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It’s mid-october 2024, more than a year since the war started, a year of Walid’s everyday life being turned upside down. Last week, to keep him entertained, I let him watch a video on my cell phone: it was of children going to school. He was fascinated.
“Daddy, I want a backpack like them!” My son wants a schoolbag, and I will do everything I can to find him one. I scour the town of Deir al-Balah, no satchels anywhere. I contact friends scattered across the Gaza Strip: nothing in Nuseirat, nor in Rafah, Kahn Yunis or az-Zawayda. It has to be said, there haven’t been any schoolchildren here for a long time. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has destroyed the whole educational infrastructure: kindergartens, schools and universities. Who needs a satchel when they’re being bombed?
A few days later I chance across a bookshop that’s open. It’s hidden at the far end of Deir al-Balah’s market, abutting a refugee camp. I go in but don’t hold out much hope.
“Good morning, do you have any schoolbags?”
“No, I’m so sorry,” says the storekeeper.
But the other salesman isn’t so sure and offers to go down to the basement to look in the storeroom. After many long minutes, he brings up a backpack covered in dust and hands it to me. I rub it with my palm and reveal a picture of Batman. The price: 150 shekels—that’s 35 dollars—which is a fortune here, rather than the 20 shekels it would have cost before the war. I don’t hesitate for a moment.
Back at the tent, Walid can’t get over it. He jumps about for joy and stows his little belongings in the bag: a notebook and some crayons that I bought from a street vendor who’d set out his wares on the bare ground. He was nine years old.
Walid is now three. At his age he should be in kindergarten learning to write and count and draw. But that’s no longer possible. So I do my best, teaching him as much as I can. Inside the tent, I overturn one of our plastic chairs so that its backrest is uppermost and he can use it as a desk. We play school. In our imaginary world I’m the teacher and he’s the pupil. Showing great pride in his schoolbag, he sets it down, opens it slowly and takes out a piece of paper and a pencil. I speak to him in French, the language of my heart.
“Write your name, my son. What’s your name?”
“Walid. Doctor Walid!”
He wants to be a doctor when he grows up.
“How do you write Mommy’s name?”
“Sabah!”
“How about mine, what’s my name?”
“Rami.”
Of course, he can’t write yet and just draws little lines on the paper, but I always encourage him: “Good job! And now, draw a circle.” He goes ahead, applying himself to the task—he’s good at circles.
I’m proud of him, even if it is all just a game. As if in a movie, I’ve been playing a part for a year, acting the clown to spare him the realities of our life. I want him to believe that he goes to school and plays in his garden, and that the bombs dropped on us every day are fireworks. He’s convinced he knows how to write Sabah, Rami, Walid and the names of his half-brothers, Moaz, Sajed and Anas. Once his writing lesson is over, he puts the paper and pencil away in his new bag, still smiling.
Sabah and I get emotional whenever we play school with him. We hadn’t pictured his education beginning in a refugee tent. In our old life, this would have been the year that Walid started kindergarten at the American school on Nazareth Street, which is close to our home in Gaza City. The teachers there are locals, but all the lessons are held in English. It was a three-story building and from our apartment window we could see its large schoolyard. I so looked forward to walking him there every morning, I imagined him speaking French, English and Arabic, and playing with children his own age, sharing his toys with them.The school buildings have been partially destroyed by Israeli fighter jets. I don’t know what remains of it now, but most of its teachers have left Gaza. That particular dream, like so many others, is broken. I hope it will be salvaged when our nightmare comes to an end. So Walid’s imaginary school is inside our tent on an eight-hundred-square-meter wasteland surrounded by a wall with a big iron gate. A few vine leaves eke out a living here. We’ve been here for six months with nine other families. Most of the tents are hard up against one another: we share the tarpaulins, fabric and wood used in constructing our shelters to save on materials. Our own tent was very expensive. Handed out as humanitarian aid, it should have been free, but we spent 3,500 shekels, the equivalent of 1,040 dollars, to buy it from the man who was selling it by the side of the road. It’s very common for humanitarian aid items to be sold on the parallel market. Anyone who’s been given a lot of flour sells it to buy canned food that others in turn are selling to buy something else. Some people had already built shelters out of tarps and corrugated iron before they were issued with tents, so they opted to sell them as a way of securing some cash because the banks no longer supply it: the war means there’s no cashflow. That’s how we came by our tent, our “Villa” as I’ve decided to call it.
Because this is a “five-star” tent big enough for all of us. It is 4 meters long by 5 meters wide and 1.8 meters high in the center where we can almost stand upright. We’ve laid out five mattresses inside. During the day we put them around the edge to create a living room; at night we line them up close to one another to turn the space into a bedroom and keep ourselves warm. Walid sleeps between his mother and me. His half-brothers each have their own mattress next to us. All around the Villa we’ve made walls out of wood and sheets, having failed to find any nylon or tarpaulins which would have been better at keeping the winter out. We’ve created a bathroom area by digging a hole in the sand. We put a bucket into the hole and cemented it in, then dug channels and invented a flushing system using jerricans. We have a five-hundred-liter cistern which supplies the whole family for showering, flushing the “toilet” and washing clothes and kitchenware. So we try to be as sparing as possible with water. We also have two twenty-liter jerricans: to fill them we have to walk nearly one kilometer, stand in line for hours, then walk the same distance back again.
Next to the tent Walid has planted basil, fava beans and lentils. I don’t want him to see destruction but seeds being sown and plants growing. Life going on. I want him to appreciate nature and to feel that our new home is as nice as our old apartment: we have a garden here . . . and a blow-up pool that I bought last year after we moved into the tent. I want him to think our life is a wonderful adventure! We’ve put two small tables and a few plastic chairs in the garden, and that’s where we eat. Sabah cooks using a clay oven with a wood fire. I love seeing her face darken from the smoke, as if she’s tanning even though it’s winter. On rare occasions we’re lucky enough to find a gas bottle, but the IDF lets them through only in dribs and drabs.So this is our little parallel universe, our kingdom, our seaside villa surrounded by bombing and the horrors of the outside world. I know that the months ahead will be especially tough, so I try to hide the humiliations inflicted on us by the Israelis behind a mask of optimism. I look at this tent and tell myself that it must be a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Sabah and I decide to give our villa a name: it will be called “Pride.” It will be a place of joy and hope for our family.
We’ve put two mattresses outside in the garden tonight. All six of us are gazing up at the stars. The sky is studded with drones and F16s flying overhead, but the stars shine brighter. A memory comes back to me: the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a mountain ridge near Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. I tell my family about when I was meant to go camping there. A memory from my youth, from another life.