I Loved You for Your Voice and The Palestinian Lover (Europa Editions).

26

Men in Pajamas

THE KICK-OFF FOR the Palestinian Spring is to be given by a large demonstration on March 15, 2011, both on the West Bank and in Gaza. That is what we have decided. We can’t join the other Arab nations in demanding “the fall of the regime” because we have two regimes—and we won’t get anywhere as long as the split between Fatah and Hamas persists. For us it will rather be “The people want national unity,” and that is the slogan we have adopted. A movement that has taken the name of “The Youth of March 15” has also called for the demonstration. The boldest is GYBO (Gaza Youth Breaks Out), a collective of young militants which has made a name for itself with an inflammatory manifesto: “To hell with Hamas. To hell with Israel. To hell with Fatah… We, the young people of Gaza, are fed up with all this. We’re like fleas stuck between two fingernails, we’re living out a nightmare within another nightmare.” There were just three of them at the start but they quickly attracted incredible support. The Association of Young Secularists and Isha! were also part of the collective calling for the demonstration.

The Hamas agencies were not slow to react. They rounded up and interrogated all the militants they managed to identify. At first they didn’t bother me but summoned my father to get him to put pressure on me and prevent me from writing.

“How could I tell my daughter of twenty-nine to stop writing?” he replied.

“You’re responsible for her.”

“That is your opinion. As for me, I stopped being responsible for her a long time ago. You can continue to give orders to your children and govern them until they die, but for me, that’s not the way things are. I leave them free.”

He came home somewhat upset by the lack of respect with which he’d been treated. He told me, “The message they have for you is: ‘Don’t write anything anymore.’ Well, what I’m saying to you is, ‘Go on writing. Don’t fear anyone.’” He smiled before adding, “I had no idea how afraid of you they are.”

In reality, what they were afraid of was the movement as a whole, and quite rightly so: the young people throughout the Arab world were in turmoil and the question of Palestinian unity that we had chosen seemed to be a key issue. The Hamas leaders guessed that they weren’t going to be confronted with the usual minor demonstration but with a mass movement.

It’s the morning of March 15 and I’m heading for Seraglio Square, the setting-off point for the demo. I’m met by a forest of Hamas flags. There’s a considerable crowd, but I can’t recognize anyone. The Islamist movement in power has fabricated a so-called “Youth Association” that has trumpeted its support for March 15. Making colossal efforts, they have called for the gathering by putting up posters everywhere. Fatah has done the same on the West Bank: mobilized the population in the same way, outflanking our comrades over there. The fraternal enemies were pretending to join the movement. They even claimed to have originated the idea, swearing, hand on heart, that they were against the divisions and for the unity of Palestine.

Sick at heart, my friends and I leave and set off at a brisk pace for another large square in the town, that of the Unknown Soldier. Young members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad get in our way. They stick to us. On the way we pass several zannane, Hamas’s little spies, kids who try to attack and hit us. We give them a few blows in return and continue on our way. The Square of the Unknown Soldier is also covered in Hamas flags, the leaders have already started to speak, relayed by a powerful PA system. They’re stealing our day and the most important squares in the town.

I think about a place that won’t have occurred to them: Al Khatib Square, a green space four times the size of the place where we are at the moment. I shout, “Everyone to Al Khatib.” The Jihad and Fatah militants send me messages saying that’s not a good idea, but I don’t take orders from anyone. There’s not a soul on Al Khatib Square. I send a torrent of messages on my cell phone: “There’s already ten thousand of us! Come and join us.” It’s a brazen lie, but I have no choice. All our friends who were getting nowhere at the Seraglio or at the Unknown Soldier converge on the square. One hour later, we’re not far from being thirty thousand—at least that’s what I say in my text messages. The institutions, the trade unions, the journalists, everyone joins the movement. We’re euphoric. We don’t have a PA system, we have to improvise. We strike up patriotic songs and shout slogans, that’s all we can do. Security arrive and start filming us; we can see from their faces how furious they are: we’ve managed to make them look ridiculous. Someone comes to tell me our people are terribly thirsty, Hamas having given instructions that water is not to be delivered to us. We manage to get two water tanks towed to the square, and all we just have to do is help ourselves from the taps—it’s so hot!

