Rule of Law Gaza-Style | Tommy Cheis

Three raisined fishermen—one tending wheel, one sewing nets, a third hustling below to keep the ancient tub seaworthy—and an eleven-year-old amateur marine biologist trolled through blue-green waves, drag-fishing three nautical miles out—seventeen miles fewer than the Oslo Agreement permitted legally yet one more than Israel’s Navy tolerated in fact. People were hungry in Gaza. Hunger is its own legal system. Ergo, the fishing.
Eleven-year old Muhammad Jihad watched the block buildings retreat and disappear. The ceasefire was in effect until dawn. Off the port bow, the setting sun sprinkled the waves with sizzling fire. The captain ordered him to flick on the floodlights, illuminating the sea two fathoms down. Sardines instinctively followed the light up into the nets. After a time, the crew gathered and prayed, then ate mashed fava beans on bread.

Then the captain ordered them stern to haul again.

The first net spilled on deck a hapless octopus, a starfish, sponges, crustaceans, and a mollusk. Muhammad Jihad studied everything with singular intensity, cataloging species he’d seen only in books, imagining he was a crewman on Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso. But when the captain abruptly ordered the crew to drop nets and run, the boy’s waking dreams were bruised. Two miles northeast, a wedge of slate-grey patrol boats perched on rooster fantails.

The captain demanded full power from the ancient diesels. Everyone sat as the boat gained speed in a race for port. The wind generated by the redlined fishing vessel sucked sardines back into the sea. The will of the Gazans was great but could not overcome the physical constraints of Israeli speed and computer-optimized vectors. The Shaldags intercepted the crew four hundred meters short of the beach, then zoomed in tight circles, creating crossing waves to block and capsize them. Fifty-caliber machineguns barked. Bullets blew out lights and melted engines. A hot metal shard drew a straight bloody line on the boy’s chin. A megaphoned voice ordered the crew to strip and swim.

The captain told his crew that Israelis kidnapped fishermen and detained them for years. He would go down with his ship, but they should do as conscience demanded.

The engineer was single, could not swim, and thus elected to stay aboard and die fighting.

The net-mender had a family and, without rancor, chose captivity. He stripped, stood on the gunwale, plunged into the water, then surfaced. But a crossing wave immediately drove him under.

Muhammad Jihad doffed clothes, dove in, and found the drowning fisherman a fathom deep. He brought him to the surface, rolled him on his back, and helped him float.

The megaphoned voice became staccato and insistent. The machine guns opened up again. The doomed boat lost structural integrity.

The boy saw his floating comrade stitched with bullets, then jackknifed his own body, dove deep, and dolphined for land. Spotlights sliced the water. The boat shrieked its death throes.

Muhammad Jihad was near enough to shore to stand but kicked until his face hit sand. Then he crawled up the beach, using cabanas to cover and conceal his movements. Halfway in, he broke and ran, clearing the beach and the beach road. Nineteen minutes later, Israeli naval commandos captured him in the Friends Fitness Club two blocks inland. He had snuck in and stolen shorts and shirt from a sale-pile to blend in but was still too redolent of fish to escape the notice of a collaborator.

They cuffed him, strapped him to an IDF jeep, and drove their human shield to a detention center. There he was professionally beaten on his stomach and chest with a rubber truncheon, then locked in a windowless isolation cell full of malarial mosquitoes. Cuffs numbed his hands.

For two days, he was neither charged criminally nor provided legal representation. On the third day a woman led him into a room and made him sit in a plastic kindergarten chair. The IDF interrogator threatened Muhammad Jihad with a nineteen-year prison sentence for firing rockets. She told him that for every Hamas rocket fired into Israel, ninety-nine Gazan houses are destroyed. Then she exposed her breasts, claiming unless the boy confessed he would rot in jail and go five-against-one for eternity.

But the defiant boy did not confess.

She led him to a different cell with no toilet, covered his head with a wet claustrophobic cloth sack, and shackled him to metal rings in the concrete walls. Two-man teams interrogated him every three hours, swearing on the Torah they knew he was a terrorist and cursing his mother. They gave him neither food nor water, but blasted him with bright lights and pop music, shifted the temperature wildly, and beat him often.

