Today, I’m sharing a story by a new friend and writing colleague Kristin Savage. Kristin is a longtime activist, by trade a public policy strategist. I’m honored to publish a chapter from her life, from quite another time and place.
Gaza City, 1992
The First Intifada
The second week I’m at the Jerusalem Center of Friends World College, Fatimah announces we’re taking a day trip into Gaza City.
“I used all my best contacts to arrange on-the-ground visits to Beach Camp and the only Feminist Center in Gaza City,” she says. “I want you to see the living conditions for people in the city and some of the Sheikh-funded infrastructure projects, paved roads and clinics.
“Listen, this shit isn’t for babies, okay? We could be shot, killed, or captured and become hostages. If you go, you’re taking your life in your own hands.”
Now she’s raising an eyebrow, and levels her challenge at us folding her arms across her chest and rocking back and forth on her heels. “You don’t have to go, you can be a pussy, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime shot at seeing something almost no one sees, if we even make it past the checkpoint. You’ll be mad when we all come back and you missed it because you were scared.” She stares directly into my eyes.
Finally, she ends it: “I’m here, right? I’m from Queens. People do actually live and survive in active war zones. Try not to be so American.”
This isn’t what I’m here for. It doesn’t feel right. My gut is screaming No! but I have a danger-seeking streak a mile wide; it underlies my lifelong attempts to create order out of chaos. All 19 years of it. I want this big, smart, caustic butch to like me and see I’m as tough as she is, all 94 pounds of me.
I say, “I’ll go,” as casually as I can muster. I have an ice cream headache.
It’s not like I’m uninterested— I’m already connected to a group of musicians who cross borders, an international peace effort. A former teacher of mine in the Theater Department of my high school led a performance project at the border with American, Israeli, and Palestinian actors. Then the Director of my theater company in Tel Aviv promised my parents in Baltimore she’d mother me and protect me like I was her own daughter. I’m certain a daytrip to the heart of the current conflict wasn’t anything any of them had in mind for me.
Fatimah warns me not to tell the Director – she’d try to stop me. She’s not only famous for her award-winning theater company, she was one of the only women pilots in the Six Days War.
I’m not a journalist, I’m not a “peace studies” major— I’m a ride-along. I’m going to see everything. Right. It will be two more decades before I understand the concept of bearing witness— or learn what a charnel ground is.
I know I’m straying out of my lane. All I do, at this moment in time, is experimental dance theater.
One of my closest friends at the Center is Rae, who thankfully is back from the London campus and still had wintry clothes in her suitcase. She lends me a white turtleneck, an Irish wool sweater with intarsia rings around the neck and shoulders. It smells musty, like if it’s ever been washed it wasn’t properly dried— and reeks of her patchouli and frankincense. It hangs on my little frame like a sweater dress and covers the bulk of the skirt she loans me, a peasant skirt covered in a maroon and blue paisley. I’ve rolled it up four times at the waist and I’m still stepping on the hem when I walk. I look like I’m headed to a Phish concert in Vermont.
My head and neck are covered by my kuffiyah, my face exposed, my Manic Panic red curls slicked back into a bun and hidden underneath. No makeup, no jewelry. I took off my nail polish like we were ordered by Fatimah, who inspects us all at dawn before letting us out of the apartment. We’re a little flock of suburban American hippies from the neck-down, Palestinian Liberation Organization recruits from the neck up. I hate everything about this outfit, our effort to dress “respectfully.” We don’t look like we’re from a press corps.
There are only two locations for entering or exiting Gaza in the fall of ‘92, and the regular border closures by the Israeli Defense Forces fuel constant rumors in Jerusalem about when one can enter or exit— or who can come and go on which days and why. Sometimes only construction workers and farmers can cross the borders into Israel. Sometimes aid-workers and medical volunteers can cross into Gaza. We’ve heard we can get in with a Palestinian professor friend of the Center from Hebrew University in his personal car. He’s willing to take the risk of bringing us in, but once we’re there, we’re on our own to get around.
Avi, the Resident Advisor, our “Sustainable Farming and Food Systems” major, decides he should stay at the Center, so now we’re five women about to travel into forbidden territory with no men. Fatimah and our University friends have connected us to cab drivers that agreed to take us where we want to go. In order to get around, we’ll pretend to be American journalists for the day; it will be easier to move about as press. We all have to bring cameras and the handheld microcassette tape recorders we’d used for notetaking in College lectures. Fatimah has a small video camera, the newest technology of our stash. She’s worried IDF will confiscate it.
