David Alvey writes: Some books become more relevant with the passage of time. Dervla Murphy’s A Month by the Sea, which relates the author’s experiences in Gaza during the month of June 2011, when she was eighty years old, is such a book. Her visit took place less than half a year after Israel’s twenty-two-day attack on the Strip, known as Operation Cast Lead. The book was published in 2013; the author died nine years later in 2022. Dervla Murphy had an exceptional gift for chatting with people and simultaneously grasping political realities. Indeed, her experience fourteen years ago casts considerable light on the horrors currently being visited on the people of Gaza.
The author of A Month by the Sea is at one level untypical of the ordinary Irish person and, at another level, an embodiment of the full spectrum of Irish opinion. A passage in her autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels (1979), goes some way towards explaining both her background and her political values:
In 1951, however, I was not yet ready to admit that an Ireland in every way independent of Britain could only be a mirage. It was too soon for me to analyse detachedly the Republican ideals and prejudices acquired from generations of militant Murphys. I therefore developed a form of cultural schizophrenia, with my nationalistic half resolutely remembering that Britain was ‘the ancient enemy’ (though already Mark and Godfrey [one a priest and lifelong friend, the other a lover] had seen that eventually my ‘literary’ rather than my ‘political’ half would win). Indeed, the fact that the implacable nationalism inherited from my father was being threatened by the apolitical liberalism inherited from my mother made me even more aggressively Irish and proud of it. Not for many years would I be willing to recognise that Ireland’s uniquely close relationship with Britain is impervious to ‘constitutional re-arrangements’ – and that to admit this is not to be a shoneen (pro-British) but a realist.
As well as being, in her inimitable way, an anti-nationalist she also rejected the devout Catholicism of her parents. At the time she got herself through the Rafah Gate into Gaza she had twenty-three commercially published travel books to her credit. And she was a lifelong feminist. You might say she had baggage. Yet Murphy was a born writer who eschewed cliched thinking as testified by each of her titles, but especially Wheels Within Wheels. Whatever way she chose to respond to different experiences, and it would be wrong to assume she got everything right, she was always well informed and thoughtful.
Because of the density of the information it contains, A Month by the Sea demands careful reading. I found myself taking notes on most pages of the 239-page text. Only slivers of the work can be discussed here; I focus on her observations on the treatment of women, her appraisal of Hamas and her view of Israel’s long-term strategy.
Expectations around female behaviour in Gaza changed radically after Egyptian military rule ended in 1967. Under the Egyptians women were relatively free although few adopted Western ways. In the seventies and eighties, a stricter observance of Islamic conventions began to creep in and with the rise of Hamas, Islamism prevailed. Early in her sojourn, Murphy became friends with a fellow grandmother, Mrs Halaweh, a native Gazan born into ‘old money’ who rails against ‘those Mujamma people’. What most upsets her is that her granddaughters no longer wish to be free, as she sees it. They see breaking the rules as sinful and unpatriotic. Murphy takes a different view to Mrs Halaweh, averring that not all young Gazans are that broken-spirited. She says that many students admitted to her, sotte voce, ‘We’d like to live normal.’
For her part, Murphy takes the brave stance of remaining bareheaded in all her dealings. Things do not always go well. She has circular and sometimes heated arguments with various young men and comes to associate disapproving stares with thick black beards. In private conversation with a female teacher from an UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) school, her companion rounds on her saying, ‘The Holy Koran orders every woman to keep every one of her hairs covered.’ Murphy’s sociability, one senses, gets her out of such scrapes.
But the way that women are treated in Palestine has darker implications than strictures on the wearing of clothes. Many miseries flow from the practice of arranged marriages, especially in families among the more affluent clans. Murphy describes a dilemma faced by Yara, a young woman she meets in a sub-office of the Palestine Working Woman Society for Development. Yara married by arrangement at nineteen, divorced at twenty-five, and has three sons whom she can only see once a week. She dreads the prospect of a second marriage, as a second wife, which her father has arranged with the son of his business partner whose existing wife is ‘barren’. A sympathetic brother living in Canada has offered to set her up in that country but that would mean leaving her boys. Back in Ireland some months later Murphy learns that Yara has become a second wife.
‘The grotesquely named honour killings,’ as Murphy puts it, are another barbaric custom practiced in Gaza and the West Bank. Murphy describes how punishment by death for pregnancy out of wedlock is not included in crime statistics, an indication of its prevalence. She also quotes Anwar, Mrs Halaweh’s nephew, a persuasive advocate for the bi-nationalist, one state solution which she also supports, lamenting that the isolation of Gaza compared to the more open West Bank acts as a tightening stranglehold on women’s freedom.
