Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

You talked to me about its caves and its cactus and its wild animals and its olives that stretch to the horizon. You said Galilee is an island between two seas. In the west there is the Mediterranean, and in the east there is the sea of blue olives. In these two seas, Christ learned how to fish and chose his disciples. A land of fish and olive trees and oil.

You promised to take me with you, and you never did. But I saw everything from the olive groves at al-Khreibeh on the Palestinian border. I saw endless olives and young men who never tired of dying for this land that has become our graveyard and our promise.

And now we’re here. Both of us have ended up in this place called Galilee Hospital, which isn’t a hospital, as I’ve told you a thousand times. The hospital is finished, and your illness continues.

“WE’LL CLOSE the hospital before the man dies,” said Dr. Amjad, laughing. I don’t know what brought him here, it’s been ages since he’d stopped by to see you. I was sitting with you after feeding you that yellow food through a tube in your nose, when Dr. Amjad came to talk about the probability of closing the hospital.

He spoke as if he had no idea of what was going on – practically speaking, the hospital is already closed. The first floor has become a warehouse, and on the second floor there are only five rooms left: one for you, a patient, one for me, a doctor, and three others inhabited by new patients I haven’t yet found the time to examine.

The patients here don’t resemble patients. Two old women and a man around fifty-five. As though the hospital, or what remains of it, has been transformed into an old people’s home. Zainab’s still here, and the job of looking after the storerooms has been added to her duties. The Syrian guard doesn’t guard, the cook doesn’t cook, and the operating room has been moved to Haifa Hospital in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. I heard recently that they may close Haifa Hospital, too. As Zainab explained it to me, the cost-reduction plan calls for keeping just one hospital in Lebanon, which will be Hamshari Hospital in the Ain al-Hilweh camp.

You know, things have been turned on their heads. The few surviving Palestinian leaders who migrated to Tunis went back to live in Gaza, where there’s an authority, a police force, prisons, everything. That’s why they absorb every penny, and there’s no need for all these hospitals in Lebanon!

Why didn’t you go with them to Tunis?

I didn’t because I couldn’t. I felt faint in the municipal stadium and went back to the hospital. But what about you? All the fedayeen went, and they ended up with their offices and their bodyguards and their revolution.

Why didn’t you go?

Is it true you refused to go and said it was our duty to die in Beirut?

That was a mistake. There’s no deciding when to die. We die when we die. Deciding when to die is suicide, madness.

Were you exhausted by it all?

Some people said you’d decided to go back over there after the defeat of ’82, but I didn’t want to believe it.

You told me it wasn’t possible for us to leave Lebanon like the Turkish army. Turn our backs on our people and go? Impossible! We had to stay with the people.

You stayed. Then what?

They slaughtered us the way everyone knew they would slaughter us. And nothing changed. Tell me, why did you choose to be a victim?

Rest assured, I’m not going to send you back now, as a corpse. I’ll keep you here with us. Staying was what you chose, and I’ll respect your choice. But talk to me about your children and your wife. I don’t want the story of Nahilah over again, because I don’t know anymore what parts of it are real and what parts are made up.

Do you remember the day you got furious with me because I refused to join the hospital staff – one of the new conditions they imposed on me after the end of the civil war in Lebanon? I refused because I’m a doctor, not a nurse. That day, you insulted me and also railed against your children: “You’re all shit! Not one of them has turned out like his father. You, you don’t want to work because you’re clinging onto your title, Salem is a mechanic, Ahmad’s a professor, and Salah’s an I-don’t-know-what. I didn’t beget any real men. Not one of them joined up with us. I was waiting for one of them, just one, who would come and be like me, with me. But they’re all like their mother, peasants rooted to the soil. You, too. What does being a doctor matter? The important thing is the work, not the position.”

You blew up because your children didn’t turn out like you, forgetting that you didn’t turn out like your father. Do you understand now how the blind sheikh suffered when you mocked the Sufi gatherings and the sessions of hadra? ^*Your father swallowed his grief. He never once insulted you the way you did us, even though he wanted you to be a sheikh like him, like his father and grandfather. And here you now are, an officer in a slipshod army in a war that never happened. And when it did happen, you said no, this isn’t my war. You didn’t want to have anything to do with the civil war, not here, and not in Jordan. What were you thinking? That the war would be just as you like them, simple and clear? Were you surprised by the explosion of this Arab world that lost its soul a thousand years ago and today is flailing around in its own blood searching, and failing to find it?

