walls!’ His smile is radiant as a sunrise.
We try to work. But everyone is too gleeful and we can’t settle at our desks. The impossible has been done and the air is charged with possibilities. We are all nervous, restless and excited. I keep imagining what the atmosphere must be like down at the border – the elated crowds spilling over into Egypt, seizing the day. Gazans are always saying they live in a
sijin,
a prison, and local resentment against Hamas is slowly gathering because for all their firebrand rhetoric, nothing is changing inside this siege. Now, for once, they have delivered.
In the early afternoon, I get a call from Tariq, who I met at the New Year’s Eve
hafla,
when we encountered the masked midget. Sometimes he and I have coffee together in the evening at the al-Deira Hotel. Tariq is a chain-smoker with the body of a rugby player; he works for one of the local UN departments and this evening he too is crossing to Egypt.
‘You want to come with me,
habibti
?’ he asks.
‘I can’t,’ I tell him, catching the reluctance in my own voice. But my colleagues have warned me not to go to Rafah. The Egyptians could start re-sealing the border at any moment, the Israeli military might get involved and the whole thing could burst like a piece of overripe fruit into a bloody clash. I have a job here and am expected at my desk first thing tomorrow morning. I really cannot join him.
Late that evening: a white ear of moon suspended in the black sky. We walk slowly forward, keeping the pace of the crowd. Thousands of us are clambering over the concertinaed fence; the atmosphere is like a huge carnival, the air charged not with anxiety, but laughter and shouting. Round-shouldered old men and women hobble, clutching the arms of youngsters who lead them tenderly, like lambs. Whole families have come out to share the joy of tonight’s walk into another country.
I clamber down from the fence with a little jump and Tariq and I make our way over the wasted no-man’s-land between Gaza and Egypt, past lines of Egyptian soldiers brandishing riot shields, yet passive as waxworks. For the first, and almost certainly the only time in our lives, we walk across a fortified international border without papers. And congratulate each other with tears in our eyes. I had to see this for myself, I just had to.
The city of Rafah is divided between Gaza and Egypt in more or less the same way that Berlin (where I was born) used to be divided between East and West Germany, with houses on each side of the fortified border lying within sight of each other. 18 On the Gaza side, the houses are so bullet- and mortar-spattered they look pebble-dashed. Some look half-eaten. The Egyptian side of Rafah is smaller, and between the two is the 12-metre-high border fence that imprisons Gazans inside the Strip. But now most of the fence is lying on the ground, buckled and useless as a crashed car.
At the end of no-man’s-land we enter Egyptian Rafah. I have never seen so many people swarming in a single street, so many trucks bulging like obese men, as flocks of worried sheep and goats on rope leads are being driven back into Gaza (Israel has also banned imports of livestock). Cars, motorbikes and donkey carts are stranded in the melee as the crowds push all ways at once. For a moment the sheer volume looks like a mob and really frightens me. But then I see that amid the chaos is some kind of calm; people are helping each other, and often waiting for their turn to move. This is an exodus, not a riot.
‘You all right?’ asks Tariq.
‘Yes, I’m good, thanks. Glad I’m here.’
We want to reach the next Egyptian town, al-Arish, because Tariq has Palestinian friends living there, so we press on down the street. Because Rafah was only divided back in 1978, most of the locals in this Egyptian half of the city are Gazans too.
I haven’t seen anyone who resembles a Westerner – this story has only just ‘broken’ and I guess the foreign
We try to work. But everyone is too gleeful and we can’t settle at our desks. The impossible has been done and the air is charged with possibilities. We are all nervous, restless and excited. I keep imagining what the atmosphere must be like down at the border – the elated crowds spilling over into Egypt, seizing the day. Gazans are always saying they live in a
sijin,
a prison, and local resentment against Hamas is slowly gathering because for all their firebrand rhetoric, nothing is changing inside this siege. Now, for once, they have delivered.
In the early afternoon, I get a call from Tariq, who I met at the New Year’s Eve
hafla,
when we encountered the masked midget. Sometimes he and I have coffee together in the evening at the al-Deira Hotel. Tariq is a chain-smoker with the body of a rugby player; he works for one of the local UN departments and this evening he too is crossing to Egypt.
‘You want to come with me,
habibti
?’ he asks.
‘I can’t,’ I tell him, catching the reluctance in my own voice. But my colleagues have warned me not to go to Rafah. The Egyptians could start re-sealing the border at any moment, the Israeli military might get involved and the whole thing could burst like a piece of overripe fruit into a bloody clash. I have a job here and am expected at my desk first thing tomorrow morning. I really cannot join him.
Late that evening: a white ear of moon suspended in the black sky. We walk slowly forward, keeping the pace of the crowd. Thousands of us are clambering over the concertinaed fence; the atmosphere is like a huge carnival, the air charged not with anxiety, but laughter and shouting. Round-shouldered old men and women hobble, clutching the arms of youngsters who lead them tenderly, like lambs. Whole families have come out to share the joy of tonight’s walk into another country.
I clamber down from the fence with a little jump and Tariq and I make our way over the wasted no-man’s-land between Gaza and Egypt, past lines of Egyptian soldiers brandishing riot shields, yet passive as waxworks. For the first, and almost certainly the only time in our lives, we walk across a fortified international border without papers. And congratulate each other with tears in our eyes. I had to see this for myself, I just had to.
The city of Rafah is divided between Gaza and Egypt in more or less the same way that Berlin (where I was born) used to be divided between East and West Germany, with houses on each side of the fortified border lying within sight of each other. 18 On the Gaza side, the houses are so bullet- and mortar-spattered they look pebble-dashed. Some look half-eaten. The Egyptian side of Rafah is smaller, and between the two is the 12-metre-high border fence that imprisons Gazans inside the Strip. But now most of the fence is lying on the ground, buckled and useless as a crashed car.
At the end of no-man’s-land we enter Egyptian Rafah. I have never seen so many people swarming in a single street, so many trucks bulging like obese men, as flocks of worried sheep and goats on rope leads are being driven back into Gaza (Israel has also banned imports of livestock). Cars, motorbikes and donkey carts are stranded in the melee as the crowds push all ways at once. For a moment the sheer volume looks like a mob and really frightens me. But then I see that amid the chaos is some kind of calm; people are helping each other, and often waiting for their turn to move. This is an exodus, not a riot.
‘You all right?’ asks Tariq.
‘Yes, I’m good, thanks. Glad I’m here.’
We want to reach the next Egyptian town, al-Arish, because Tariq has Palestinian friends living there, so we press on down the street. Because Rafah was only divided back in 1978, most of the locals in this Egyptian half of the city are Gazans too.
I haven’t seen anyone who resembles a Westerner – this story has only just ‘broken’ and I guess the foreign
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