All this watered the seed of theretofore dormant hatred. Encouraged by other prisoners who shouted that jail was part of his training and they would be exchanged for Israeli POWs soon, Muhammad Jihad savored the fact that for the first time in his life the enemy saw him as dangerous.

When two guards entered his cell, laughing derisively, to inform him his parents had just been killed, he laughed back and demanded they take him to their boss. After allowing him a shower, food, and clean prison garb, they did.

The boy sat on a leather chair under fluorescent lights in a comfortably appointed office deep in the detention center, separated only by a well-designed desk from a man wearing a crisp blue suit, thinning white hair, and a battle-hardened face. The facility’s senior Shin Bet Arab Affairs counterintelligence officer stood when the boy and his flanking guards entered. He introduced himself, in flawless English, as S. His resemblance to the Israeli Prime Minister was so close the boy wondered whether they might be twins, or even the same person, but knew this was ridiculous.

“I apologize for your mistreatment. This is not our way,” S began, in Hebrew. “With hardened terrorists, we use necessary measures, but with a boy of thirteen—”

“I, Muhammad Jihad, am eleven. And I don’t know anything.”

S smiled wryly, then motioned the guards to leave. “I’m perplexed,” he said. “Your Hebrew is superb. I could believe you were born in Tel Aviv rather than at a Gazan roadblock in a Peugeot.” The dropping of his name and the mention of the roadblock had the desired effect. “Do you have grievances? Are you hurt?”

“No,” said the boy festooned beneath his clothes with ripening bruises.

“You’re lying, but not in the usual direction. Arabs are drama queens. They exaggerate with volume, flailing hands, and a thesaurus. A hangnail is brain cancer. A disagreement is the Battle of Kursk. Bland food’s the Irish Potato Famine. You’re stoic. Are you sure you’re Arab?”

The boy said nothing.

“Forced eye contact’s an indicator of deception. So are flashing pupils, flared nostrils, sagging facial muscles, and thinned lips. You’re in fight or flight mode.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Au contraire. You’re an interesting person. We’ve studied you for some time. When you know a person’s baseline, what he does with his hands and feet, what his face looks like under normal circumstances? Even a trainee can spot deviations. And that scent you give off? When you lie under interrogation, your metabolic system attacks body proteins, producing the smell of decaying roses and fingernail polish.” S waved his hand as if to ward it off. “We call it prisoner funk.”

“I’m fine.”

“Khara. Bullshit. Look, everyone lies most of the time. We omit, commit, embellish, transfer. Most people can’t get through a morning without three whoppers. Do you know your rockets can go ninety-nine kilometers? Today a mother and three children in Tel Aviv were immolated.”

“They aren’t my rockets. And I’m truly sorry for that family.”

Detainees never expressed humanity in regard to Israeli civilians. S noted the anomaly. “Hamas is pathetic at war,” he said. “It takes ninety-nine Arab rockets to wound one Israeli. We’re destroying the tunnels where they’re launched and stored.”

“Along with the rest of Gaza. We have nothing more than firecrackers. You have the world’s third-biggest military. You call it Operation Pillar of Defense but you attack every one of us.”

S scrolled through something on his computer, then smiled like a kindly doctor about to administer a painful but curative injection. “The sooner you give me the truth about rockets and terrorist infrastructure, the sooner we’ll stop shooting, and the sooner we’ll have you out of here.”

“It’s you who should be out of here. You illegally occupy our lands, skies, and waters.”

“You’re confused. The U.S. and the Saudis have blessed us to do whatever we deem necessary. They blame Hamas for this war. So does your President Abbas.”

“He’s not my president. And your war is criminal.”

“Face facts. Israel’s the law in Gaza, so whatever Israel does is legal.”

“Stealing land? Destroying civilian neighborhoods like a kid with a magnifying glass and we’re ants? Your circular reasoning’s out of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Klugkind. I like you. You want to hate me, but you like me too. No matter. When we captured Gaza in ’67 we didn’t like the rules, so we made our own. Under Rule 19, we can expel the population, summon anyone to the police station, and detain anyone without explanation for offenses never committed, confessed, alleged, or even defined.”

“For how long?”

“Depends. You’ve been to four stations on the Israeli Via Dolorosa. Arrest, interrogation, detention, and beating. All that’s left are a military tribunal and execution.”

“For fishing?”

