Palestine Speaks, page 18
My dad told his friend that I was interested in meeting his daughter, and so we went back to visit a week later. At Houda’s house, the two of us went into kind of like a private room, but with the door open of course. We chatted. It was weird, because I never really—she was nothing like the American girls I knew. All my life, I’ve talked to boys and girls, no problem. But it was weird being in a room with a girl like Houda. I didn’t know what to talk about. She asked me some questions, I asked her some questions. Just small talk. I think we both left smiling.
Then soon after our talk, I asked her brother to come with us on a date to the sea. Her brother was there as a chaperone. Even though our conversation was limited because her brother was there, we felt a connection. We ended up going to the beach together every day, and even went swimming together, which made her mom go crazy. That was scandalous to her mom—she thought that was so inappropriate. Houda and I were really starting to feel comfortable together, though.
During that time that we were courting, one of the things I was trying to understand was her sensibility, and I was looking for something genuine. I wanted to know if she was one of those girls who maybe just wanted to leave Gaza. Some girls might just be thinking, Hey, this guy’s a U.S. citizen! I was looking for a sweetness inside, like a smile that’s too sweet to be fake. And I saw that, I saw something genuine in her. And she was pretty smart, too. She was getting a computer science degree, so we had that in common.
So before I left Gaza, I proposed. She said yes, and her parents agreed. She was still in college, and they wanted her to finish that first. We had the engagement party in Gaza before I left. It was on the beach, and we had all of our families there and we ate and danced. And then a year and three months later, in September 2005, she came to the U.S. and we were married in Knoxville.
YOU DON’T ENTER HEAVEN UNLESS YOU ARE UNDER YOUR MOM’S FEET
For my wife, I think it was really easier for her to adjust to life in the U.S. than it is for many people, because she had somebody from here to help her out. She didn’t have to deal with feeling like an outsider, a weirdo, as much as I did when I came as a kid. And she loved the U.S. right away. She fell in love with the way people were just friendly to her. Even strangers would smile and say, “Good morning!” She said it was so different from Gaza, where everyone was unhappy and people you’d run into on the street were just rude. America seemed like a happy island to her—a bubble where people weren’t affected by any bad things happening in the world. Plus we had a nice house in Knoxville, and I got my job back at IBM so we had a good income and didn’t have too many worries.
We traveled some after we were married, and then we had our first child, our son Azhar, in January 2007. Later that same year, she got pregnant again, and it was going to be a boy. I called my dad, and told him I was going to name my second son after him. But before my second son Iyad was born, in January 2008, my father passed away.
I wasn’t even able to go to the funeral—I flew to Israel, but the Erez crossing was closed at the time because of the war with Hamas, and I couldn’t get in.5 I was glad I got to tell him about my son, at least. Then we had one more child, my daughter Nada in 2009.
Houda got a master’s degree from University of Tennessee—a teaching certificate. And we were so busy, way too busy for me to go back and visit my mother right away after my father’s death. I really wanted to, though, especially to help settle his estate. But still, we were becoming more and more involved in the Palestinian community in Knoxville, even though it was small. You just end up meeting these other families, and there were about twenty-eight families in the city that would get together sometimes. We’d talk about what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank, share food, talk. I started to become a better Muslim, too. I stopped drinking after I got married, and I read the Quran. And I started to want my kids to have a closer connection to the Arabic world. I wanted to pass along Arabic language and culture to them. And frankly, I was worried about them growing up in the States and getting pulled into some of the stuff I saw as a teenager—drugs and gangs, that sort of thing. I thought having a closer connection to Arabic culture could help keep them away from that stuff. I think my time in Kuwait helped me develop some boundaries, even though I drank and did other things as a kid.
