May is the cruelest month in Gaza, not spring time
For the past seven weeks, every Friday morning a small group of teenagers had met at the corner of my street. They would exchange “good mornings,” chat amicably for a while and then head east to the protests at the border with Israel. On May 14, they gathered again, this time to demonstrate against the opening of the new American embassy in Jerusalem. May 15 was supposed to be the protests’ climax: It commemorated Nakba, or the “catastrophe,” when Palestinians were expelled from our land by Israel in 1948. But somehow President Donald Trump managed to add a day to our calendar of infamy, and it may be the crassest yet.
I, too, headed to the border, east of Jabaliya, with four of my friends. We are all in our 40s, the generation of the first intifada of 1987, and as we drove, we wondered whether it would be a big day.
It was only midmorning when we arrived but already very hot over the dry clay land. The crowd was a mix of young and old, men and women, including some old ladies in traditional dress. It was fragmented, maybe even confused, with different groups moving different ways. The speaker who had the microphone at that moment — politicians and local leaders took turns — was spewing anger into the air, trying to provoke the people around him to march east, into Israel: If you are not here to cut the fence down and cross over to our own land, he said, you may as well not be here. I felt anger toward him.
A small drone hovered in the distance, deep into Gaza, well past the protesters amassed at the border. It dropped a dozen canisters of tear gas. Whoever was controlling it had finally understood the game.
During the first few weeks of the marches, Israeli soldiers would torpedo the canisters directly into the crowd — only for the westerly wind to blow the gas back toward them. Since then, they had learned to deliberately overshoot west, so that the wind would deliver their gas to the crowds.
To escape the fumes, my friends and I started to run. But the wind was blowing the gas that way, too, and my eyes caught on fire. Three girls fell to the ground in front of us. Journalists with fancy-looking gas masks took photos, leisurely. We kept running. Fleeing protesters trampled acres of cucumber, okra and watermelon plants. By day’s end, some 60 Palestinians had been killed. Some parents lost their children; some teenagers lost their first loves. Everyone seemed to have abandoned or dropped something as they ran. A few of us, cursed about our petty losses, jokingly, once we made it to safety. By the time I caught my breath, I had a hollowing feeling. Relief.
Whenever you survive something in Gaza, the same question returns: For how long? A few years ago I wrote a novel that tried to encapsulate this paradox. Its first line was “Naim was born during war and he will die during war.” Like the character in that book, I have always felt that my own life was merely a short hiatus between two great deaths. When I look at my kids, I think: They have witnessed three wars in less than a decade. They have never holidayed abroad. They don’t know what it feels like to drive for more than 40km.
On the evening of May 14, the teenagers regrouped at the corner of my street. After a long day of inhaling gas and running in zigzags to avoid bullets, they didn’t seem much concerned with self-reflection. “I was next to him. I could have died as well.” “They say the crowds were bigger in East Gaza City.” All they knew was that if the anniversary of the Nakba wasn’t going to be another Nakba, they had to go back out there, to that border. They have been given no other choice to claim a better life.
The morning of May 15 we mourned. The streets were quiet, and people walked with their heads down, their eyes also down, words stumbling out of their mouths as if nothing they said really mattered. The border protests had been meant to be peaceful, not another massacre. Maybe the warmongers are right, after all: Maybe the enemy is just the enemy.
The funeral processions were quiet, too. Young men carried the coffins. There was anger in their eyes. Around 3pm, after the funerals were over, I got in a car with the same friends as on May 14 and we headed for the border again. The crowd was much smaller, less than half what it had been the day before. But otherwise the scene was similar. A few teenage boys rolled out tires toward the border and set them on fire. Dark clouds of smoke plumed up into the sky. Children flew kites decorated with the Palestinian flag. In the distance, drones took off and fanned out. Whenever you survive something in Gaza, the same question returns: For how long?
In perfect formation the drones started dropping their canisters. Again we scattered to avoid the gas clouds. A few minutes later we regrouped in the main field, opposite the Israelis’ main watch tower. A boy who had been collecting empty black canisters was stringing them together into a great necklace. He began to swing it above his head joyfully, to the laughter of those around him.
Another round of fire. More running. A drone dropped out of the sky, spiraling downward ungracefully, like a bird that has been shot. Children ran to the spot where it hit the ground: Yes, Israelis also lose things. One boy touched it carefully, afraid that it might be hot or would explode. When the children realized it was safe to touch, they all wanted to pick it up and play with it. I saw their smiles, heard their excitement. Then a stack of speakers nearby started blasting nationalist songs from the 1970s, drowning out the kids’ voices.
It was getting dark, and we headed home. As I drove back with my friends, I misquoted T.S. Eliot in my head: “May is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” —NYT Syndicate Atef Abu Saif is a political scientist and the author of
‘The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary’