Nader Al-Masri is the only Palestinian man we interview who doesn’t smoke—the absence of a cigarette in his hand is striking to us. Dressed in a faded plaid shirt, he sips a fruit cocktail as he answers our questions. Everything about Nader is neat and trim, from his chiseled face to his clipped answers during the interview. His stern, focused manner perhaps comes from the force of will it takes for him to pursue running in Gaza, a place where it’s difficult to earn recognition for following a dream, much less get paid for it. With an unemployment rate approaching 40 percent, most Gazans are focused on getting by, but Nader has scraped together a way to support his family of seven while keeping up a demanding training schedule and traveling to competitions.
We first interview Nader during our trip to Gaza in the spring of 2013. He explains to us why, despite the lack of support, Gaza’s legendarily hot summers, difficulties traveling, and even Israeli air strikes, he has kept running.
I WAS ALWAYS FASTER THAN THE OTHER BOYS
I grew up in Gaza, in Beit Hanoun.1 I was always faster than the other boys. In Gaza when I was a child, the only sport kids played seriously was soccer. So when I was very young, running meant running back and forth while chasing a ball. Really, though, I didn’t care about the ball—I just enjoyed running. One day when I was fourteen, my teacher Saoud Hamed—he taught Arabic and sports—announced that we’d be having a foot race. That wasn’t something we’d ever done before in school. I prepared for it by running whenever I could for a few days, and then I won the race easily. My teacher told me I had a special talent, and offered to help me train.
From that first race, I wanted to be a runner, to be the fastest there is, but my family didn’t support me. My dad thought there were better things for me to do, such as help out with his business as a grocer. So I had to train secretly while I was a teenager. Then one day, I was away from home for a long time, running, and when I came back, my father asked me what I had been doing. I said, “I was training to run, and running is the thing I want to do with my life. That’s all there is to it.” Later, my uncle visited our house and was able to convince my dad to let me train.
Training for me took a lot of extra effort. There weren’t any great places to run in Beit Hanoun or Gaza City. I didn’t have good shoes. And I had to work long hours at my family’s produce market a lot of the time. It was routine for me to leave the house with my father at two in the morning for work. I’d go to markets in Gaza City to pick up shipments of produce, and he’d go into Israel through Erez to buy produce there.2 Then my brothers and I would be in charge of the market, which was right next to our home, until my father returned from Israel. So there were many days when I didn’t have a chance to start running until the afternoon, when it could be hot, and when I was already tired from a long day.
During this whole time, my teacher Saoud was very supportive of me. He helped me train, and he also worked to get the attention of the Palestinian national running team, which was based in the West Bank. I got stronger and stronger as a runner, and then I joined the national team in 1999, at nineteen years old. I remember telling my family that I was on the national team and that I was going to travel to Ireland for a race. They didn’t believe me. They asked me, “What are you talking about?” They went and asked Saoud, and he said, “Yeah, your son made the team and we’re leaving in a few days.” My family was shocked that this was something I could actually do with my life.
So in 1999 I left Gaza for the first time through the Rafah border into Egypt. Saoud was with me. I remember him saying, “You are about to have an amazing experience, Nader.” We flew to Ireland out of Cairo. When I got on a plane for the first time, I was a bit worried, but I was calm as soon as the plane took off.
In Ireland, I saw a very different life than the one I knew in Gaza. People there had so much, there were times I felt like what we had back in Gaza couldn’t even be called “life.” But one of my best memories from Ireland was just meeting the other runners on the Palestine national team, getting a chance to talk about shared experiences. I’d never met them before, since I’d never had the chance to travel to the West Bank, and there weren’t any other members of the team from Gaza. The coach of the national team was Majed Abu Maraheel. He was the first runner to represent Palestine internationally when he ran in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. The national team had just been formed the year before in 1995, just after the Palestinian Authority first came into power. It was great to feel like there were others like me, other Palestinians who had devoted themselves to running.
After I finished the championship, I insisted on going back to Gaza and training there, so that I could represent Palestine again and again in other countries. I didn’t want to be a Palestinian runner living somewhere other than my home, and I wanted to stay in Gaza, where people were just starting to notice me and realize that running has a purpose.