What did you expect?

The blind sheikh mourned you and took pity on you.

And when you didn’t go to Tunis with the leadership, all of us here took pity on you because you’d become a fragment of the past, a relic, walking among the ghosts of memory.

You don’t know your children, or that country you used to contemplate in the blue night through the fissures in your cave. Now I’m going to be the voice of reality, which you’ve never heard before, as though fate has sent me to tell you your truth that you’ve taken care to hide away in your basket of stories.

“What is reality?” you’ll ask.

I won’t answer you by philosophizing and telling you that the reality of a man is his death because I don’t like heavy phrases like that. When I read them in a book they convince me that the writer has nothing to say.

Reality, Abu Salem, is what Catherine, the French actress, passed on to me.

Please don’t smile. Listen for a moment. I’m not. . I don’t. . I didn’t. .

Yes, I visited her. I went to the Hotel Napoléon on Hamra Street because she said she wanted to see me before she left. No, it never occurred to me that I might leave everything and go work with them in France. First of all, I don’t speak French, second of all, I don’t like the theater, and finally, I hate acting.

I thought I’d visit her to get out of this prison. Yes, I feel like a prisoner here. The doors are closed, the light’s dim, and there are bars over the windows as though we were surrounded by barbed wire or minefields, or the walls were leaning in on us and melding into one another to suffocate us.

I wanted to get out if only for an hour, and I stayed out all night. . I don’t know. Just be patient, please, I’ll get there.

No, it’s not what you think. It’s serious. Catherine told me something unbelievable, and I read the book and verified that what she said wasn’t a lure.

I went to the Hotel Napoléon and asked for her at the reception desk. They called her on the telephone and I spoke to her; she asked me to wait for her in the lobby.

She came, sat on the edge of an armchair and said she was sorry but she had an appointment with a Lebanese writer who was going to take her to see Prison of Sandat the Beirut Theater.

I told her that I’d just come over to say farewell.

She said she needed to talk to me. “Can you come back later?”

“When?” I asked her.

“Tonight,” she said. “The play’ll be over at ten. I won’t have dinner with him; I’ll come back and I’m inviting you to dinner.”

I said I couldn’t stay out that late because getting back to the camp, with all the security barriers surrounding it, was almost impossible at night.

“Please,” she said.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

As she got up, she said she’d be waiting for me in the lobby at ten.

And we left.

She went toward a man who appeared to be in his mid-forties, wearing glasses and carrying a black leather bag, and I set off with no idea where I was going.

I could’ve returned to the camp, and that’s what I decided to do in fact. But then I thought of the sea and decided to walk a little along the Manara Corniche before going back to the camp.

I got to the corniche and everything opened up. I saw the sea and filled my lungs and heart with the sea air. God, it was delicious! Only we, we who have been released from all the prisons of the earth, can take such pleasure in the taste of the wind. I walked and breathed and took it all in. The sea was every possible shade of blue and I almost wanted to throw myself into the midst of its palette. I ran and walked and danced. I bought some lupine seeds to snack on and sat on a stone bench and watched the people running and striding and strolling. Nobody paid any attention to me. I was alone among them, overhearing snippets of their conversations, which blurred as they drew away and which I’d be trying to continue on my own when new stories would steal into my ears.

Time flowed by without my noticing.

I wasn’t waiting for her. Perhaps I was waiting for her unconsciously, but I didn’t sit down and wait deliberately. I sat down to sit down, and then I looked at my watch and it said five past ten so I started walking toward the hotel. I walked at a leisurely pace because I was sure I wouldn’t find her. The writer would invite her to a restaurant, then woo her and sleep with her. That was their world, and I had nothing to do with it. I arrived at about half past ten to find her sitting on the sofa in the lobby with an empty glass in front of her. She got up and said eagerly, “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” and sat me down opposite her.

“What will you have?” she asked.

“Whatever you’re drinking.”

