10.27.87

A REFUGEE'S VOICE IN THE CITY


Ibrahim is a third-generation refugee, born to a teenage mother who was born in Gaza two weeks after Ibrahim's grandparents left Jaffa.

He has been working in Tel-Aviv for the last seven years, since he was 17 and able to convince his father that it was better to go to the big city and, as Ibrahim says, "sleep and work God knows where", than to be another Unrwa-fed mouth in his 12-member family. He says "God" instead of "Allah" when he speaks Hebrew.

Since 1980, when he first came to the city, he has worked as a dishwasher, night security guard, garbage collector for a private firm and often, as a day labourer.

He is almost always paid cash, and for the last two years has been sharing with seven other workers from the territories a two-room apartment on the top floor and in the back of a dilapidated apartment house in a side street of the Carmel Market. His share is NIS 100 a month.

For the last two years, he's worked at the same restaurant on the promenade, which means that he's been able to give a semblance of normality to his life.

In the first years he worked in the city, Ibrahim would pay NIS10 every day for a ride that would leave Gaza at 4.30 a.m., and if the traffic wasn't too bad, those manning the roadblocks weren't too strict, and there was no curfew (which means no work that day for Gazans who work in Israel), he could be in the city by 7.30-in time to get some day labour. The same vehicle would collect him on the Geha highway at 5 p.m. and take him back to Gaza. If the traffic and the roadblocks weren't too bad, he could be home by 8 p.m.

Ibrahim now visits his family once or twice a month, but he says that he's pretty much out of touch with his friends from Gaza.

"Most of my fiends now are people who work in the city. And I even have a few Jewish friends. But not too many. People from the restaurant."

What Ibrahim calls "normal" is a routine that begins when he awakens at three in the afternoon. Some of his roommates work during the day, but he works at night. His boss says he's a good worker at the restaurant, which has grown large and popular in recent years. After two years on the job, he's now in charge of the three dishwashers who work in the back of the kitchen. The job pays him NIS 65 a night, which Ibrahim says is more than twice what he would get as a day labourer, freelancing his skills as a plasterer, gardener, bricklayer, whitewasher and cement mixer.

Ibrahim begins work at 4.30 p.m. and finishes between 13 and 14 hours later, after dawn, when the last of the drinkers has finished and the first of the day labourers begin reaching the city from administered territories towns much closer than Gaza.

He was on his day off yesterday, and on his day off he dresses in a clean pair of trousers and a white shirt and walks in the city, sometimes stopping at the restaurant for a cup of coffee.

Like almost everyone he grew up with, he's been arrested.

Twice, Ibrahim says, he was picked up, as a teenager-and before he came to work in Tel Aviv-as a suspected stone-thrower.

In Tel Aviv he's been stopped several times by policemen, Border Policemen, and Civil Guardsmen. He's been slapped around, he says, "but nothing really bad", except about a year ago, when he was picked off the street during a search for a rapist and two policemen beat him up until, he says, "a big officer" stopped them.

He couldn't work for a few days after that, but his boss gave him the name of a doctor who taped his ribs.

Ibrahim doesn't want his full name in the papers and he certainly doesn't want his picture in the papers.

"All I want is to save enough money so that I can get married and build a house, and maybe start a little restaurant of my own, on the beach in Gaza".

He would also like the authorisation to live in Tel Aviv legally, and sometimes he wishes that he didn't know enough Hebrew to be able to read the newspapers, understand the radio, and "worst of all, understand when people talk about me and all Arabs as if we were all terrorists".

After a while, Ibrahim will say that "yes, the PLO" represents him be he doesn't believe "in all that business about the Zionists leaving and the Palestinians going back to Jaffa".

He didn't know about the troubles in Gaza this past week. But when he was told, he said that that explained things.

"What things?"

"It explains why some of the people I know from Gaza weren't in the city today. Curfews. Maybe tomorrow they'll be back at work. Who knows? The army decides".


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