I’VE ONLY BEEN TO THE WEST BANK ONCE
In international competitions, I’m a runner, and I throw shot put. As a runner, I participate in the 5,000-meter race. My proudest moment as a runner so far was at the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, in 2006, when I got eighth place in the 5,000-meter race. All together, I’ve been in forty international competitions, including the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I was just under the qualifying time to run in Beijing, but I still got a chance to represent my country on the national stage.
In the past thirteen years since I joined the national team, I’ve been to twenty-five countries, but I’ve only been to the West Bank once. That was in 2008, when I had to cross to Jordan. It wasn’t easy. It took seven months for me to get the permit to travel through Jordan. It was because of the media, because I got many interviews with Israeli TV channels and newspapers. At the end of the day, the Israeli government gave me the permit.
I also ran the UNRWA Marathon in 2011 and 2012, and I received first place both times. Then in 2013, it was canceled.3 In 2013 and 2014, Gazan runners were also banned from going to Bethlehem to participate in the new marathon there.4 Israel would not grant us a permit to go. In 2013, I applied four times. They didn’t give reasons. The Bethlehem Marathon meant a lot to me, because I wanted to run in Palestine against other top Palestinian runners.
I’ve never been to Bethlehem or Jerusalem. It would have been my first time. Even if I get a permit to the West Bank, I won’t get a permit to Jerusalem this year because of my age. The Israelis only give permits to men older than thirty-five to travel to Jerusalem, because they see young men from Gaza as too dangerous to even consider allowing in the city.
IT GIVES ME THE SENSE OF BEING FREE
I’m married with five kids—four girls and one boy. I was married to my wife Sawsan in 2007, and I supported my family for a time as a security officer with the Palestinian Authority. But after Hamas took over shortly after I got married, they drove the PA out of Gaza and I was left without any job. Still, I continue to be paid by the PA, which is true of many Gazans who had worked for the Palestinian Authority. I’m paid around $500 per month.5 That helps to feed my family, and I also need the money for vitamins and supplements, when I can afford them.
I train alone because no one can compete with me. There is no sense in competing with people slower than me. I have to compete with people who are like me, and that doesn’t exist in Gaza yet. I usually train at a playground near my house. It’s 400 meters, like a normal track, but it’s a sand track, so the sand slows me down. It takes more time. It also hurts my legs, so I don’t train there all the time. Sometimes I train on the beach, sometimes on the sidewalk. I wake up at six a.m. and train for two hours in the morning, and then I go back home, have lunch, and take a nap. Then I train again at six p.m. I have a program. I train all summer, even when it gets extremely hot.6 It’s harder, but I never stop, because when I stop I feel like my legs need to move. I run even during Ramadan, after I break the fast. I usually start at six a.m., but during Ramadan I start training after we eat at seven or eight p.m.7
I regularly go to Europe and other countries to participate in competitions. If you visit my home, you can see the many medals and prizes I’ve received over the past thirteen years. Sometimes, host organizations that invite me to races pay for my travel. But I still have to figure out how to get to Cairo, which can be impossible when the borders are closed.
Soccer players are sponsored and supported by the government and the Palestinian Authority more than runners. I feel isolated because I am not supported and I don’t have facilities. Sometimes I stay for six months or so outside Gaza to train, since I don’t have the facilities to help improve my running here. I have the proper shoes, but I can’t run with them in Gaza. They have spikes, and I can’t run with them on the sand, so I only use them when I travel. But then when I wear them, they give me problems because I’m not used to them. I can run 5,000 meters in fourteen minutes, but the international qualifying standard for a number of top-level competitions is just over thirteen minutes. So I’m training so I can participate in international competitions and make money. I can’t make money until I reach this goal. But becoming better with the facilities I have available here in Gaza is difficult.
My running doesn’t make money. I’ve thought about leaving Gaza to have more support as a runner. I have a wife and kids who I would have to leave behind, but I would be paid, so they would have a better life and I would be achieving my dream.
I go running while people are sleeping, and I do all these things partly because I want to get first place when I run and show that Palestinians have something to be proud of. I’m proud to be representing Palestine, no matter how hard it is for me to keep training. When I go to represent Palestine in championships, I try to focus on the idea that Palestinians are a peaceful people. And I draw attention to the fact that we can’t move around easily because we don’t have an airport and we have to go through Egypt to travel, and not even that is reliable. Now the Rafah crossing into Egypt is closed.