“I’m drinking margaritas. Do you like margaritas?”

I’d never drunk one in my life, but I said I liked them.

The waiter brought two glasses, the rims coated with salt.

She said she wanted to ask me some questions.

I told her that I didn’t know anything about the theater, that I felt strangled inside an enclosed space. I also said the only time I’d seen a play – it was about the history of Palestine – I’d felt stifled by seeing the actors chewing up the Classical language like cud before spitting it out in insipid, repulsive phrases.

She said she’d decided not to take the part. The massacres of Shatila and Sabra couldn’t be performed on a stage. She said that she had been terrified when she visited Shatila, and that if she’d accepted the part, she would have felt implicated politically.

“You know, I’ve visited Israel,” she said.

“Really?” I asked coldly.

“Doesn’t that surprise you?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re not upset?”

“Why should I be upset? You visited my country.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “I know. But I visited Israel when I was fifteen, and I lived three months on a kibbutz in the north.”

“In Galilee,” I said.

“Yes. In Galilee.”

She said she’d gone there because of the Shoah.

“The what?”

“ Shoahis a Hebrew word meaning Holocaust,” she said.

“I understand,” I said and asked if her background was German.

“No,” she said, “but all of us” – and here she made a gesture toward herself and me – “are responsible for the massacre of millions of Jews, don’t you agree?”

“Agree to what?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I decided not to take the part. I can’t. I can’t see the victim as someone turned executioner because that would mean history is meaningless.”

I downed my glass, and she ordered me a second drink.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No. Not really.”

She said it would be better if we ate something. “Take me into Beirut and choose a beautiful restaurant.”

I said I wasn’t hungry and quietly started sipping my second drink, since I don’t know any restaurants in Beirut, and I didn’t have any money on me.

She said she didn’t want to perform in that play because reading wasn’t the same as seeing.

“You know, Jean Genet’s strange. His language is amazing, and there’s that ability of his to move from the most savage to the most poetic expression. But the reality’s different. I can’t do it.”

She looked at me with enigmatic eyes and asked where we were going to have dinner.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. “I’ll finish my drink and go.”

She raised her hand, the waiter came over, and she asked him about food. He said it was late and the kitchen had closed, but we could order sandwiches if we liked.

She ordered a club sandwich for herself and asked me what I wanted. I said, “Anything,” and she ordered me a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

For an instant, I imagined myself in a cops-and-robbers film. The lights in the lobby were dim, and Catherine and I were seated in the bar, where there was nobody else. At the bar itself there were three men in black suits who looked like intelligence agents.

I downed the ham sandwich quickly, and she asked me if I wanted another.

“Please,” I said.

She called the waiter and ordered another ham-and-cheese sandwich. I would have preferred a club sandwich like hers, but she’d assumed that I liked the first one, since I’d devoured it with such speed.

I ate the second sandwich and felt a little giddy, maybe because of the margaritas or maybe because of the kibbutz story.

I asked her the name of the kibbutz, but she said she couldn’t remember.

I asked her if she’d visited the demolished Arab villages in Galilee, and she said she hadn’t seen any demolished villages and hadn’t known we’d been expelled from our country.

She took a sip and said she was sorry but she wanted to ask me an embarrassing question.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She said she’d read something about Iron Brain in a book by an Israeli journalist.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Iron Brain is the name given to the operation to break into Shatila on the eve of the massacre.”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“Nothing,” she said and fell silent.

She said she’d read in the Israeli journalist’s book that nine Jewish women married to Palestinians had been killed in Operation Iron Brain.

“How did you know it was called Iron Brain?” I asked.

“It’s in the book. The writer’s name is Kapeliouk. Have you read his book?”

“No,” I said.

“He describes the deaths of these nine Jewish women in the massacre.”

At this point, I felt I’d fallen into a trap. What was this woman saying, and what did Iron Brain mean? No, I swear I’m not paranoid about the intelligence services, and I don’t think that everyone who asks questions is in Intelligence. So far I’d understood Catherine, I’d even felt some sympathy for her; she couldn’t take the part because she felt responsible for the Holocaust – that was understandable. But this story of the nine Jewish women had a strange smell to it.