Now people are flooding in from all directions, there are more and more of us. Some have brought tents and we decide to sleep there, like our comrades in Cairo’s Tahir Square. Our morale is as high as can be, the Hamas Prime Minister himself has the audacity to make a speech saying that he supports us… Our March 15 is a great success. At 5:30 p.m., rumors start to go around that the government is preparing to launch an attack on us but we just shrug our shoulders and retain our optimism. I come across a friend in the crowd, Samah el Sheikh, who is an actor and writer. Pregnant, she’s come to the demonstration with her poet husband and their daughter. Over by the mosque I suddenly notice men in pajamas armed with batons who are rushing at the crowd with loud cries. I guess that they’re the regime’s henchmen coming from prayers. They’re wearing pajamas to make people think they’re simple civilians who’ve come as local inhabitants. Samah’s husband takes their daughter by the hand and hurries away with her. I start running as well, I see people beaten up, girls hit, women dragged along the ground and subjected to copious insults: “Whores! Women of ill repute! Your children are prostitutes like you!”

I manage to get out of the square and hurry toward a main road where the traffic is heavier, hoping to escape that way. But a man in pajamas armed with a thin iron rod starts chasing me. He catches up with me on the edge of a sidewalk and starts to beat me. “You’re Asmaa al-Ghoul, aren’t you? It is you?” I shout, “That’s enough! Leave me alone!” Rather than coming to help me, the people keep as far away as possible—while a few minutes ago on the square they were all gathering around me. Eventually I manage to escape from my attacker and run into a dark, narrow street. At that moment I hear the voice of my friend Samah behind me: a dozen Security men have cornered her and are beating her up. I have to admit that I hesitate for a second, then retrace my steps. Samah is much bigger than me, I have no idea how I manage to push the men out of the way and put my arms around her, covering her completely. When she tells the story today she says, “Asmaa managed to put me inside her.” And the blows start to rain down on my head and shoulders while the men in pajamas shout our names, hers and mine. No one comes to help us, except a person you’d never expect to see, a man called Ghassan, neither a militant, nor a writer, nor a poet… a simple bookkeeper. He’d been taking part in the gathering, and when he saw us being beaten he just ran over to help us. Suddenly Samah said to me, “I can feel something in my back.” A stab with a knife.

Someone I know arrives: Yussef, the man who threatened to make a hole in my cheek with a pencil. He shouts at me, “Are you going to call me Abul Zalaam (the father of oppression) again?” He’s been doing some reading—that’s what I called him in my blog. He has us arrested, Sameh and me. As for the unfortunate Ghassan, he orders him to be taken in as well.

At the Security prison I see a line of cameras and tape recorders the plainclothes officers have smashed, cameras that have been seized, even the goods confiscated from the poor vendors of fruit juice. Above all, I witness the comings and goings of the men in pajamas who come for a rest. They behave as if they belong there, which they do. A warder asks me to come and see Sameh, who’s sitting in a neighboring room. She’s in a bad way. The knife penetrated the fat and muscles; no sensitive organ seems to have been affected but the wound doesn’t look good. Another officer arrives who makes me stand up against the wall and slowly comes up to me.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“No.”

“We hit women as well, you know.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Sameh starts shouting, “Leave her alone!”

He insults both of us and comes back to me. “Where’s your son Nasser? Wasn’t he with your mother in the garden yesterday? And where is he today?”

Suddenly we’re both very much afraid, we don’t say a single word. We can see that the man is satisfied. “You can write what you like about me.”

That’s all they’re worried about: what I can write. I remain silent. He goes on, “If I see a single sentence, a single letter you’ve written about me, you’d better look out.”

An officer comes with some cotton and some alcohol and asks me to clean Sameh’s wound. I refuse, saying, “It’s a deep wound, my friend could fall unconscious. You’ve got to call an ambulance to take her to the hospital.”

They don’t know what to do, they hesitate for a good hour before picking up the phone. And when they do, they register Sameh under a made-up name. I ask to go to the washroom, and the officer orders his men to accompany me. “And don’t let her in the toilet with the eucalyptus outside the window,” he shouts. He clearly follows what I write. The last time I was imprisoned I noticed that tree outside the window. Parts of the way I took to school when I was little, sick with fear of the Israelis, were planted with eucalyptus. For some inexplicable reason the scent of that tree gave me a feeling of safety, so that I had been reassured by the prison eucalyptus, and I’d recounted that in my piece about ‘General Salwa’.

When I come out of the toilet, I’m taken to a room and a completely veiled woman comes in behind me. I say, “We’re alone, there are no men with us, why do you keep your niqab on?”