“In the Israeli Security Zone.”

“We were catching Palestinian fish. We left the gefilte alone.”

“You’re funny. If you quit terrorism, you could headline in Vegas.”

“You’ve blockaded us. What else can we eat, S?”

“Cake, I suppose. The judges could kill you or sentence you to life, you know.”

“I was born in the world’s largest open-air prison. I’ve already been sentenced to life. If a Gazan male hasn’t been to jail, he’s a Jew or someone’s wife.”

Weariness settled into bones S had abused through a lifetime of athletics, war, and power-jockeying. “Listen, Muhammad. There’s no Gaza and no going back. What’s true for a shark is true for you. If you stop moving forward, you die. You’re in trouble. Forget your people and your land. Look after yourself. Gaza’s been ours since Samson crashed it down on your heads.”

“Samson brought Gaza down on his own head, too. Do you condone suicide attacks?”

“Khalas. You play brilliant and ignorant by turns. I’m impressed. I want you on my side. I’ll get the charges dismissed.”

“If I collaborate.”

“Don’t use that word. Just give us information from time to time about bad people who harm good people. It could be months or years before we give you a task. Or never.”

“I’m no snitch, Godfather.”

“If I let you walk after three days, I’ll be signing your death warrant. Anything short of two months is an apology. Everyone will assume you’re ma’ashtab. Even if I add you to our security blacklist, Hamas will kill you as a collaborator. You’ll only survive Gaza under our protection.”

“For which there’s a price.”

“You won’t ever see us again. You’ll report to our friends in the Palestinian Authority. You’ll be a VIP. In two years, we’ll give you a new identity and send you to the U.S.”

Muhammad Jihad shook his head.

S reached under his desk. The door buzzed, then popped open. Two guards came to stand on either side of the boy. “Take a day. Think it over,” said Colonel Shlomo Rivkin, speaking loudly enough for the boy, on his way back to his cell, to hear.

At midnight, as Muhammad Jihad slept with his face on a tiny plastic pillow, a hulking acromegalic Jerusalemite, recruited by Shin Bet out of a Palestinian prison while serving a nineteen-year sentence for rape and pedophilia, keyed open the disquieted boy’s cell. He crept over, freed his erection, tore the boy’s underwear, kneed his back, clapped a hand over his mouth, and sodomized him. Lightning seared the boy from brain to rectum. Savage thrusts hammered air from his lungs, ripped him into rags, and took something he would spend the rest of his life trying to recover.

When his rageful lust was spent, the professional child-rapist, softening in Muhammad Jihad’s body, rubbed his lips on the boy’s ear. “You liked it, didn’t you?” he hissed. Shock, horror, and pain put the boy beyond comprehension. “Say it! Say I liked getting fucked up the ass!” When that failed to produce the desired result, the paid Palestinian sodomite projected self-hatred. “You fucking faggot! They have cameras in each cell,” the savage hissed. “If you cross them, they’ll release the disc. Everyone will know you’re gay. You’ll never have wife or family. Whatever you expected from life, kiss it goodbye.” The monster wiped his penis clean of blood and feces on the boy’s back, then dressed and presented the deal: “Collaborate? You leave. Don’t? I’ll date you tomorrow night.”

Muhammad Jihad’s shock deepened when, in a Hamas safehouse he found the next afternoon after furtive inquiries, his detailed explanation, undertaken in a bid for sanctuary, wasn’t met with a salute and a welcome into the fold. Instead, two hyperbolically-bearded men strip-searched, photographed, blindfolded, bound, and dumped him in living room corner in a candle-lit, unfurnished studio at the center of Beach Refugee Camp. The space was empty save for a television, plastic chairs, sleeping bags, rifles, and prayer mats. The virtues of the location, where militants stayed to avoid capture and plan operations, were two: it was undamaged, and so deep in the warren of buildings that the enemy’s approach would be reported by concentric rings of paid civilians, thereby buying time to escape.

Burning pain throbbed through Muhammad Jihad. Blood oozed. His hood blinded him, but he heard Hamas fighters whispering, arguing his fate. “No one is set free without having sold his sold to the devil, Abu Zakaraya,” said the older, grayer, paunchier of the two.