She asked if I’d like another drink.

I said I didn’t want the drink that was rimmed with salt.

“How about white wine?” she asked me.

“Okay,” I said.

She ordered a bottle of white wine, and the waiter came carrying it in a container full of ice. He poured a little into my glass and stood and waited. I didn’t know what he wanted, but Catherine gestured to me to drink. I drank and nodded my head, so he poured more into my glass and hers and left.

“Wait a second,” she said. “I’ll go up to my room and get the book.”

I swallowed a large mouthful of wine and stood up to go. I didn’t want to discuss the Shatila and Sabra massacres again, and I wasn’t going to tell her about Boss Josèph, who I’d heard about from the crazed Lebanese journalist. I swear they’re all crazy: They’d invent the news so they could write it. Why did he want to set me up with Josèph? Was it because Josèph was from al-Damour? ^*Does one massacre justify another? I don’t want to make comparisons. I told him I rejected comparisons: Massacres are not supposed to happen, and if they happen, they must be condemned and their perpetrators arrested and taken to court. All the same, I’d gotten involved so I went with him to the restaurant in al-Jemmeizeh, at the bottom of the Ashrafiyyeh district in East Beirut. But, by then, I was half-drunk and wasn’t in the mood for a discussion.

I took a last gulp and was getting ready to leave when I saw her coming back, carrying the book.

“Listen,” she said.

She opened the book and started reading: “In the count of those lost were nine Jewish women who had married Palestinians during the British Mandate and followed their husbands to Lebanon during the exodus of 1948. The Israeli newspapers published the names of four of them.”

She closed the book, drank a mouthful from her glass, and asked me if I’d been in the camp during the massacre.

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you know those women?”

I laughed out loud. “You’ve come all this way and given me wine to ask me that? No, my dear friend, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m serious. Did you know of the presence of Jewish women in the camp?”

“No.”

“I’m trying to discover their names. Can you help me?”

“Why?”

“Because this book saved me.”

“Which book?”

“Kapeliouk’s book. Do you see where I’m coming from?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t.”

“I told you I went to work on a kibbutz in the north when I was fifteen. I went because I felt guilty. And when I came here for the play, I felt guilty again. Then I came across this book, and it saved me. I stumbled on it here in Beirut – in Antoine’s Bookstore on Hamra Street, and I felt a sense of comfort. You know, this book will help me to say to Jews that when they kill Palestinians they’re killing themselves, too.”

“What has it got to do with me?”

“You’re Palestinian, and you have to help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Get hold of the names of those women.”

“But it says in the book that they were published in the Israeli papers.”

“I want their stories,” she said.

“Why?”

“To prove my idea.”

“Do you know Hebrew?”

“ Ketsat.”

“What?”

“A little. Ketsatmeans a littlein Hebrew. Do you know Hebrew?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a doctor and not a linguist. Go to Israel, anyway, contact this writer, and he’ll give you the names.”

“No. I want the Palestinians to tell me about these women’s experiences.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“No. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “I understand that you won’t act in this play so you won’t feel implicated. Didn’t the tall man say Jean Genet didn’t defend the Palestinians, he was just obsessed with death and sex, and that his project as a director was to put on a show that glorified death? You’ve refused to act in it, and you may be right: In your view, our death doesn’t deserve to have a play put on about it. But then you come and ask about nine Jewish women who, you say, or your Israeli writer says, were slaughtered here in the camp. There were more than fifteen hundred people killed, and you’re searching for nine!”

“You haven’t understood me. Please, tell me, do you believe, as a Palestinian, that what the Israeli writer says is true? Tell me about the massacre.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Did you see the massacre with your own eyes?”

I TOLD YOU that I was drinking white wine, the lights were dim, and the noose was around my neck. The wine was going to my head and taking me to places I’d forgotten. It made me think of Jamal the Libyan.

Did you know Jamal the Libyan?

