THERE is a wonderful moment in Louisa B Waugh's book when she meets the near legendary journalist Amira Hass, the only Israeli reporter to have lived in the Gaza Strip.
Over dinner with Waugh, Hass receives a call on her mobile phone and begins speaking to the caller in Hebrew. Waugh describes how "sitting across the table from an Israeli journalist speaking Hebrew in a crowded Gaza restaurant, I feel my spine tense".
Only then does Waugh realise that none of the Gazans around them is taking any notice whatsoever. Many of them, she points out, are themselves fluent in Hebrew having worked in Israeli factories, workshops and restaurants before the Strip was closed off following Israel's 2005 'withdrawal' and closure of Jewish settlements.
Small and seemingly insignificant as the incident is, it is very telling of the claustrophobic nature of life in Gaza which many journalists – myself included – have described as "the world's largest open-air prison". Indeed, the significance of this particular reference features heavily in Meet Me In Gaza, as the writer sets out to reveal that despite the confines imposed on this hotly contested finger of coastal land by the Israeli government and military, those who live there have dreams and aspirations that refuse to be hemmed in, neutered or stultified.
In a conflict of few compromises, the Gaza Strip has always been hardcore. Home to the toughest Palestinian resistance and the Israel military's most punitive tactics, it should come as no surprise that it was here that the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, first broke out.
From a place so politically hardcore, it is at long last welcome to find a book that is gentle and subtle in its rendering of the life faced by most Gazans. At its best it is a little reminiscent of the writing produced by the gifted and eloquent Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh, whose books When The Bulbul Stopped Singing and Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape give the outsider a poignant understanding of how both the individual and collective mindset of Palestinians have been shaped by long-term occupation and oppression.
Waugh, like Shehadeh, is able to sift nuggets of humanity from the most depressing of circumstances, making this ultimately an uplifting book. To achieve this, the author spent the best part of 18 months living in Gaza, working as a "writer-cum-editor" at a local human rights centre. Reading of her encounters with fishermen, farmers and beach acrobats, or picnicking with Gazan women and bathing at the hammam, is to be reminded that there is a thirst for life among Gazans that defies the wanton destruction so associated with this place.
Those descriptive passages set along Gaza's waterfront and beaches are especially poignant. Here Waugh captures the peculiar juxtaposition created by the apparent freedom and wide-open space of the sea with the physical congestion that sees 1.7 million Gazans cram into an area 25 miles by six.
There is something about seeing Gazan families frolicking on the beach that simultaneously liberates them while at the same time reinforces their sense of incarceration. I well remember during one of my own visits shortly after the closure of Jewish settlements and Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza in 2005, watching young Palestinians hurl themselves into the surf of the Mediterranean Sea many had lived alongside but had been unable to enjoy because of the military occupation and restrictions on movement that accompanied it.
In Waugh's book the plight of Gaza's fishermen still trying to make a living, their boats "scarred with bullet holes" from running the gauntlet of a five-mile fishing limit enforced by the Israeli Navy, is yet another reminder that real physical freedom remains an elusive quality in Gaza.
If the book has any shortcomings it is perhaps that its kaleidoscopic take on Gaza life at times leads to a few structural dips. Some of the dialogue exchanges between the author and the characters she meets can too be prosaic or mundane. The author is also a little hard on mainstream journalists and correspondents towards whom one senses she harbours a certain disdain for not sticking around Gaza as long as she does, even if that, unfortunately, is the limited nature of news reporting assignments.
These, however, are minor quibbles with what is otherwise a very different offbeat insight into Gaza and its people, delivered in a narrative style that succeeds precisely because it is simple, straightforward and devoid of any ostentation.
During the author's aforementioned dinner with Amira Hass, the Israeli journalist admits to being "a Gaza addict". I suspect Louisa B Waugh is very much someone who now shares that addiction. As readers we should be grateful for that and the eloquent, perceptive book she has written.
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