“But the brothers reported that he did not break, Abu Ayash. And he came straight to us without delay. What collaborator is so stupid? By Allah, he lied to the Jews to get out of jail. He’s smart. He tricked them. Now he’s a triple agent.”

“But only four days behind bars.”

“Bruised like an old melon, with a bloody starfish for an asshole. He couldn’t be broken. His uncle was a shahid whose bomb harvested ninety-nine pigs and monkeys and nineteen Zionist soldiers. His bloodlines vouch for him. Give him a task to prove his loyalty.”

“Very well. Have him kill his handler.”

“Who is your handler and where is he?” Abu Zakaraya asked Muhammad Jihad.

“Abu Hikma,” the boy responded, “is the curator of the Museum of Archaeology.”

“No,” Ayash told Zakaraya. “That’s too easy. Get the Jew recruiter behind him.”

S didn’t recruit me,” the boy protested. “He only thinks he did.”

“Who is this boy?” Ayash asked Zakaraya. “We don’t know for sure if S exists.”

“Well, how could the boy come to tell us of S unless he met and fooled him?”

“Maybe he’s an idiot. If he kills S, he lives. Otherwise, we kill him.”

“Palestinian weapons should never spill Palestinian blood. It’s haram. Forbidden.”

“Collaborators are the enemy no matter what blood their hearts pump, Zakaraya. And once they collaborate, they’re no longer Palestinian.”

“OK, but S is well-hidden. It’s too much for a boy of eleven.”

“Boys younger than this fought, killed, and died in the Army of Muhammad, PBUH.”

“Then let him kill Abu Hikma. Ayash, this boy is no collaborator.”

“Very well. Hikma it is. But first he’ll sit on the mahkama. What better way to teach the importance of loyalty than to make him judge and punish betrayal?”

Hands untied Muhammad Jihad’s hood. Abu Zakaraya ordered him to align chairs while the Hamas man fetched a detainee from the opposite corner and removed his hood, revealing a face made of black eyes, cuts, and bruises. Zakaraya made the prisoner kneel, then directed the boy into a seat in a row of Hamas militants.

With that, the ceasefire ended. Israeli bombs dropped, along with Hamas-style judicial administration. Calling it a trial would do violence to a word implying a presumption of innocence, rules of procedure and evidence, proof of guilt beyond some quantum of doubt, and other constituents of the hoary phrase rule of law. In what unfolded, none made the briefest appearance.

First, Abu Ayash offered fruit and cigarettes to the defendant, a college student accused of passing information to Israel concerning the whereabouts and schedules of senior Hamas leaders who’d died in Israeli targeted killings.

The defendant, stoned by hashish, accepted a filterless Camel.

Abu Ayash, chief prosecutor, read the florid boilerplate indictment, then asked the defendant to confess so his soul might be forgiven.

With no expression, the defendant admitted guilt but stated the Israeli cyber-espionage agency, Unit 8200, which, like the U.S. National Security Agency snoops on personal communications, had compromised him with texts exchanged with his boyfriend. The Israelis had promised to keep secret his lover’s sexuality and transport his mother to Tel Aviv for chemotherapy in trade for collaboration.

That said, the defendant signed the confession.

Abu Ayash asked the convict what punishment he should be dealt. It was pro forma. There was only one—everyone knew it—but, in exchange for cooperation, the doomed collaborator might spare his family the collateral consequences of his actions.

On cue, the convict rendered the only answer. Offered a choice of method, he elected shooting.

The jury, until now window-dressing, drew one rifle per member, then dragged the convict to a park and up against a bullet-pocked wall.

The convict refused a blindfold.

With the earth shaking such that to stand was to be a toy soldier juddering on a drum, the Hamas execution detail, five paces away, formed a line with the boy at the center.

On the signal, Muhammad Jihad closed his eyes and fired.

Abu Ayash sent him away with a pistol, three rounds, and seven days to kill the curator. The boy ran.

* * *

He made his way to al-Shifa Hospital, where a nurse attended a row of premature babies delivered from dead mothers by Caesarean section and toe-tagged when power to their incubators was cut. She gathered up the youngest Gazan fatalities, took them to the makeshift morgue, and placed them in top-loading freezers bearing the purple triple-scoop logo of Kazem’s Ice Cream. Then she scanned Muhammad Jihad for injury. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head.

“Family?”

Another shake.

“Orphan?”