Jamal whose chest was torn open by an Israeli bullet near the Beirut airport during the siege? I don’t know why I told her about Jamal. I think his story deserves to be made into a book; if only I’d told it to a great writer like Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, he could have made it into an epic. But Jabra’s dead now, and I never met him. All I had in front of me was this French woman half of whose face was hidden behind the bottle of white wine, and I wanted to explain things to her. It didn’t matter to me whether she was an actress or a spy. I wanted to make her understand the truth, and all I could think of was Jamal the Libyan. Or no, perhaps I wanted to seduce her. There was the wine, and there was her soft skin, and there was her little head balanced like a little ball upon her neck, and it was night, and for the first time in months I felt my loneliness had been breached.

The man who told the story of Jamal the Libyan wasn’t me. It was a man who resembled me.

I saw him do it and observed him closely and was impressed by his way of talking and how he could convert his fear and doubt into a dance of seduction and attraction; how he saw the woman’s defenses fall before him, and how taken aback he was at detecting a sort of betrayal as he approached the female body after a long dry spell. I saw him shaking off the humiliations his fear had inflicted on him. By the way, Father, why do fighters, when they feel fear, feel it more deeply than others? If you want to see fear, find a veteran, and put him in a frightening situation; then you’ll understand what real fear is.

So there was Khalil, which is to say myself, his fear tossed aside, sitting in front of this French woman about whom he knew nothing, telling her an extraordinary story, one that really deserves to be turned into a novel or a film. The truth is that Khalil Ayyoub had given some thought to the matter. Don’t think anyone could know such a story and not get the idea that he might become a writer – though to turn this true story into a novel we’d need at least one military victory so that people would take us seriously and believe that our tragedy deserves to be placed next to the other tragedies our ferocious century has known, while casting the gloom of its final days over us.

We don’t deserve our own story, which is why Jamal never told anyone. He fought in silence and died in silence. But what a story it is.

Why, come to think of it, did he tell me his story?

I remember he came to the hospital among the wounded. They brought him in with another man, both covered in blood. The first one looked dead, his blood clotted on his stiff body. I don’t know who examined him. Anyway, he was taken to the mortuary in preparation for burial. Then they discovered he was still alive, so they rushed him to the recovery room, and there we discovered he was a poet. The papers that came out in Beirut during the siege published long obituaries about him. When the poet awoke from his “death” and read these, he was delighted beyond imagining. His medical situation was desperate: He’d been hit in the spinal cord and his left lung was punctured, but he lived for two days, which were enough for him to read everything that was written about him.

He said he was happy, that he no longer was afraid of dying because he’d grasped the meaning of life through love woven by words. Ali – that was his name – was the only happy corpse I ever saw; it was as though all his pains had been obliterated. He lived for two beautiful days in his bed surrounded by stacks of obituaries, and by the time he actually died everything had already been written about him, so his second death notice consisted of a few lines and no one paid attention to the time of his funeral. We took him in a procession from the hospital to the camp cemetery – there were only a handful of us.

Jamal the Libyan was wounded along with the poet, fracturing his right shoulder and sustaining several severe chest wounds. This didn’t stop him from visiting his friend, the living dead, in the recovery room and weeping over his two successive deaths.

Jamal told me his story in the hospital and I told the tale to Catherine, and here I am now, repeating it to you so I can unravel, for both of us, the meaning of things. I won’t lie to you and say that my encounter with this French actress was nothing and ended with the gush of the shower in her hotel room. Something stole into my insides and created a sort of breach, which I wouldn’t call passion but which I will say, for the time being, resembled passion.

Jamal the Libyan left the hospital to die, as though it were the fate of this pilot to die on firm ground, not in the sky. His real name, of course, wasn’t Jamal the Libyan; the tag “the Libyan” got attached to him because he’d studied at the aviation school in Tripoli in preparation for the formation of the first squadron of the Palestinian air force in exile. The squadron was never formed, and when the Israeli invasion of Lebanon started, the Palestinian pilots from Libya were called to join the defense of Beirut. Jamal died in Beirut, and it was there he told his story.

“Let’s start at the end,” you’ll say.

Okay, I’ll do it since I’ve always preferred to tell the ends of stories before their beginnings. But you’ll have to forgive me this time because first I’m going to give you an account of what happened with Catherine. I began with her from the beginning. I didn’t tell her, for instance, how Jamal told me his story.

I remember that, when he was speaking about the Israeli army, he said his maternal uncles were all in a dither because they couldn’t enter Beirut.