In typically robust fashion, Murphy declares she has become a ‘shameless cultural imperialist’, a stance open to criticism. Her reply to such criticism later in the book is that ‘the covert “liberated” of both sexes have pleaded with me to write honestly about Palestinian Women’s Rights’.
The methodology behind Dervla Murphy’s travel books rested on a simple formula. First, research thoroughly the history, geography, and culture of the destination country, using the best available sources. Second, embark on the journey and record the practicalities, adventures/misadventures, and human encounters in a travel diary. Third, return home and write the book mixing together the first and second. So she did for her remarkable book on Gaza.
Before ever embarking on her journey, her preparatory research, and experiences from visits to Israel and the West Bank had predisposed her to supporting Hamas.
Murphy has a lot to say about Hamas. She describes its origins in the 1970s in a movement of young Gazan graduates, Mujamma, who were committed to the revival of Islam. Critical of its denunciation of Darwinism and the physical intimidation favoured by some of its fanatical offshoots, she nonetheless sees a positive side as over a hundred Mujamma-based Mosques were constructed, with Saudi and Kuwaiti backing, which became central to the lives of the poor in the camps, villages, and urban areas. In an emerging clash between the Islamists and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), she contrasts the charitable orientation of the former with the corruption of the latter.
In 1987, a fortnight after the first Intifada began, Hamas was formed by Mujamma elements in Gaza. Its leaders, especially the famed paraplegic, Sheik Ahmed Hassin, virulently opposed the Oslo Accords but pragmatically adjusted to non-violent community building when a peaceful settlement seemed possible. Murphy suspects that the assassinations of Hamas leaders, including Sheik Yassin, by Israel between 2002 and 2004 were aimed at thwarting a competent peace strategy beginning to emerge on the Palestinian side. She is scathing about the extent of collaboration between Fatah, the main PLO faction, and Israeli forces in attacking Hamas. Relaying the views of Gazans she writes that the Palestinian temperament is incompatible with al-Qaeda-style fanaticism and that the demonisation of Hamas in the West was a factor preventing the Islamists from controlling extremist elements.
When word spread around the Strip about the strange Irish woman, Dr Mahmoud al-Zahar, an early associate of Sheik Yassin and a respected Hamas leader, asked to meet her. Her first words to him were: ‘Politically I’m on your side but as a European woman, Hamas is not where I belong.’ Their conversation, taking up nine pages of the book, is an informative read.
Responding to Murphy’s questions, Dr al-Zahar covers many topics: periods of history where Muslim and Jew flourished side by side; the provision of healthcare, welfare assistance, sports clubs and Islamic education to Gaza’s poorest communities by Mujamma; the persistent opposition of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the ideology of Osama Bin Lama; Fatah’s spectacular corruption; the contemptuous dismissal of a free and fair election (in 2006) by a UN-led ‘international community’; how an ideal Palestinian state would benefit human beings of both sexes equally and allow people to choose for themselves whether or not to live by the Koran; and so on. She says: ‘We agreed that one of the Palestinians’ major handicaps is public ignorance of the conflict’s historical background starting in the 1880s’. She likes Dr al-Zihar’s steady focus on the essentials and, as they part, thanks him for raising her spirits. In her assessment he is intelligent, practical, adaptable, tenacious, loyal to his own, most of all a man of integrity, a quality she describes as elusive, ‘but you know it when you meet it.’
Just two extracts will suffice to conclude and summarise Murphy’s view of Israel’s strategic intentions. The first is a telling quote about the past from Mrs Halaweh’s nephew, Anwar. ‘The Zionists didn’t get rid of us because they were bigoted Jews who hated Muslims. They were secular Jews who had to drive us off land they wanted to settle’. The second is from Arnon Soffer, an Israeli Professor of Geostrategic Studies who was an advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Murphy’s interpreter, Nita, remarks at one point that the graffiti spray painted by IDF soldiers on the ruined remains of some Gazan houses shows that they are uneducated. Murphy then recalls a statement from Professor Soffer, a man she describes as ‘not lacking education’.
We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence we will fire ten in response. And women and children will be killed and houses will be destroyed . . . When 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza it’s going to be a human catastrophe. These people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. Until collective imprisonment produces voluntary transfer.
Dervla Murphy died in May 2022, a year and some months before the execution of Soffer’s vision commenced.