Finally, in 2010, I flew to Gaza to stay for a week and a half. I was shocked to see how my mom was living—she was so alone. She had a couple of cousins, but nobody to really look after her, and she was seventy-two. I was like, Man, it isn’t right for her to live by herself like this for so many years. But she didn’t want to come back to the U.S. She said, “I will have nothing to do there. I want to die here, just like him.” And she wanted me to stay. She wanted her family around her. It really bothered me. In Islam, there’s a saying that you don’t enter heaven unless you’re under your mom’s feet. It’s a weird saying, but it basically means that your mom really has to be pleased with you when she dies for you to get into heaven.
And so I went back home, and I told my wife, “Listen, you know I’ve been at IBM almost ten years, and I don’t want to let it go. Nobody does this, but I really feel like the right decision is to return to Gaza for a while. I have to do it for my mom. I can’t live with myself if my mom dies and I’m not there.” And Houda said, “You have two older brothers, let them help her out.” My oldest brother, he was in Houston, he had kids who were about to go into college. He couldn’t just leave his job. And my other brother, in Florida, he was a citizen, but his wife wasn’t, and he was applying for her citizenship—he couldn’t just throw all that away. And Houda was like, “Okay, fine, fine. I’m not sure this is the right decision, but I understand.” I said, “It’s probably not the right decision! I don’t know if I’m gonna find a job there. I don’t know how people think there, what their attitude will be.” There’s another saying in Arabic—you have to leave your destiny up to God sometimes, and just whatever happens, happens. And however bad it was going to get in Gaza, I couldn’t imagine being fifty, sixty years old one day and thinking, I wish I had gone to Gaza and helped out my mom.
I also thought, This is good for my kids. My kids are gonna learn Arabic, they’re gonna be able to read the Quran. Because if I stayed in the States another twenty years, yeah, I’m gonna be well off, my house paid off, everything fine, but it’s not worth anything to me if my kids can’t speak to me in Arabic, you know. So after considering my kids, I thought, Screw it. I wanna do this for two, three years—what’s the worst that can happen?
GAZANS ACT LIKE BOMBINGS ARE A NORMAL PART OF LIFE
We came here in April 2012. My sons Azhar and Iyad were five and six, and my daughter Nada was three. It was a big adjustment for our family. But in some ways it was a bigger change for Houda than for me. You have to understand, she came from a family of Palestinian refugees in Gaza. Her family lived in Ashkelon before 1948, so they didn’t really consider Gaza home.6 For my wife, she felt like she’d finally found a home in the States, and she wasn’t crazy about being back in Gaza. But we settled into the house that my dad had bought and my mom was still living in, which was in the Zeitoun neighborhood in the south of Gaza City.7 My mom lived on the first floor, then there was a family renting on the second, and we moved in on the third floor, and there’s another family on the fourth floor.
We moved to Gaza at a really interesting time. It was calm when we arrived, but it still felt like a dangerous place. The second month after I came here, my cousin had an injury, and he had to go to Egypt for an operation. He came back dead because they botched the operation. But there aren’t any good hospitals in Gaza at all, so he had to make the trip. There’s one hospital in Gaza City called Shifa, which means “get well” in Arabic. But its nickname is Maut—“death.” It’s terrible. You know a hospital’s bad when there are feral cats running around inside, and that’s what Shifa looks like.
Then in November of that year, Ahmed Al-Jabari, the guy in charge of the Qassam rockets, got assassinated.8 I started hearing things like, “Hamas is gonna really have to retaliate for this.” Everyone knew something was gonna happen. So after that we saw eight days of bombing.9 At first it was kind of further away, but then they started hitting areas in the Zeitoun neighborhood where I live, and east of my neighborhood, where there are a lot of militia bases and spots where militias launch rockets. You don’t see the militias, but they’re around you. Even right around where we live, they come and set up rockets and shoot from here. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were missiles buried under these olive trees on our land. Seriously. The militias look for any open spaces they can shoot rockets from.