“My uncles are very scared of their soldiers dying. They’re sick! And they need psychiatric help!”

I didn’t say anything when he mentioned his uncles. At the time I didn’t notice because, like tens of thousands of others living in Beirut, I was under continuous Israeli bombardment from air, land, and sea and was suffering from what you might call shell shock.

He said it to give me a chance to stop him at the word uncles, and when I failed to notice and got into a political-military debate with him about our likely collapse in the war, he immediately changed the subject and said, “Look, Doctor, you don’t know them. I know them better than you because I’m a Jew like them.”

“A Jew!” I said, and burst out laughing, sure he was joking.

Jamal wasn’t joking, but he wasn’t a Jew in the true sense of the word. He said it to give me a jolt and provoke me to question him so he could tell his story.

I didn’t tell Catherine the story this way. I began from the beginning. I left things deliberately vague and in limbo to heighten the shock value, and it worked. I didn’t make anything up myself – the story’s astonishing, and I used it to frame a moment of passion with a beautiful woman in a Beirut hotel on Hamra Street.

We were drinking white wine, and Catherine was seated beside me because when she came back from her room with the book, she’d changed her place and, instead of sitting opposite me, sat down right next to me on the wide sofa. She moved close to me as she read the text so I could see the page she was reading from, but when she finished reading she stayed there.

I was surprised.

Really, the text took me by surprise, and I was on the point of expressing my doubts and saying, as any of us would, that they didn’t even want to grant us the benefit of being victims of the massacre but felt the need to skew even that by focusing on the nine Jewish women who’d been slaughtered. But when I remembered Jamal the Libyan, I decided to keep quiet. I swallowed what would’ve surely appeared ludicrous to that woman, however obvious it seems to you. It was in China that I learned to distinguish between the stupid and the obvious. It takes another culture to let us discover that half the things that seem obvious are simply our own stupidities.

I said to her, “Listen. I’m going to tell you a story about a Palestinian family, and afterward you can draw whatever conclusion you like. But listen carefully.”

She said that first she wanted a response concerning these women.

“This story is my response,” I said.

And Khalil began.

I can see him sitting in the hotel lobby, the words gushing from his lips and eyes. I see him now as though he were another man, I would have wanted a friend like him because I love people who know how to tell stories.

Khalil began.

Jamal was born in Gaza City, where his father was a notable of the place, a wealthy man who had never been interested in politics, in spite of the fact that Gaza had been badly shaken by the war in ’48 and had turned into a city of refugees. The city was overflowing with tens of thousands of those expelled from the areas the Israeli army had just taken over. It almost seemed as though there were no Gazans left in Gaza – Gaza dissolved in a sea of refugees and became the first place to be collectively Palestinian. It was there the Palestinians discovered they weren’t groups of people belonging to various regions and villages; the disaster had produced a single people. That’s why Gaza became the most important hub of political activity in Palestine’s contemporary history. The Communist Party was strong there, it was there that the Muslim Brothers arose, and the first Fatah cells took shape in its camps and quarters. The Popular Front would occupy the city by night, under the command of a legendary figure known as Guevara of Gaza, setting up roadblocks everywhere. It was there that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements were born. .

Ahmad Salim, Jamal’s father, lived in the heart of this political and ideological whirlwind that battered Gaza. He never participated in politics, but he permitted his sons, when they became young men, to attach themselves to the Arab Nationalists movement, which had caught on among students.

Jamal, his eldest son, finished his secondary education in Gaza and then studied civil engineering at Cairo University, where he was an activist in the Arab Nationalists movement, which changed its name to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine following the fall of Gaza and the West Bank to Israeli occupation in 1967.

Mirwan, the second son, studied agricultural engineering at the American University of Beirut.

Hisham, the third son, was unable to complete his studies. He was finishing up his secondary education in Gaza in 1967 when everything was turned on its head.

Samira, the only girl and the youngest in the family, was one of the first Palestinian women to be arrested on charges of forming cells of “saboteurs,” as they’re called in Israel.

The four children participated enthusiastically in the demonstrations that swept the streets of Gaza in support of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and his decision to shut the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which was the official reason for the Six-Day War.