Unfortunately, not many Gazans know about what I’ve done as a runner. Usually, when you say you are on the official team of your country, it means something, but here there isn’t much appreciation of that sort of achievement. There was a movie I saw about a runner who died, and as the ambulance pulled away, people were clapping like he was something great. But in Gaza, if I died while I was in the middle of a training run, probably nobody on the street would notice.
I’ve thought of quitting many times because of the lack of support, but running is still the thing I want to do at the end of the day. It takes all of my time, but it’s what I want to.
I also keep running because it basically means freedom to me. It’s not like soccer, where I have to play with eleven others. I run on my own. I go wherever I want, do whatever I want, and it gives me the sense of being free. The second I start running, I feel free to fly and go wherever I want. When I was young, before I had a family, I’d even run when there was an Israeli invasion or bombing in Gaza City. Today, I stay with my family when anything like that happens. But whenever I feel stressed out by everything that’s happening here, I can still leave the city and go running in the country, where there’s nobody else in sight, and it gives me the feeling of being free.
1 Beit Hanoun is a city northeast of Gaza City with over 30,000 residents. The city is on the northeast border of Gaza and close to the Erez crossing into Israel.
2 The Erez crossing is the major border crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Movement across the border was severely restricted starting in 2007.
3 The UNRWA Marathon is an annual marathon that was started in 2011 and brings people from around the world to Gaza. In 2013, it was canceled because Hamas didn’t allow women to participate.
4 The 2013 Bethlehem Marathon was the first marathon ever organized in the West Bank. The Israeli government denied passage of twenty-six Gazan applicants into the West Bank to participate in the race on the grounds that the applications didn’t meet criteria for extreme humanitarian need, such as medical urgency, which are currently the only criteria for permitting Gazans to travel into the West Bank.
5 The Palestinian Authority governed Gaza from 1995 until 2007, when the political party Hamas took full control of Gazan governance. Though employees of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza were replaced by Hamas loyalists, the Palestinian Authority continued to pay former government employees in hopes of an eventual return to power in Gaza.
6 Average temperatures in Gaza City in July and August are over 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
7 For the month of Ramadan, observant Muslims refrain from eating between sunrise and sundown.
APPENDICES
I. TIMELINE OF MODERN PALESTINE
The history of the lands west of the Jordan River is vast, complex, and contentious. We’ve composed the following timeline as a guide to help readers understand the broader context of some of the stories presented in this book, and to understand the ways the very name “Palestine” has developed across millennia. We’ve assembled the timeline with information from the Palestine Institute, as well as information from timelines assembled by UNRWA and other UN agencies, the Guardian, PBS, BBC, and others. For further reading, we recommend Ilan Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine and Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine.
8000 BCE—The first permanent human settlements appear in the land west of the Jordan River. These settlements develop into the city of Jericho, which is still inhabited and located in what is today the West Bank.
8000 BCE–1000 BCE—Control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (known in the ancient world as Canaan) passes through control of numerous empires, including Egypt and Babylon. Parts of the region are controlled by autonomous Canaanite city-states. Around 1200 BCE, a coastal Canaanite people known as the Philistines form a defensive alliance around the cities of Gaza, Ashdod, and Ashkelon near the Mediterranean coast. Egyptians describe the land of the Philistines as “Peleset.” Later, Greek writers refer to the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as “Palestine,” or “land of the Philistines.”
1000 BCE–850 BCE—The Kingdoms of Israel and Judea emerge from confederations of autonomous tribes of the people known as the Israelites. The Kingdom of Israel has its capital in Samaria (near modern Nablus), and the Kingdom of Judea makes Jerusalem its capital.
722 BCE–1 BCE—Part or all of the land now known as Palestine is ruled by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, numerous Hellenistic dynasties, and the Romans, among others. Semi-autonomous city-states also flourish during this time, including those of Israelite and other Canaanite peoples.
324–634—Roman Emperor Constantine moves his capital from Rome to the city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). He establishes Christianity as the religion of the new Byzantine Empire, which includes all of Palestine. Palestine passes through Byzantine rule to Persian rule, then back to Byzantine rule. During this time period, much of the population of the region is Christian.