It was a scary time, and I remember my daughter Nada running back and forth in the apartment when she heard bombs. She couldn’t understand what was going on. I’d look at her and I’d think, Man, I really hope this doesn’t affect her psychologically as she grows up. Because you hear so many horror stories about kids losing their hearing, and you hear stories about how kids get their legs cut off, or kids that become mentally ill.
On the seventh day or eighth day, the F-16s mowed down a building about a quarter mile from here. They shot it up with machine gun fire, and my building and every other building in the neighborhood shook with the impact. An Israeli missile put a giant crater in the ground not far from our home, and that really scared us too. So during the seven or eight days, there were moments where I would be thinking, Man, did I make the right decision here? And I would be with my mom downstairs, and she would be scared too. And then we started hearing the news about how if you’re a U.S. citizen and you want to leave, give a call to a certain number. I didn’t. I thought, I’m gonna hang on, I’m gonna hang around.
I would be so scared during those strikes. I remember once or twice after a bombing, an hour or two after it calmed down, I would go outside and I would see my cousins at the corner, just chilling, you know. I was like “Hey, what are you guys doing out here?” And one of my cousins would be like, “Hey, this is nothing, man—just don’t walk too far east right now and you’ll be okay.” So to them it wasn’t a big deal, but I sensed that’s just the attitude—Hey, I’m not scared—but at heart you cannot not be scared when you hear these bombs and the building you live in starts shaking. This was like Hollywood action—it was just crazy.
But a lot of Gazans just act like it’s a normal part of life. There’s a lot of pressure on men here to be strong. Like the kids in the street, when you’re driving a car, you might honk the horn to get them to move out of the street, and they’re like, “No, you move!” Little kids have the mentality that they’re grown men, and that can’t be healthy.
I FEEL MY DAD’S PRESENCE
I admit my decision to move my family to Gaza is kind of strange. I mean, anybody here who’s well educated, when I tell them my story, they’re like, “Man, what are you doing here? Really. What are you doing here?”
I’ve had trouble finding work. I figured if I had some type of 9-to-5 job, no matter how much it paid, at least I’d feeling like I’m being productive. But I still haven’t found one. I’m not gonna lie, coming to this situation after so many years having a solid job, it brings on depression sometimes. Sometimes the stress is so much that I’ll smoke a pack of cigarettes in a night.
I’m responsible for Houda and the children. Anything happens to them, it’s my fault. It’s a lot of pressure. I’ve got gray hair. My brothers see my pictures and they’re like, “What happened to you?!” I say, “Man, a year in Gaza is like five years in the U.S.!” I had some gray hair when I arrived in Gaza, but in the last year it just started going completely gray. It’s a tough life here.
But I think the kids are comfortable. That’s why I think that I really did the best thing for them by bringing them here young. I don’t even remember when I was four or five years old, maybe I remember seven and eight. So that’s why I figured if I bring them here now, it’s gonna be easier. Harder on me, but easier for them. If I bring them here when they’re eight or nine, they’re gonna want breakfast cereal, they’re gonna want everything U.S. style.
I also think that coming here has made me feel closer to my Palestinian identity. Just ’cause when I sit with my cousins, they tell me these stories about my grandfather, about my dad while he was here. They also tell me stories about Hamas, about Fatah, what happened with them. All the crazy things that have happened in the city.
I wasn’t with my dad when he died. But when I’m fixing these olive trees and the garden, I feel I’m near him. I’ll just feel his presence, and I’ll sit down under the trees in the cool air. The breeze comes in from the sea, and it’s real nice. I can kind of sense what he wanted to get back to by returning here.
MY WIFE WANTS TO LEAVE FOR GOOD
Things are still so hard here. Recently, the electricity schedule changed, so we’d have about six hours of power, twelve hours without in a cycle. It was like that for about a month and a half. Propane gas got really scarce. We use it for cooking, heating, but people were buying it up to run their cars, because gasoline shipments from Egypt got cut off. So it was a rough couple of months, but what are you gonna do? Then there was all the rain and the flood—we were fine because we’re on high ground, but so many people we know who live more in the middle of the city were completely flooded, with raw sewage in their houses. Life in Gaza, it’s full of surprises.