“Yes, but not recently.”

“Go to blood donation or get the hell out of our way.” The nurse grabbed his arm and woman-handled him down the hall until they came to a T. She pointed.

The phlebotomist punctured the boy’s vein and drained him. The effusion of crimson was not punishment but a gift. He felt proud to be useful. Then the nurse walked him to the cafeteria where a robotic food-service worker handed him a plate of cold falafel.

After he ate, Muhammad Jihad headed back down the hall as if in magnetic traction, slipping right and left to avoid the rush of staff, toward the pediatric unit. Victims were dead or recovering from surgery. A stack of children’s books, along with charts and medical paraphernalia, covered a gurney. Without being asked, he slipped on a mask, grabbed books, and headed for the closest child, a girl of two—Layla per her chart—who had lost a leg and incurred facial trauma. He read her a translation of The Bunny Planet.

Layla perked up and smiled to the extent her wounds allowed. “Shukran,” she said, although injuries impaired her speech. Then her eyes closed.

He panicked, thinking her dead, but the machine tracking her vital signs told him she lived. Then he wandered from bed to bed, reading to each child in turn—Umar, Nur, Qasim, Nasreen, and Hamid. To each he bore light in a sea of darkness, oblivious to everything else, full of place and purpose that almost filled the void recent events dug from his bedrock. After many hours he noticed the sun brazing the windows with orange film and the shadows of palms and people running in and slouching out.

Having done all he could, he kissed each child goodbye then stripped off his mask. He’d almost cleared the doors when, from behind, a hand clamped viciously over his mouth.

In an office commandeered from al-Shifa administration, Muhammad Jihad, hooded, was interrogated, then beaten for half-an-hour by thugs with the Hamas Internal Security Wing. Given his youth and the fact confession wasn’t needed—the boy freely admitted he’d not, within the allotted week, killed the assistant museum curator whose death was his release-condition—he was spared the use of hammer, pliers, and more medieval tools.

His trial mimicked that of the recently-dispatched collaborator. Prosecutor and jury were mental and moral clones of the idiots who’d stood beside him and murdered the homosexual violated by Israeli cybersnoopers. Muhammad Jihad’s conviction and death-sentence were foregone conclusions.

At the end, floating on a rug woven from relief familiar only to those who fear life more than death, he requested to perform istishhad—a suicide bombing—to redeem his honor. The court was shocked and debated the request for nineteen minutes—far longer than such men were wont to spend considering anything. The ask was denied, not based on sentencing guidelines but because Muhammad Jihad wasn’t yet thirteen. Oddly, per ad hoc policy, although he was old enough to kill and die by firing squad, he was too young to die by his own hand.

They marched him out a delivery bay, around a flattened mosque, past a petrol station, across a sandy expanse, and up against a cement wall facing the sea.

Abu Ayash gave the order to aim.

Sand ran from the boy’s hourglass.

As the God in whom he wanted to believe refused to intervene, Muhammad Jihad heard an angry whirring.

Then a hissing serpent.

The world exploded.

When the boy regained consciousness, he, sitting at the base of a wall, peeled his melted eyelashes apart. The petrol station had collapsed into the huge fuel tanks below to form a glowing slag pile. The Hamas militants had been sliced into stew meat and cooked. The effects of the missile strike—blast, shrapnel, heat—extended from Ground Zero along a circumference running just shy of his shoeless feet. His face and hands were blistered. His hair was singed away. The vacuum created by the explosion had sucked off his garments.

But when he ran his hands over his naked body, everything was where it belonged and nothing was where it did not. Better still, one week after his jail rape, Muhammad Jihad had stopped bleeding. For such was the rule of law in Gaza.

Tommy Cheis is a Chiricahua Apache writer, medicine leader, veteran, and Cochise descendant. After traveling extensively through distant lands and meeting interesting people, he now resides in the Sonoran Desert with his horses. His short stories (will) appear in The Rumen, Yellow Medicine Review, Carpe Noctem, ZiN Daily, Spirits, Red Paint Review, Pictural Journal, Little Fish, Hot Potato Magazine, Blue Guitar, Florida Review, Exploding Head, Purple Ink, Pine Cone Review, Florida Review, Unlikely Stories, and other publications. His first novel, RARE EARTH, is under submission.