Twilight
Zone / End of the Rainbow
by
Gideon Levy
(June
2, 2004)
One of the
120 homes demolished by the IDF in the Brazil refugee camp
belonged to
architect Manal Awad. This was the third time since 1948 that
her family
has been left homeless - and the second time that Ariel Sharon
was
responsible.
Now all 19
people are crowded into a tiny two-and-a-half-room apartment
belonging
to one sister, on the edge of the destroyed area of their refugee
camp. The
curtain blowing in the breeze allows intermittent glimpses of the
view from
the window: mounds of rubble all the way to the end of the street.
This is the
Awad family: Mother, elderly aunt, son, daughters and their
families.
On Thursday, May 20, two bulldozers approached their home,
threatening
to raze it with the occupants still inside: Operation Rainbow.
The
85-year-old aunt barely managed to climb out. She says that in 1948,
when she
fled from her first home, and in 1972, when the IDF razed her home
again, it
was easier for her - she was still young then. One of the
daughters,
architect Manal Awad, says that it's not just stone walls that
have been
destroyed, but also memories - in the photographs and books that
are lost
forever. Her sisters tried to save the coffee table that she had
designed,
but couldn't. The table was crushed along with the other contents
of the
house. Among the wreckage, the only thing she could find was the new
narghile
she had bought for her brother in Tunisia.
The IDF did
its work very thoroughly here: The houses and their contents
were
completely crushed. Here and there, some recognizable items can be seen
- part of a
dress, a smashed water boiler, the torn pages of a book. Entire
houses have
been wiped off the face of the earth, and now they are just
mounds of
dirt. The chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, said without batting an
eye:
"We know of 12 houses that were demolished since the start of the
operation."
Platoon commander Brigadier General Shmuel Zakkai corrected him
the next
day, saying the actual number was 56 houses.
But neither
figure is correct. In the Brazil
camp alone, according to
Mustafa
Ibrahim, an experienced investigator for the Palestinian civil
rights
commission, 120 houses were destroyed. Visiting the place, it's hard
to count,
but one sees that many dozens of houses were demolished, judging
by the many
mounds of rubble. All the talk about smuggling tunnels also
appears
less than credible. The Awad family's home, for example, is
approximately
800 meters
away from the Philadelphi corridor; there are no
tunnels
that long. This was demolition just for the sake of it, a punitive
campaign of
vengeance against innocents rendered homeless for the second and
third
times.
In
Operation Defensive Shield, we destroyed the center of the Jenin refugee
camp - 350
houses - but the destruction was dense and concentrated. There
were
battles there as well. In Operation Rainbow, we demolished houses in a
scattered
fashion, without a battle, so that the Brazil camp now looks like
Sarajevo in 1993. It's hard to find the
logic in the demolition campaign: A
group of
houses here and another one there, this house yes and that one no,
seeming
more the result of whim than any real planning. To the 120 houses in
the Brazil camp
that were thoroughly destroyed must be added a similar
number of
houses that were partially destroyed - not to mention the crushed
cars, the
roads and utility poles that were uprooted, or the Taha Hussein
school,
part of which has been reduced to rubble. The residents describe how
the
bulldozers approached from all sides; they were trapped inside their
homes, and
terrified. (One resident telephoned me then and told about his
neighbor
and the man's 12 children who were trapped in a house that was
about to be
demolished, begging for something to be done to save them.)
This past
Sunday, long after the end of the operation, as a bonus, we
demolished
another 23 houses in the adjacent Block J, in another nameless,
forgotten
operation which doubtless is of tremendous security importance.
Manal Awad
sits in her modest office in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City,
tearlessly
mourning her demolished home. She is the director of the Women's
Mental Health
Center
in Gaza.
She is
30 years old, dressed in an elegant
sport
jacket and speaks fluent English. She was in her office when the
bulldozers
arrived at the family's home, where her mother and aunt and
sisters
were. They had sent her brother out of the house before the
bulldozers
came, thinking that if it was only women left there, they'd be
safe.
"I'll
never forget that day. My sister called and told me there was a tank
next to the
house. I told her not to dare peek out the window. We're
experienced
- in Tel al-Sultan, they shot at anyone who peeked out of the
window. On
the radio I heard that they were starting to raze houses with
people
still inside. We were afraid that this time it would be especially
bad, but in
our worst dreams we never imagined that our home would be
destroyed.
"I
tried to reassure my sister, but when I called back she told me that the
bulldozers
were right in front of the house. I told her: You have to get out
of the
house immediately. She said the guest room was already collapsing.
They were
afraid to go out because there was a bulldozer in front and
another one
in back, as well as tanks. My mother took a hammer and tried to
break
through the wall to get to the neighbors. My sister brought a ladder
for them to
climb out. My 85-year-old aunt, who walks with difficulty,
managed to
climb the first couple of rungs, but then she stopped and said
she
couldn't go on. She said that in 1948, she could run away, but not now.
