Amid the bombs, some fine dining
Two Palestinians lounge in the sauna room at the new Techno Gym in Gaza City.
Alongside the Hamas training camps and bombedout neighbourhoods, there exists a parallel reality where the wafer-thin Palestinian middle class here is wooed by massage therapists, spin classes and private beach resorts.
Media images beamed from the Gaza Strip rightly focus on the territory’s abundant miseries. But rising from the rubble of last summer’s devastating war with Israel are a handful of new luxury-car dealerships, boutiques selling designer jeans and, coming soon to a hip downtown restaurant, “sushi nights.”
This is the Gaza outside the war photographer’s frame, where families of the small, tough, aspirational middle class will splurge on a $140 seaside villa with generator power to give their kids a 20-hour “staycation,” with a swimming pool and palm trees.
This is the sliver of Gaza, a coastal enclave with the highest unemployment rate in the world, with personal trainers, medium-rare steaks, law school degrees and decent salaries.
The surviving bureaucrats, doctors, factory managers and traders in the middle class who haven’t abandoned Gaza often say they are squeezed between the Israeli blockade, with its tight restrictions on travel and trade, and the Palestinian leadership, including the Islamist movement Hamas, which has governed the strip since 2006.
“I like to get out a night or two a month. You have to, if you can afford it. You have to live life, just a little bit, even in Gaza,” said Samia Hillis, 33, a counsellor who works with children suffering from PTSD.
Hillis was sitting with her niece at the new open-air rooftop restaurant called Level Up in the highrise Zafer Tower.
The tables were crowded with families celebrating birthday parties, beside shy young engaged couples whispering sweet nothings, and women smoking flavoured tobacco in water pipes.
Gaza has had a lone five-star hotel, Al Mashtal, since 2011. Across the street is the newest sensation, the Blue Beach Resort, which has an Olympic-size swimming pool, cabana boys and a private beach.
After an Israeli TV news station did a snarky piece on the resort — wondering aloud how tourists would arrive, if not by smuggling tunnels? — the management decided to lower its profile. An employee at the hotel said Hamas security complained that journalists were giving the world the wrong impression about Gaza.
Said local economist Omar Shaban: “Always in every society, during war, famine, whatever, you will find some risk-takers, some entrepreneurs. Here the business people are hopeless the siege will end, so they look for other opportunities. There’s no export. No garments, no flowers, no trade. So they sell something to Gaza. Some cars, restaurants, resorts.” Shaban shrugged. “It’s not much,” he said. But for Gazans who can afford it, a little taste of middle-class pleasure keeps them going. At a beach villa last week, the Ammar family piled out of their cars, carrying plates of hummus, spicy olives, sandwich meats, mangoes and grapes, and cranked up the music. They rented the villa for 20 hours for $140 to have a pool party.
Heba Ammar, 24, couldn’t wait. “If I could leave Gaza,” she said, “I would run!”