Fatimah sat up front with the Professor and four of us squished into the back of his shiny brown 70s Mercedes sedan. On the sunrise ride out of Jerusalem, we got briefed by the two of them on all the rules we need to know for the day:
“No looking men directly in the eyes when you speak.”
“No speaking until spoken to.”
“Let your male guides speak for you to any officials.”
“No smiling or open-mouthed laughing, not even amongst yourselves in the taxi— people will think you’re prostitutes and might throw you out of the car or even stone you.”
“Watch the women around you and sit and stand the way they do.”
I watched Fatimah speak to the IDF guards at the checkpoint in English, acting as though the Professor was our hired driver for the day— lying about us being journalists and which news outlets we worked for. I was sure we’d be turned away by the barely-out-of-high-school armed soldiers. After a brief show of cameras, notebooks, and tape recorders, we were allowed through the heavily-fenced and gated point of entry.
The children swarmed us at Beach Camp as soon as we arrived, the moment I stepped from the car onto the sand. It was a gorgeous day by the sea, with a slight breeze. Still not enough air to combat the humidity and our modest winter clothes.
We were met by a guide who spoke some English, and he hurried us through the mass of tents while adults and children surrounded us wanting to pose for pictures and pointing to their tent city on the beach. I gave the kids all the change in my pockets. Some held pictures of family members whom I could only guess were lost to the cause. I ran out of film in the first few minutes but kept snapping photos all day as though I had a fresh roll.
Our guide led us to one tent where a family of eleven welcomed us in and had already brewed us hot tea. They offered us cookies on a silver tray as we sat down on rugs around a wooden post holding up the middle of the tent in a space that might have slept three on an American camping trip. But here at Beach Camp it was their family home. I felt awful accepting offerings when they had so little, so many to feed, and I must have said so under my breath. Someone whispered I could not refuse their hospitality. I drank the strong black tea with sugar and ate one cookie, though the women in the family urged me to eat more, and rushed to refill my tea glass whenever it was half full.
Our guide translated for us while the father and mother told us how they ended up at Beach Camp with their nine children. They said, over and over, “Please tell our story, please help our family and our community, Tell everyone what you see. Tell everyone. Please. With the help of God, (Inshallah) please.” They cried.
We looked like people with power to them, they trusted us to carry their stories. I had no idea if I could ever do anything useful.
Dozens of people trailed us on our way back to our next car, a friend of our guide’s, who had a rusty yellow Yugo hatchback. They shouted thank you in English and yelled for us to please help, please tell their story. They shouted blessings as we squished into an even smaller space, all the women in the back seated on each other’s’ laps and the men in the front. We hit potholes in the dirt and bounced on each other’s bodies, slamming our heads into the car roof. The friend drove us back into Gaza City. We were going to meet up with one of the most powerful women I’ve ever met in my life, the founder of Gaza’s one and only Feminist Center. I’ll name her here, as Rana Maqdisi.
The men left us in an alley because we couldn’t all be seen together, and they couldn’t go with a group of women into this particular woman’s space.
We walked past rutted, ditch-ridden mud streets, the bombed and not-rebuilt concrete buildings with rebar exposed. Walking through the main square we were hit with an unfamiliar smell we couldn’t escape. The 1960s concrete buildings in various states of disrepair surrounded by a four-block-square deep open lake of raw sewage. I’d never seen anything like it. We mouth-breathed through our kuffiyahs while we looked for the address. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the smell out of my nose and throat. At nineteen, I was an easy-to-ignite rage-bomb in general, but this was a new level. How could anyone let people live this way?
The Feminist Center was inside a crumbling building, a small apartment with two wooden tables, a handful of donated chairs, a few books, and one typewriter next to a small sheaf of paper. The bravest woman in Gaza City, Rana Maqdisi, told us stories about the widowed and abandoned women with children she was working with, teaching them to read and write and type, in hopes it could one day help them support their families. She told us so matter of factly, almost casually, that she was stoned on her way from her apartment to her Center, daily— since she cut her thick black hair and refused to cover up. She wore pants every day until her family kicked her out and she had to find a way to live on her own. She was the most cursed person in her neighborhood. She refused to believe there wasn’t a future these women she taught would be prepared for. She envisioned their success and safety every day. I didn’t want to leave her. A loud call to prayer prompted her to rush us out of the building.
