Palestine: Conversations about Gaza: The Broken Glasses

I met Deeb E., then in his early 30s, with an open look behind cheerful, square glasses, in 2018 as the “IT guy” and technician for a theater company in Gaza. Over the years, he not only helped to develop a theater format between Berlin and Gaza, but also found himself enjoying an unbounded joy in playing and even getting on stage. »Here I can be anything. I can fly like Batman, swim for my life in a glass of water, my imagination has no limits,” he said at the time.

Deeb grew up in Gaza, in the living chaos of the Sheikh al Rodwan neighborhood. Hamas co-founder Sheikh Yassin lived in the neighborhood and once visited Deeb (in a dream). He encouraged him to join Hamas. He is a man now, it is time. But Deeb didn’t want to. He has to find his own values. “What are your values?” asked Sheikh Jassin in the dream, which Deeb told me during a break in rehearsals, on the terrace of a high-rise apartment called “Dream.” In his dream, Deeb promised the sheikh that if he would not join Hamas, he would at least live a more God-fearing life.

Since then, Deeb has seen the world through different eyes – he promptly took off his glasses. He looked sleepy without his glasses, squinted his eyes, cleaned his glasses. He seemed blind as a mole. It’s very simple: “If we doubt God, who else can help us? He is the one who has everything. We believe that He always chooses what is best for us.«

“Maybe it will take us ten years to recover from this war and be ourselves again.”

Deeb E.

“Does that mean you’re so alone in your suffering that you can’t afford it? to believe?” To me it sounded more like the last straw. “It’s anything but great right now.” – “A matter of perspective,” Deeb laughed and put his glasses back on.

“Right now,” that was November 2019. Rockets flew for three days and the situation threatened to escalate. I was surprised that almost everyone still wanted to continue rehearsing. That morning I had climbed through the rubble of the Human Rights Watch offices that had been destroyed by the Israeli army and secretly wished for a break from rehearsals.

»Of course we want to continue! If we stopped pursuing our visions every time bombs fell, we wouldn’t get anywhere.” Deeb first rolled a cigarette. His 15-year-old nephew was sitting next to him, checking the latest news from a network. “That wasn’t Israel!” he said, still engrossed in his cell phone. “What wasn’t Israel?” – “The one with human rights!” A misdirected rocket from Gaza destroyed their office. “You can see the difference between Hamas then and today,” said Deeb.

The old founding members, he said, never attacked their own people. Sheikh Yassin wanted to fight Israel, but never to take power. “And he always left breaks in the fight so that the people who were allowed to work in Israel also had periods in which they could work.”

“Because he needed her as a suicide bomber?!” I blurted out. I hated the sheikh, who looked so venerable in his wheelchair, with his Dumbledore beard, but who exploited people by turning them into weapons with their skin and hair.

Would it be any less inhumane to “attack your own population and blame it on others?” asked Deeb, putting out the rest of his cigarette. »When Israel fires on us, they use the opportunity to inadvertently hit institutions that they themselves would like to get rid of or that don’t pay their protection money with “friendly fire”. The old Hamas guard would never have done that.”

“But that wasn’t Hamas!” said the nephew. – “What wasn’t Hamas?” – “The thing about Human Rights was Islamic Jihad.”

The more radical Islamic Jihad escalated the situation in 2019, while the ruling Hamas, on the one hand, distanced itself and appeared to be more peaceful for a while, outsourcing the terror, so to speak, in order to sit even more securely in the saddle. In addition, the still-reigning Hamas leader Yahya Al Sinwar offered young people in Gaza swashbuckling prospects for the future: “We have access to tens of thousands of rockets that can reach Tel Aviv and turn small towns in Israel into ghost towns…” That sounded like boasting at the time . Only in retrospect does the speech seem like the announcement of October 7th.

