I met Khoudary nearly a dozen years ago, on the seventh day of the eight-day Gaza war of 2012 that in retrospect feels like a schoolyard fistfight compared to the past four months of death, destruction and displacement.
As I wrote then in The New York Times, he experienced that mini-war, in which Israeli airstrikes killed 174 Palestinians in Gaza, from a perch of extraordinary privilege. A guard from Khoudary’s construction company brought him enough Marlboro Reds to last three weeks, and a butler served us fresh-picked clementines as we chatted. He was a “soft bear of a man in sweats and sandals,” as I put it, and had spent the week learning to use Facebook from the youngest of his five children, Hamza, then 14.
But even they were not immune to the sounds of bombing at night.
Khoudary had shuttered the hotel he then owned, Al-Mathaf, and the adjacent antiquities museum he’d opened in 2008, because they were in a neighborhood facing heavy bombing. He’d halted work on the two hospitals he was building in Gaza, but kept paying his 60 employees, he told me, because “we have to show the people we are committed to them.”
Two years later, amid the intense 51-day war of 2014 that killed some 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza, Khoudary, now fluent in Facebook, posted bits of poetry and relevant history to the site. A new seaport was being discussed in truce talks, so he wrote of Anthedon, a 7th-century B.C.E. Gaza port that served as a main trade conduit between the Middle East, Europe and Asia Minor.
I returned to the Khoudary compound during a brief ceasefire that summer; Jawdat was in the West Bank on business, so I sat with his wife, Faten; their two daughters, who had recently graduated from the American University in Cairo; and Hamza. We munched green grapes from the garden and supped coffee with cardamom.
Again, their experience of the fighting was anything but typical. One daughter, 24-year-old Yasmeen, told me she’d read Lolita, Kafka on the Shore and a Pakistani comedic novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, during the war. Hamza, then in 10th grade, had been watching Harry Potter movies. But Yasmeen also spoke about the nightmares she had after seeing “headless fighters” in the streets where Israel bombed Hamas tunnels.
Weeks before that war broke out, the family had fulfilled one of their dreams, an exhibit and sale in Gaza of the succulents they so carefully cultivated. Jawdat had taught me that the Arabic word for cactus, sabr, also meant patience.
“This is what we need in Gaza,” he’d said in 2012, “to be patient.” During our 2014 visit, Faten showed off her favorite, a hybrid of eight species, grown over seven years to be taller than her.
“The bigger they are, the more beautiful they are,” she told me. “The more care you give them, the more they give you.”