We pressed onward with Fatimah’s itinerary. We headed to the Sheikh-funded psychiatric clinic for children where doctors treat extreme trauma and try to support the young who are orphaned, shell-shocked from bombings, missing body parts. Sometimes they were “just” suffering the effects of extreme poverty and starvation. The only reliable electricity, running water, and technology we saw was within this one clinic, all funded by oil wealth from Abu Dhabi.
My strongest memory was the art the children had drawn— some serious, some frightening, some hopeful. They were doing something I recognized— drawing pictures with crayons. I was moved to the tears I’d been holding back all day.
We rushed this last visit; time was running out. We needed to get a taxi to reach a bus station where a minivan bus for hire would take us back to Jerusalem.
One of the doctors called a taxi for us. The driver didn’t speak a word of English. He was driving a 70s model station wagon where we could all sit easily in the back two rows. Fatimah insisted on sitting up front with him. He looked uneasy about us and I felt the same about him. Were we just mirroring our fears back and forth? Our therapist tour guide instructed the driver to take us straight to the bus station. We paid him up front.
As soon as we were out of sight of the facility, we moved fast down side streets and alleys. I asked Fatimah, “How good is your Arabic, anyway?” I’d heard her say a few words in conversation with our Palestinian friends at the Center which made me think she had studied the language.
“Almost none!” she said. “I’m at the toddler level.”
We bumped along dirt ruts, dodging ditches at full speed. Our driver must have known the roads well. I don’t pray, but I hoped real hard that he was taking us where we were supposed to be going.
We turned down one alley and heard loud gunshots just as we screeched to a halt and almost ran into a pile of rubble and rusty metal set up as a blockade at the end of a street. Men were yelling and screaming. A young boy who looked about twelve scrambled over the rubble pile and began moving barbed wire and rocks to clear a car-sized path we could fit through, urging and gesturing to the driver to come through the blockade towards the gunfire. The driver looked over his shoulder to see if we could back out of the alley. When he glanced forward and saw the boy still urging him on, he changed direction towards the sound of the gunshots while saying something we couldn’t parse.
He drove slowly forward when Fatimah screamed, “LOW! LOW! LOW! LAH! LAH! LAH!” (NO! in Hebrew NO! in Arabic) at the top of her lungs.
The rest of us in the back screamed, “NONONO!” shaking our heads back and forth furiously and pointing away from the blockade.
We heard machine gun fire which could only mean the IDF was getting closer, and I realized there was no way anyone knew or cared who we were, or where we stood in any of this. Our back seat become a chorus of hoarse Sirens, realizing the futility but refusing to stop wildly gesturing and shouting.
Our driver hit reverse hard and fast, seeing a narrow side street halfway through the alley. He got us out of one passageway and we kept screaming, “GO! GO! YALLAH! GO! YALLAH!” until he was headed well away from the gunfire.
He drove like a maniac until the car stopped a block from the old bus terminal, where he demanded more money in Hebrew and Arabic. Fatimah tried to argue with him because he had already been paid. We yelled at her, “Stop! Give him the money and let’s go!”
She stopped. She glared at us and mumbled under her breath while he took her cash and finally unlocked the doors.
The minibus ride headed back to Jerusalem at sunset. Anyone who could sleep passed out in their seat. I was wide awake, seething. We got caught in a crossfire, and for what? I was so mad I’d let Fatimah bully me. People poured their hearts out to us, shared their lives, and what little they had. I felt useless. After seeing everything that day, we were headed back to safety in air-conditioned comfort, where we could turn on lights, take hot showers, put on fresh clean clothes, eat until we were stuffed, chain smoke a pack of cigarettes. Smile and laugh out loud. We could curse and sit with our legs wide-open in pants, sleep in a soft bed and wake up with freedom to do whatever we pleased. To move about the world.
I was certain this would be one more episode Fatimah would brag about to traveling peacenik academics. To those who do nothing, nothing to further any actual peace anywhere. All to appear well-traveled, tough and wise about conflict.
I didn’t care if Fatimah liked me anymore. I didn’t have the words. I wanted to punch her in the face. I took a cold shower. I took a cold shower and then I went to sleep, a dead sleep, in my soft bed in Jerusalem.
I have interviewed Kristin Savage about her 1992 story, above, and the moment twenty years later, that she mentioned, when the concept of “bearing witness” bore fruit.
In Case You Missed It
Commie Camp
Bushy liked to say his Ford Econoline was “infallible.” I loved Bushy like a brother, but he had a habit of saying the opposite of what everything was— that was his humor. He’d coaxed his baby all the way out to Detroit from Oakland and he had the empty Pennzoil cans to prove it.
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