In 2023, my thoughts on Facebook are going nowhere: Deeb and his family are fleeing Gaza, wandering from camp to camp like 1.3 million civilians. While Hamas is holed up under the city with Jewish hostages and is also taking the society it was supposed to protect hostage. It wasn’t until 2024, when I arrived in Rafah, that I reached Deeb via WhatsApp: “Why are there still people behind Hamas?” He coughed as if he had choked on the number 42 percent that I mentioned – people who, according to statistics, are always in Gaza are still pro Hamas. He thinks he misheard and laughs, coughing again: “Why should we like her, especially now? They’re letting us down more than ever, they don’t care what happens to us.”

When exactly did the fighters stop the suicide attacks to become a massacre army? I won’t ask the question until February 2024. The connection is good, Deeb is silent. “I mean, these are men who aren’t even allowed to shake a woman’s hand because it’s not halal – now they rape, desecrate corpses and put it on the Internet?” It takes a while for him to answer in a thick voice: “I think so Not that the Hamas guys did anything like that. Nobody is capable of something like that and can then say: That was good.” – “Excuse me?” His astonishment that I even consider such terrible actions to be humanly possible also leaves me speechless.

Deeb, otherwise open to uncomfortable truths, seems seriously convinced: “These are Israeli stories.” Simply and poignantly because the actions are unthinkable? “Everyone in this world who is normal doesn’t want things like this to happen.” Nobody would support Hamas in this, not even Hamas would support Hamas in this, says Deeb. Shots can now be heard in the background, very close.

The connection breaks down. It’s not because of the shots, but because of the Bavarian Internet. It wasn’t until four in the morning that I received voice mails, silent, someone was praying in the distance, otherwise there were explosions and shots.

The next morning there is relief: everyone is still alive! Deeb’s wife Rula can be heard trying to make a fire on the boggy ground. Not with wood, but with plastic waste. Is that why everyone coughs? All children are sick. There is no medicine. “If you line up at a local clinic at four in the morning, you might be able to get a packet of paracetamol in the evening,” says Deeb. “For a cough?” I ask.

A few weeks ago, Deeb described the situation in the camp like this: “Like camping, only without showers, but with bombs.” Now he speaks more seriously. For the first time, it’s not just the Israelis who are the enemies: “In order to survive, people fight among themselves.” That would also have cost people their lives. “All I lost was my glasses.”

That’s why his house still stands. It is badly damaged, the Israelis kicked in the door and searched everything, destroying the pipes, says a friend who stayed in the north. Later his house was completely devastated by the looters. Only Chais’ Playstation miraculously remained undiscovered. “When I can go home, I play with it day and night,” the eight-year-old introduces himself. “And whoever wants to take them away from me, whether it’s Hamas or Israel, I’ll beat them until I can’t take them anymore.” Deeb’s friend, who remained in Gaza, also talked about the many nameless corpses lying around everywhere. “Cats and dogs eat their faces.”

“Maybe we need ten years to recover from this war and be ourselves again,” says Deeb. »Rula has not yet forgiven me for leaving Gaza and leaving behind her father, who insisted on staying in his house – even though she was beside herself at the time and wanted nothing but to get out of the hail of rockets and bring the children in Bring security.”

I hardly recognize them in photos anymore. Chais seems so serene. When you ask him what he wants most, he says: “I want to go to paradise.” There would be peace. His little brother Jussep wants an electric piano. He no longer has any memories of home.

The lost glasses are only the tiniest of all collateral damage, but I associate it with lost perspective, lost consideration, and foresight. Can I expect Deeb to squint and google the Israeli perspective on the Internet? Instead, I’m sending the photo from the time he talked to the kids on the beach: What might have become of them? “Maybe they have become friends?!” he writes on Facebook. And follows it with a “Haha!”

I answer: “Just because you said: ‘Stop the violence!’?” – “Statistically speaking, one of them would be with Hamas,” I write back and think about which one it would be: the thug, the one The beaten one or the one who stands jaded and dull?

“They probably died in the war,” Deeb writes back. Everything is possible in these times. “But I hope they’re okay.”