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CounterPunch
March 7,
2003
"Nothing Ends
Here. This is the End."
Nightmare in
Rafah
By BEN GRANBY
Rafah,
Gaza.
I had spent nights in Rafah before, but never
so close to the front line. On March 4, I was offered to join
International Solidarity Movement (ISM) member Rachel in sleeping
at a home threatened with imminent demolition. The ISM, which
works throughout the Palestinian Territories staying in homes
endangered by Israeli bulldozers, has a small core in Rafah in
the southern Gaza Strip. They have spent their days responding
to emergencies, placing themselves in the line of bulldozers
and tanks, and their nights with families whose homes are threatened.
To understand daily life in Rafah is
beyond the capability of most foreigners. Only by paying a visit
is it possible to understand how people survive in a city that
is almost completely surrounded by hostile tanks and gun towers,
and loses portions of its border almost daily. Since the start
of the second Palestinian Intifada, the Israeli Defense Forces
have embarked on a slow, but monumental campaign of demolishing
homes along the Egyptian border to the south and the Israeli
settlements to the west. After conducting a few massive demolitions
in July 2001 and again in January 2002, which garnered international
condemnation, the IDF has resorted to slow and piecemeal destruction
instead. In its now gradual method, over the past three months
some 200 more homes have been demolished, brining the total in
Rafah to over 600. This doesn't include the vast areas of orchards,
gardens and greenhouses so critical to this impoverished city's
food supplies.
Before arriving at the house, owned by
a local policeman named Monsour, I asked Rachel what the nightly
situation was like in Brazil camp. "Oh, theirs is a good
deal of ambient gunfire usually. But nothing much." she
casually described it. The term "ambient gunfire" stuck
in my head. In my previous stays in Rafah the year before, I
had been further from the frontline but still heard machinegun
bursts and tank shells into the night. I thought it was a particularly
nerve-wracking experience. I had no idea how much worse it was
at the front.
We approached Monsour's two-story home
in almost total darkness through sand- swept streets. Instantly
I felt far more afraid than having been so close to the Israeli
tanks and gun towers during the day. I simply couldn't see any
of them and had no idea what was on the other end of each street.
Monsour's front yard, if it can be called that, consisted of
sand covered piles of concrete and twisted metal, moved in to
place by bulldozers. The sand piles mark the beginning of no-mans
land.
We knocked on the heavy metal doors and
were let in to a dimly lit hallway with half of a ceiling where
Monsour's family sat next to some burning charcoal. Indeed,
the desert night in winter was quite cold, but I only noticed
it when I wasn't thinking about the tanks.
Monsour, who looks well beyond his mid-40s,
took heavy drags from repeated cigarettes as he asked me about
my background. His father and brother talked with each other
while eating biscuits as his elderly mother found us lawn chairs
to rest in. Almost instantly the chugging of tanks emanated from
the walls. No one else seemed to notice, and at first I thought
they might just be large trucks. But the clanking of metal treads
revealed the true origin of the sound and I sat in awe as the
family and Rachel continued to chat while a tank positioned itself
only a few hundred feet away. I knew fully well that this was
the case every night here, but it still took some adjustment.
Food was shared, and the grandmother hobbled back and forth to
bring us tea. She wouldn't quit working, despite her clearly
advanced age and the able bodied men who could help. She just
kept grinning at Rachel and me, happy to have us present. The
family took delight in finding that I knew some Arabic, but once
my vocabulary's limits were met, they lost interest. We continued
to communicate with each other though and I thought it would
be a simple night of laughing and eating.
About a half-hour later, as more tanks
and bulldozers rumbled past, I thought I would try to take a
look. Monsour's brother Rafat took me upstairs where there was
nothing more than a short patio and a small bedroom. Rafat and
I took turns poking our heads around either side of the walls
to catch glimpses of the bulldozers and other armored vehicles
moving in the night. The bulldozers looked immense, standing
about 9 meters high, slowly chugging past appearing almost twice
as large as the armored vehicles. Eventually more came past,
but in the end we returned to our seats in the hall for some
tea.