And Houda, she doesn’t have anyone keeping her here. Her father is in the States now. He’s actually ill and being treated in Cleveland. He had a stroke, and he’s seventy-five. My wife wants desperately to go back and visit her father, but we can’t get her out of Gaza at the moment. The border crossing situation is horrible. We contacted the U.S. embassy to get them to help us go through the Erez crossing, but they wouldn’t do it. Their attitude was that they’d warned U.S. citizens not to travel to Gaza, and so getting stuck here is our fault.
It’s rare for people to get out through Erez, but the Rafah crossing into Egypt is shut down now, too. It’s been opened and closed off and on, but it’s been closed the last few months. To go through, you have to apply first. To apply, you have to go to an office that’s basically like the DMV, but you have to get there at four in the morning and wait in a line that’s got hundreds of people. Then after five hours in line, you register to cross on a specific day. But when that day comes and you go to the Rafah crossing, they might just say, “Sorry, border’s closed today. Try again later!” And then you have to start the whole application process over again.
When you go to the Rafah crossing, it’s amazing. There are hundreds of people waiting for the crossing to open again. Many of them are sick, and they need to get out for medical treatment. Some people have died waiting at the crossing. And then I worry about my wife’s safety, even when we do get her across. Egypt isn’t very stable right now, and that four- or five-hour trip from Rafah to Cairo is dangerous. We’ve heard of hijackings, kidnappings of people on that road.
But my wife really wants to leave for good. Her brother left the capital a few months ago, so she doesn’t really have any family in Gaza. I always tell her, “I feel for you. Just be patient. Just a couple of more years, let the kids get some Arabic in them.” But I don’t know, sometimes it gets just really frustrating for her. One day, she told me, “You see your cousins every day, you laugh with them. You have a social life, but me, I’m just here, at the house with nothing.” I said, “I know it’s a sacrifice, but look at the benefits. Your kids knowing Arabic, reading and writing—God will give you rewards for that.” I mean, I don’t consider myself a conservative Muslim, but I’m a Muslim, you know, and I believe in the Quran. I believe in the message of Muhammad. And she told me, “Yeah, but even the kids, they’re not learning the best habits here in Gaza.” I thought about that, and I remembered something that had happened a few days before. I said, “You know, a little while ago I was telling Azhar that it was the anniversary of the day my dad died. And he was like, ‘Oh, God forgives all the dead people.’ He said it in Arabic, and it made me cry.” I would never imagine him saying that in the U.S., in English. I told her, “Let’s spend a little more time here, then we can call it quits. At least they will have a base of culture to build on.”
I don’t know what the future holds, really, or where we’ll move. I’ve been to Austin, and I like the way the city is small but big at the same time. So we might move to Austin. We’d be about three and a half hours away from Houston, from my older brother, so I’d be closer to him. On the other hand, I might go to Dubai to see if I can find a job there. Because I think for the kids it’d be better in Dubai than in the States—they’d be speaking Arabic. And I’d still be close to my mom.
Throughout the spring of 2014, Fadi and his family sought a way to leave Gaza, but were unsuccessful due to border closures with Israel and Egypt. U.S. authorities refused to help. Then, on July 8, Israel launched the early stages of the bombing and ground assault in Gaza that the Israeli military called Operation Protective Edge. On July 10, the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem issued an emergency message to U.S. citizens in Gaza offering assistance in leaving. Fadi quickly provided all the needed information to the consulate, and a consular representative told him to be ready to leave immediately.
However, Fadi’s wife Houda was in her third trimester of pregnancy, and in the early morning hours of July 11 she went into labor. Just after two in the morning, Fadi helped his wife into the family car and made his way to Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City.