My mother
and sisters pushed her up, the neighbor pulled from the other side
and she
finally got over, I don't know how.
"It
was the first time in my life that I ever heard my mother cry like that.
She's a
strong and sensitive woman, but she never cried that way. Not even
when my
father died 23 years ago and she was left alone with six daughters
and a son
and an elderly aunt. She fought for us all her life and now I felt
that she
needed my support and I wasn't by her side. I was helpless. It
wasn't easy
to hear her crying on the telephone. She said to me: 'I won't
leave the
house.' Those were the last words I heard from her. My sister
said: 'Now
it's the end. We're running away.' I didn't know what happened to
them,
whether or not they were alive. I only got the good news an hour later
- they had
reached the neighbors. They thought that the bulldozers would
stop and
not demolish the neighbors' house, too, but that also turned out to
be wrong.
My mother was so angry and shouted against Sharon and against Bush
while the
bulldozers were pursuing them to the neighbors' house. It was also
demolished.
My sister came out of the neighbors' house waving a white flag.
I tried to
picture the layout of the street, to think where they could have
run to,
with the tanks there. I was afraid for their lives. All of those
images keep
coming back to my mind.
"In
1948, the family fled from our village near Ramle to a cave. In 1972,
Sharon demolished our house in the Shabura
camp, when I was a baby. Now this
is the
third house. My mother is a strong woman, but now she's broken. It's
the end for
her. She always dreamed about the first house that they fled
from, but
she was attached to the house in the camp. Now it's all
meaningless.
Her life was for nothing. She hoped that our fate would be
different.
Peace. Maybe not peace, but at least a better life.
"I
wasn't with them, but I felt what they felt. I lost all my memories
there. A
house isn't just walls. I can buy new furniture, a new
refrigerator.
But that's not it. The photographs with the family history -
every one
holds a memory for me. Photographs of our loved ones and our joys
and our
sorrows - all destroyed. We also had a book collection. It wasn't so
big, but it
meant a lot to us. Each one had his favorite books. Nothing is
left. The
house is destroyed. Life is destroyed. Thirty years of life was
wiped out.
"When
I was finally able to go to Rafah on the weekend, a friend offered to
accompany
me. I told her there was no need, that I was strong, but she
warned me
that I'd be in shock when I got there. She was right. Nothing was
left of the
whole street. We live in the old part of Brazil, and we always
said that
if they did demolitions, we'd just hear the noise, but that they'd
never come
close to us, because we're far from the border. But for some
reason they
started with our house. I'm sorry that I'm just talking about
myself ...
I hoped so much that I'd be able to save something.
"A
week has passed and I have the feeling that it's just going to get
harder
and harder.
I thought I'd recover. It was a simple refugees' house, but on
the inside
it was beautiful to me. I've been all over the world and seen
some
amazing houses, but I always missed that one."
Here is
where the family home stood. A pile of rocks. Manal's mother,
Shukrin,
emerges from the ruins - a small woman in black - and here is
Manal's
brother, too. And here is the Mansour family's house, and the house
of the
Hassan family and the Hamad family. Nothing is left. The elderly
aunt,
Aliya, sits on the floor of the apartment that is their temporary
refuge,
staring at the carpet, her expression masked. Manal took her to see
a doctor in
Gaza;
he said
that her spine had not been injured during the
escape with
the ladder.
Aliya
vividly remembers the first escape, from Abu Shusha, and the second
escape from
the Shabura camp, when Sharon
came "to widen the corridor." It's
the same
now. Aliya tells about their first days in a cave after fleeing Abu
Shusha, and
how they trekked from there first to Yavneh and then to Gaza.
Her niece
Shukrin adds some details. They speak softly, the signs of the
most recent
trauma still very apparent. It happened twice in the month of
May - May
1948 and May 2004. Only in 1972 did it happen in December.
Yusuf, the
husband of one of the sisters in whose home they've taken
shelter,
chuckles: He hasn't yet counted how many people are now living in
his tiny
house. "Like sardines, but at least everyone's together." This
morning,
when a Palestinian bulldozer came to clear away the rubble opposite
his house,
his daughter burst into tears. She thought the Israelis had come
back to
demolish some more.
We go
outside to wander along the long pile of rubble. There is destruction
on both
sides of the sandy road. By one pile that used to be a house,
children
are still scavenging for pieces of metal to load onto a donkey
cart. The
apartment of Yusuf Bahlul (who once worked for Sonol in Gaza), on
the top
floor of an apartment building overlooking this refugee camp, took a
direct hit
from a shell and is also ruined and covered in soot. Everyone
here speaks
Hebrew, from the years when they used to work in Israel.
A small
television table stands alone in a living room whose walls have all
collapsed.
In the Brazil
camp, an old woman tries to push a crushed water
heater. Her
strength is gone. A post-disaster calm prevails. The Philadelphi
corridor is
visible at the bottom of the street, and every so often a
menacing
Israeli tank passes by. The stench of burst sewage pipes pervades
the air as
children display their latest finds from the rubble.