A Month by the Sea by Dervla Murphy Read Free Book Online

State of Israel and the Gaza Strip. To ensure Israel’s security, the Arab League (no friend of the Palestinians, then or now) authorised Egypt to install a military administration in Gaza. In contrast, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan. Benny Morris has commented on the various new borders: ‘In great measure, and especially around the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they followed no natural topographical contours. Often they abruptly severed Arabs from their land and kin. A few villages were even cut in two …’
    Under Egyptian rule, Gaza’s modernisation, begun in Mandate times, gained momentum. Newly built cinemas showed the latest Cairo films and traditional home-centred celebrations were replaced by jolly café gatherings, or by music and dancing on the beach. Like their contemporaries in Cairo and Beirut, young Gazans discarded the
galabiya
and the
thobe
. Rich Egyptians swarmed in to enjoy tax-free shopping, safe swimming off a smooth, 20-mile-long beach and seafood restaurants with snob-value. From Egypt’s universities hundreds of middle-class students brought back Nasserist dreams and cared nothing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Revival, then appearing on the Strip but being driven underground by the military administration.
    In June 1967 Israel’s victory in the Six Day War discredited Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism (socialist and secular). Soonyoung graduates were coming home from Egypt all fired up by the writings and sermons of leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, men like Sayyed Qutb – executed in Cairo in the late 1960s for ‘preaching sedition’. They could see only one way forward: an unquestioning acceptance of Allah’s will, as revealed to his Messenger in the seventh century AD . Modernisation was out. Qutb’s successors fixed the ‘infidel’ label on all leaders, including Arafat, who allowed their followers to be corrupted by Westernisation in any of its insidious forms.
    When resistance to the Zionist take-over burgeoned on the Strip, Major-General Ariel Sharon, then CO Southern Command, launched a year-long ‘anti-terrorist’ operation. In January 1971 hundreds of the refugees’ frail, family-built dwellings were levelled to make way for military roads. Sharon used the Druze Border Police as his crack troops; they celebrated their arrival by shooting dead twelve Palestinian civilians rash enough to ignore ‘Halt!’ commands. Another of the General’s favourite units was made up of Arabic-speaking kibbutzniks, disguised as Palestinians, who could mingle with the Gazans and detect ‘terrorists’. They were ordered to execute their captives promptly. When Ziad al-Husseini , the Strip’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader, killed himself on 21 November 1971, Sharon boasted that resistance had been eliminated at a low cost: 100 or so Palestinians killed, 700 or so imprisoned. To an extent, his boast was justified. For several years Gaza remained politically subdued, its activists focusing on religious reform.
    In 1973, when a group of young Gazan graduates established al-Mujamma ’ al-Islami (Mujamma for short), the Israeli military governor on the Strip noted, ‘Mujamma is not a problem.’ Sheikh Ahmed Yassin led the Mujamma preachers, urging Gazans to join in a ‘restorative jihad’ to strengthen and purify Islam. The Zionist oppressors were not yet a target; guiding Muslims back to ‘the true path of Islam’ had to precede liberation. (Or driving them back:from the outset fanatical offshoots favoured physical intimidation.) The secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was then gaining stature, globally, as a guerrilla movement but Mujamma angrily denied its right to exercise political control, either within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) or throughout al-Shatat (the Palestinian Diaspora). The Islamists also denounced Darwinism, thus siding with the most pernicious Christian fundamentalists . They were not trained