As Bombs Fell in Gaza, a Rich Cactus Lover Could Cultivate Only Patience

GAZA — Jawdat N. Khoudary is one of Gaza’s wealthiest men, and one of its boldest dreamers.

His $15 million-a-year construction company, Saqqa & Khoudary, is building two hospitals here with money from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, employing 60 people full time and 140 day laborers. A lover of antiquities whose family has lived in Gaza more than 200 years, he opened the strip’s first archaeological museum in 2008, and is financing a French dig in the north. At his 100,000-square-foot compound on his family’s former citrus farm, a garden oasis amid concrete density, he is cultivating tens of thousands of cactus from around the world, imagining a huge public park and nursery selling small pots for $1 or less.

The Arabic word for cactus is “sabr,” which also means patience. “This is what we need in Gaza, to be patient,” Mr. Khoudary, 52, said during a tour of the garden two months ago. “It’s good practice to learn patience from cactus, because it grows very slow.”

None of that shielded him from the eight days of bombardment that ended last Wednesday, because, as he put it, “In Gaza, when it comes to the war, all people are equal.”

After the first 24 hours of Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket fire, Mr. Khoudary took his wife and five children to her father’s home near the coast, thinking it would be safer. He returned the next day, realizing that “there are no zones, this zone danger and this zone safe and this zone half-half,” as he put it, but splitting the family between the two places, in case.

He spent the days of cross-border violence mostly in his diwania, an indoor-outdoor study, unable to focus enough to read his beloved history books, or to sleep during the fierce nighttime strikes. Instead he toggled between his iPad — his 14-year-old son has been giving him Facebook lessons — radio and television, avoiding talking to friends on the phone because, really, what was there to say?

“The first day was the most difficult,” he said on the seventh day. “Now, if we hear the bombing, we’ll not be afraid, we’ll not go to the other room, we’ll continue our coffee and cigarette.”

Mr. Khoudary’s was certainly a rarefied experience of this war: he had a guard from the office bring him “enough cigarettes to last 20 days” — he usually smokes two and a half packs of Marlboro Reds daily; last week he was up to three and a half packs — and a worker at the house fetched dozens of fresh-picked clementines when a visitor came to chat. He did not know anyone directly who had died or whose house was destroyed, though he took personally an attack on Saraya, a collection of historically significant buildings that housed government offices and was severely damaged in the 2008 war.

Mr. Khoudary knew he could leave: unlike the vast majority of the more than 1.5 million people who live here, he travels monthly to Israel and has visited 40 countries, though he said the year he lived abroad, in Egypt, was “maybe the worst of my life,” racked by homesickness.

Yet he, too, was feeling helpless, and if not quite hopeless, certainly less hopeful about what might happen next. He recalled vividly the days after the 1967 war, when Israel first captured this 140-square-mile coastal enclave and brought refrigerated trucks to distribute ice cream, then an unheard-of treat here, to children like him on the street. “Until now I have good memories about the ice cream I ate from that truck,” he said. “What will Israel send us after this war?”

Like so many people here, Mr. Khoudary said the most difficult thing was trying to explain the situation to his children, two girls who have returned to Gaza after studying at the American University in Cairo, two older boys working toward engineering degrees like their father’s at the Islamic University in Gaza, and the youngest boy, Hamza, a swimmer who loves to travel.

“All of them have one question: why?” he said. “Why Israel attacks us, why Israel tries to make our life more complicated. This is far away from politics. It’s just kids. You cannot give the direct answer. No way to tell them, ‘O.K., this war will finish and then we will go to peace.’ Did you hear this word, ‘peace,’ in the last week? No. Just ‘cease-fire.’ ”

Of the cease-fire agreement announced in Cairo, Mr. Khoudary said that he hoped “it will be sustainable,” but that “the speeches of the two parties are against my hopes.”

He said he did not “agree with a lot of Hamas ideas,” but like many here thought that Hamas [3], the Islamic party that has ruled here since 2007 after winning elections the year before, prosecuted this round of fighting well, with its rockets reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He said the critical question was whether the cease-fire would yield a real opening of Gaza’s borders, something yet unclear, and last longer than all the agreements signed before.

“Let Gaza live freely, no need for the siege, khalas, it’s enough,” he said, using a common Arabic term. “We want to have sustainable life, we want to achieve our dreams. You cannot achieve your dreams between 2008 and 2012.”

Mr. Khoudary, a soft bear of a man in sweats and sandals, was abroad in 2008 when Israel launched its three-week offensive that left 1,400 dead and many, many buildings destroyed. His children went to their grandfather’s then, too, and on the last day Israeli Marines fired a rocket that hit a concrete column of his house.

“Nobody knows who will die and who live,” he said. “The rockets don’t differentiate.”

Last week, Mr. Khoudary shuttered his Al-Mathaf Hotel, adjacent to the antiquities museum, during the fighting, because he considered its location too risky. His construction business, like all others, closed, but the employees will be paid. “We have to show the people we are committed to them,” he explained.

He got up then and walked the mosaic paths of the garden, amid the lush trees of lemons, grapefruit, oranges, dates, those juicy clementines and the endless rows of cactus. There were prickly spears twice as tall as a man, and baby ones smaller than a toe. He brings seeds and saplings back from his world travels, then crossbreeds them into his own varieties. The scientific names for the species are complicated, so his garden workers make up their own: “flowers for peace,” “the beard of a gazelle.”

He stopped to pick a flower, plumeria, white with a yellow center, and handed it to his guest.

“I was in Athens last week,” he said. “I found a very nice palm tree at my friend’s company. I told him, ‘Can I take some seeds?’

“He said, ‘Will it grow in Gaza?’ I said, ‘I will try.’ ”