Monsour's youngest brother, Nidal, an
ever smiling young man, told me as we descended the stairs that
"no animal lives here. Just humans." Shortly after,
just as our conversation turned to learning Arabic, a donkey
began bleating aloud far in the distance. The half-honking, half-squealing
sound startled me and I asked Monsour what it was. He told me
it was a donkey, but that in their tradition such a sound means
that the devil is coming. I tried to ponder the old-wives-tale
as if it would prove prophetic, but I eventually scoffed at the
idea.
Not long after, Rachel went up to the
porch to take a phone call from Jenny, another ISM member stationed
in a home not too far away. They began debating what to do if
in case the bulldozers began demolishing anything. Almost on
cue, a loud detonation sounded. Then gunfire erupted not too
far away. I ran up to the porch with my camera and Nidal followed.
He explained that the detonations, which gave a low nad dull
rumble, were Palestinian homemade grenades being throw at the
tanks and bulldozers. As he explained this to me, a gunbattle
erupted in full.
A few short cracks from single-fire Kalashnikov's
were repeatedly answered by heavy blasts from Zelda APCs (Armored
Personnel Carriers with an added gun platform on top). The bursts
sounded like an amplified zipper, and its echo resonated through
the refugee camp for seconds after. I began to gauge my surroundings,
noting the thickness of the porch's high walls and where I could
duck down if needed. Nidal and Rachel hardly flinched at the
gunfire and I began to grow accustomed to it. After a few minutes
I realized that it was safe enough to poke my head over the concrete
porch walls to check if I could see anything. The battle was
going on several houses down and past an orchard so really nothing
was visible.
Meanwhile, the monstrous D9 military
bulldozers began their work. Rachel called around to known families
to confirm that the Israelis were demolishing a mosque that stood
just at the end of a road. It was difficult though to hear any
sound of demolition over the din of the gunfire. Bursts came
from different areas and their echoes prevented us from knowing
their origin. Rachel wanted to know what to do. Did ISM want
to try to get in front of the bulldozer? The loose plan was to
bring battery-powered lights to wave while walking up to the
demolition. We had a megaphone with which the ISM usually identified
themselves. In the past they had been successful only sometimes
in actually delaying or preventing a demolition with their pretense.
But all of those cases were in the day time.
I pressed myself up against the wall
of the porch thinking. Rachel again asked, "Ben, what do
you think we should do?" I knew that had I been proposed
this scenario hours before, and given my video equipment, I would
have said yes. But the night was too much. I balked. Yet my reasoning
was valid--the short cracks of rifles from around the area indicated
Palestinian resistance fighters. If we wandered out into the
darkness, we could be shot from either side. More heavy bursts
erupted. My heart was racing, but I rather preferred my position
on the porch.
Cold winds swept in, prompting Nidal
to jump around complaining. He began making jokes about the situation.
"So Ben, shall I go get you a rifle?" No, I said, I
want an RPG. He laughed and shook my hand. How could I blame
his reaction? This was his nightly liferisking death just by
living in his home, and constantly fearing that it may not be
there in the morning. By now the rest of Nidal's family had gone
to bed. His elderly grandmother somehow slept up against the
wall facing the bulldozing--but then again, I don't think they
had a choice.
Peculiar wooshing sounds echoed from
a distance away. They clearly came from inside the camp. I asked
Nidal what they were, and he said that they were probably just
distant gunfire. But I thought that there was no way guns would
echo like that. It was only the next day that we found out that
the Palestinian resistance launched several small and inneffective
rockets from Salah Ad-din Street, about 200m away.
Rachel was again on the phone urging
Jenny to come over with a portable light. They figured they
could discuss things then. Just as she was getting off the phone,
a tremendous CRACK CRACK pierced the air sending us both to the
floor. There was likely a resistance fighter not far from the
house. We cringed each time he shot, even though the reality
was that the sound meant that he was shooting away from us. It
was the inaudible gunbursts which would be potentially fatal.
Jenny somehow managed to wander the dimly
lit camp streets to make her way into the house. I realized that
I certainly would not have done such a thing alone, then again
she had already been in Rafah for several months. At 28, the
small woman from England was quite adept at her ISM work. As
she arrived, we stood outside waiting. Loud bursts again came
from not more than a few meters away. The others turned to look
while I almost literally jumped up. Well, they do return fire,
I though.
