508
PARTISAN
REVIEW
Gazans died after an Israeli truck plowed into their car. The demonstra–
tions and rioting which erupted in Gaza's Jebalya Camp after the acci–
dent soon spread throughout the occupied territories, finally coalescing
into a full-fledged rebellion. Since that time, the Strip has achieved such
a reputation that many Israelis, soldier and civilian alike, say "Lekh Ie
'aza" ("Go to Gaza") instead of the traditional "Lekh Ie azazel" ("Go
to hell").
In
a recent army scandal, an Israeli officer became so annoyed
with his men - who refused to volunteer for an arduous training exercise
- that he threatened to send them to Gaza as punishment.
The hell in Gaza is what the first-time visitor notices most: the ab–
surdly fat and bold rats, the fermented mountains of uncollected trash,
the gut-wrenching booms of tear-gas grenades. Gaza as hell makes a sexy
story, but this depiction is always simplistic and incomplete.
2
Gaza is a
world wrought with ambiguities and contradictions.
In
the streets, the
ubiquitous Mercedes taxis dodge camels, donkey carts, and stone-proofed
Israeli jeeps. Posters of Rambo and blonde-haired girls praying to Jesus
adorn the walls of houses constructed so that their cinderblock compo–
nents spell out
Allah
in six-foot letters. The women, veiled from head to
foot in black, sew, sort lentils, or watch the gyrations of belly dancers on
Egyptian television and the travails of Krystle on
DYllasty.
Everywhere the
air is pervaded by the peculiar olfactory cocktails of dung and spice, of
night-blooming jasmine and tear gas. Gaza is difficult to bring into focus
and even harder to compose.
During the early days of the Intifada, there were many curfews.
Sometimes the electricity would be cut off, and the family we lived with
would sit around a candle and listen to "Radio Monte Carlo" or Um–
Kulthum or odes to Molotovs sung by local bands turned up loud
enough to drown out the grandmother's cries of "Oh Lord! Oh Lord!"
2Gaza has long been presented as hell. Antigonus and Ptolemy, it is recorded, fought a
bloody duel in Gaza with ancient tanks called elephants. The Emperor Hadrian brought
many of the Jews captured after the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt to Gaza for Roman-style
entertainment. One could quote from the
Chrollicoll Paschale
which speaks of the mangled
remains of Christians being thrown to the beasts in Gaza during the time of Julian the
Apostate. During World War I, the English and the Turks fought a vicious battle in the
Strip which left the banks of the Wadi Gaza littered with corpses. Fifteen thousand men
died in two gruesome days, neither side having gained an inch. One can also find Gaza
presented as a little paradise on the edge of the desert, a garden of mulberries, fairs, wine,
and pseudO-Messiahs. Although now extremely puritanical, Gaza was, at various times,
something of a fleshpot with a temple dedicated to the fish-god Dagon, a very naked
statue of Venus in the central Square, baths said to equal those of Paris. As late as 1917, a
British soldier prophesied in
Palestille of the Jews
that Gaza - specifically Khan Yunis -
would someday boast "a fashionable watering place," featuring a "Philistine golf links'
over the dunes."