Without a word she takes it off and I say, “Allah! You look like my mother.”

It’s true! We start to talk. It becomes almost friendly. She asks, “Why did you demonstrate?”

“But that’s obvious. Everyone knew about it the day before. Please ask me questions you don’t know the reply to.”

An officer bursts into the room, interrupting us. A message from my friend Fathi arrived on my cell phone a moment ago: “The meeting is fixed for eight o’clock at the Institute.”

The officer says, “We went to the Institute, there was no one there. Call your friend back and ask what the new place for the meeting is so we can go there.”

He really thinks I’m going to spy for him. I say, “Okay, Call back the number.”

He does so and puts his ear next to mine. I feel he gets a bit too close.

“Hello?”

“Fathi?”

“Asmaa, where are you? We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“I’m at Security, they’ve beaten me.”

The officer brutally cuts off the call, picks up an iron chair and holds it over my head. I protect myself and cry, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t do anything else.”

And it’s true, no one knew I’d been taken in by Security and I’ve managed to sound the alarm.

The veiled woman reproaches me bitterly. “I was good to you because you played at being nice. It’s my fault. I allowed you to become familiar with me.”

Officer Tayeb comes back into the room, his tone is slightly more courteous, “You have to state that our men didn’t attack you, you fought amongst yourselves.”

He demands that because outside, though I don’t know this yet, things are starting to turn out badly for them. There are angry comments on Facebook: “Hamas has attacked people for no reason at all, they beat them and showered outrageous insults on them.”

The left-wingers and the human rights movements are not the only ones to express their indignation, some of the more liberal Hamas leaders joined in as well. The officer and his henchmen try to defend themselves by saying, “It wasn’t us.”

“Of course it was you. I saw with my own eyes attackers dressed in pajamas come back to take refuge here. I can testify to that.”

“No, you can’t. You’re the ones who are responsible.”

“Us? You claim that we were stabbing each other? But it was you who stabbed my friend.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He’s silent for a moment, then he says, “I must warn you that it’s not your father who will come to collect you. We’ve decided that it’s the family mayor who will take you out of here.”

The family mayor is one of my uncles, a brother of my mother, but he has to come from Rafah, a journey that takes an hour and a half. He’s conservative, but he does love me a lot. He’s very much like his father, my Grandfather Abdullah, which makes me feel weak when facing him, I can’t refuse him anything. I’ve never forgotten how good he’s always been to me. When he comes into the prison he’s accompanied by his brother, my Uncle Ahmed, whose library made me dream so much. They sit down at a table and Officer Tayeb starts to scold them, “If I’d found out that my daughter smoked, I’d have killed her.”

We all remain silent, then my uncle says to me, “Come on, we’re going.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to sign any documents.”

Tayeb literally goes crazy. “If you go on talking like that, you’ll remain under lock and key. Even if day turns into night, I won’t release you.”

“As for me, I don’t want to get out. I’m staying in prison.”

Uncle Ahmed doesn’t say anything, he can’t bring himself to tell me to do this or that. But my other uncle, the mayor, starts crying. He’s wearing my grandfather’s ‘abaya, he has his skullcap on. Head lowered, he lets the tears run down in silence. It makes me feel terribly upset. “I’ll sign anything you want,” I say. “I just want to get out of here.”

Officer Tayeb explodes with rage, “I don’t want you to sign anything at all anymore! Get out!”

We went out, my two uncles and I, and walked. I can remember that we spoke on the way, but I no longer know what about. At home we continued to talk, even to laugh. I was shattered but strangely happy. My father said to my uncle, “From now on your official function will be to get Asmaa out of prison,” and everyone burst out laughing. The next day the journalists flocked to the house, and the press union and foreigners, a crazy mob. I was deathly pale, I was wracked with pain on that second day, I was completely done. As for Sameh, she was lying on a couch at home, making every effort to recover from the stabbing wound she’d received.

My maternal uncle passed on a message from my Uncle Saïd to me, “If you had insisted on staying in prison, they could have killed you. They’ll certainly get you if you write anything else.” I said to the messenger, “Tell my Uncle Saïd to keep his mouth shut if he wants to stop me publishing another article on him.” I know that my message was passed on to him because he actually did remain silent from then on.

Some Hamas policemen set up outside our house, I realized I no longer had the right to go out. But that wasn’t the end of the story, the Palestinian Spring still had a few more tricks up ...