It was at this point, now sitting in
Monsour's hallway discussing plans, that the telltale sound of
a small motor soared overhead. It was the lawn-mower buzz of
an Israeli spy drone. I alerted the others to the fact that while
they planned a means to move around the gun battle to the vicinity
of the mosque that the drone would see them. My fear was that
while a tank may not notice us slip by in the dark, a drone's
infrared eye would see us coming and could tell the tank to open
fire even before it realized we weren't combatants. This gave
Rachel some pause. "You know," she sighed, "I
never really realized that." Phew. Another concrete reason
not to risk my life tonight, I thought. Indeed, the resistance
fighting all but ended once the drone emerged. Apparently the
Palestinians recognized its potential to point out their locations
and they melted away into the night. It was now coming on two-
o'clock and I was drifting off in my chair while Rachel and Jenny
continued to ponder ideas. Finally, they too concluded that a
night-time action was too risky. Reprieve. I rather knew I would
regret the sort of thrill, but perhaps for one of the first times
in such a situation, I thought the better of it. Hell, I figured,
I'm already risking quite a bit just by sitting next to the gunfire.
Nidal offered to escort Jenny back to
the home she was staying at. Abu Ahmed, her elderly host, was
apparently a rather cranky man that didn't like her wandering
out into battlefields late at night. Rachel and I ascended back
to the narrow porch to see if anything had changed. One of the
bulldozers had begun pulling back, with the drone soaring around
overhead. As it chugged by, I made some vain attempts to film
it. It was a beast, an infernal contraption with no face and
clearly no soul. Its abstract form reminded me of the futuristic
tanks from "The Terminator" crushing all beneath its
triangular steel treads. To the credit of the total absurdity
of the home demolitions in Rafah, I observed that the bulldozers
actually emit a beeping sound when reversing, just like normal
construction vehicles. It went a long way to showing how the
Israelis had transformed the machine for solely malicious purposes.
But its companion was still at work.
Now without the gunfire we could hear the sounds of demolition.
The mosque was being eviscerated and grinding metal reverberated
across the refugee camp's narrow roads. The building sounded
like it was dying. The metal groaned and screamed, dulled only
by the thud of falling cinder. The mosque had once been a principal
center of the community in the camp and now it was breathing
its last. I must stress that this image wasn't simply a literary
allusion--for that night for the first time in my life I was
anthropomorphizing a building. I also had to realize just how
angry I was becoming. There was nothing to do but sleep.
Rachel and I slept in a small bedroom
adjacent to the porch on the second- story. This was the area
where the family would expand into as it grew, if the house was
to be given a stay of execution. The room was barely any warmer
than outside. I shuddered and paused again to listen to the surroundings.
The drone kept up its incessant buzz above the area, while in
the distance large pistons and motors wheezed. Every now and
then I could make out the sound of collapsing concrete. I shivered
as I crept into bed. My pillow was rock hard. I fell right to
sleep.
BAM! CRACK CRACK CRACK! Typically there
is a subtle transition from a state of sleep to waking where
one fades out of a dream. Instead I woke up into a nightmare.
The house was practically shaking as shells and explosives went
off around us. Gunfire spewed from all around. Barely able to
remain conscious, yet scared out of my mind I struggled to gain
a perspective. The drone was gone. Seizing the opportunity, the
resistance must have waited in ambush for the returning bulldozer.
At this hour I couldn't even muster much moral support. All I
could think of was my safety.
As the chatter of guns and thuds of explosives
went off all around I did a quick scan in the dark of my situation.
The far wall facing the Israeli pathway was stacked ceiling high
with blankets and pillows. Good. To the right, where the Israelis
had attacked the mosque, Rachel was sleeping and would probably
take a bullet before me. Good. I found myself taking a sort of
fetal position as I sunk back into bed. I was cold, scared and
dead tired. I fell back asleep.
The next morning we woke to Rachel's
phone. The ISM had a meeting with the Rafah Water Municipality
to help guard their workers as they set off to repair wells demolished
by the Israelis a few weeks before. In a total daze I threw on
my coat and got myself ready. As I plodded down the open-air
stairwell and into the hallway a machinegun let off a sustained
burst. I just shook my head.
Nothing will end in Rafah. Rafah is the
end.
Ben Granby
can be reached at: sarin@devo.com
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