Category: Journals - Page 58 - International Solidarity Movement

Fishing in Gaza – no day at the beach

24 October 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

I saw an Israeli naval warship for the first time yesterday, a concrete monster the color of ash, guzzling up the Mediterranean and spurting it out in its wake.

I rose early to go out with the Oliva, a small white boat used by Civil Peace Service (CPS) Gaza to monitor the Israeli navy’s conduct vis-à-vis Palestinian fisherman.

My colleague Joe and I walked across Gaza’s sandy shore, past a dozen wooden boats painted in bright shades of pink, blue, green and yellow and then jumped onto the Oliva. CPS’s white and blue flag billowed as Captain Salah started the boat’s engine and we pulled out of the harbor. Burgundy carpets with geometric designs lay across the boat’s floor. Three orange life jackets sat within an arm’s reach.

“Oliva to base, we are now leaving the port,” Joe radioed.

Fishing in Gaza - Click here for more images

Because of weather conditions, we didn’t get started until about 8:20 a.m. Joe showed me how to work the radio and we were off. Dozens of small wooden boats – hasakas as they call them here – docked in Gaza’s peaceful harbor floated above the water, and if I didn’t know better, I may have felt like I was on a Middle Eastern pleasure cruise.

“So this may sound obvious, but if the Israelis water cannon you, don’t just stand there,” Joe informed me. “Duck,” he said in a matter of fact tone. “Oh, and go to the front of the boat, they generally target the engine.”

We sped towards the infamous 3 nautical mile line – another unilaterally-imposed “no go” zone imposed by Israel in June 2007 – cutting through the waves. Under the Oslo Accords, specifically under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994, Palestinians are permitted to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza. Israel reduced this amount in 2002 to 12 nautical miles, and began enforcing a 6 nautical mile limit after Shalit’s capture in 2006.

“How are you feeling?” Joe asked me. At least one other international human rights observer had gotten sea sick on her first journey, and had asked if I would like to take something in advance of the journey for sea sickness.

“Oh I’m totally fine,” I responded. This was nothing. I mean the Mediterranean — it wasn’t even an ocean, how bad could it be? I declined the pills. And besides, I was tough. I sat back on the seats and chatted with Saleh for a bit in Arabic. He had 25 years of experience on the sea and told me the name of his village in what is now Israel from where his family was pushed out of in 1948.

At about 2 nautical miles I checked our position. We could see the Israeli naval ship moving towards five hasakas, headed our way. We continued forward, and then stopped our engine as one of them pulled up beside us.

“The Israelis shot live fire at us and we came back,” one of the men on the blue, yellow and white boat said. All of the hasakas came towards us, as fast as their small engines would be allow.

We all floated around for a while, until the navy moved away and the fisherman head back out. The Oliva straddled the 3 mile line, engines off, monitoring the situation. The fishermen explained what I had already read, that there were no fish to catch within 3 miles from the shore. The fish were 5, 6, 7 miles out. And so, the fishermen went out every day, sometimes fishing within 3 miles, sometimes going out further, in an attempt to ply their trade.

We watched as the Israeli navy played the game of cat and mouse with the working fisherman of Gaza, shooting at them when they came out, then moving south to shoot at another set of fisherman, then coming back towards us, and back again. Some of these fishermen had been detained by the Israeli navy in the past, taken to Ashod and then released, their boats damaged or confiscated.

“There are two more Israeli ships farther north,” Saleh explained.

I jotted down some notes, and, suddenly felt a wave a nausea. Taking notes was making me sick. I lay down. Joe periodically radioed the base to report our coordinates. At times, we could hear the crackle of the radio as the Israelis talked amongst themselves, sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in English. I tried to recall the Hebrew I had learned years ago, but that too, made me sick.

“The navy is back,” Saleh reported. “Look they are very close to the fisherman.” I sat up and tried to take a few photos and some video footage, inhaling the engine’s fumes as the Oliva rocked in the sea. I lay back down. I was the world’s worst human rights observer at sea.

Saleh continued to explain the situation in Arabic, but my brain stopped working. I crawled up, leaned over the side of the boat and gagged a few times. And then, well, my breakfast came up. All of it. And dinner from the night before as well.

As my head dangled over the side of the boat, I wondered if the Israeli navy was watching us with their binoculars. Didn’t they have anything better to do then harass these poor fisherman? I mean really, the navy is supposed to be one of the most prestigious units for Israelis, and here they were spending all day, every day chasing after skinny fishermen riding in tiny pastel-colored wooden boats. Gilad Shalit was free, so really, why the 3 mile limit? Were they worried that Palestinians were going to fling sardines at them using 18^h century technology?

After about ten minutes I came back up. Captain Saleh had started the boat and he let me drive it for a few minutes, since apparently that cures sea sickness. It did. Around 11 a.m. the fishermen head back and so did we.

Back on shore, we saw the group that had initially reported the gunfire and they showed us their meager catch of silvery fish – selling for about 20 shekels ($4) a kilo. They would be back out again tomorrow, Israeli gunfire and all.

Ashraf Abu Rahmah was arrested for being himself

23 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

To some soldiers of the Israeli army, staying alone, being quiet, and carrying a flag is a crime. To them, people who act in that way should be arrested. At least we can come to that conclusion when we think about the arrest of Ashraf Abu Rahmah, from Bil’in village, who was arrested on Friday, October 21.

The demonstration had not yet finished when the Israeli soldiers, in four jeeps, went into the village. It was a surprise to everyone, but not an unexpected act, because Israeli incursions into Palestinian villages is something regular. The surprise comes because people were going home, far from the place of the demonstration. Ashraf was arrested just on his way home.

He was charged with throwing stones, but he did not throw anything not at the time he was arrested, nor during demonstration itself. He just stood with his Palestinian flag, talking to friends, looking at the bombs that were thrown, running away from the gas, sometimes coming close to the barbed wire which rolls through Palestinian land.

The ISM volunteers can testify that Ashraf did not throw stones at any moment. But he will be dragged to court tomorrow under that charge. Journalists and friends will take photos with them to prove that he wasn’t throwing stones.

Last Friday’s demonstration was one of the most violent ones in recent times in Bil’in. When the Palestinian, Israeli, and foreigner activists came near the wall, the soldiers began to throw tear gas without pausing. The park which is being built by the villagers on the lands Israel was obligated to give back, lands it had stolen after a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007, was full of gas and dust for a long time.

Ashraf Abu Rahmah’s last peaceful demonstration – For more images click here

People who were on the top of the hill, far from the valley where the confrontation took place, also suffered from the burning smoke. Some cases of asphyxia were registered because of the gas inhalation, and the flames in brush and olive groves decorated the sky. Some of them became great fires, the trees and other plants.

To the economical life of villagers, it means a great loss, because the economic basis of Bil’in is agricultural, like the majority of Palestine’s villages. And to some, Ashraf being taken away on false charges by an occupying power can in some way be labeled as a loss. Yet the trees and plants and landscape that are Palestine, they can be replanted to grow a new future. That is the nature of Palestine. Ashraf will grow back in Bil’in. In shrub, tree, or voice , peaceful resistance will continue to grow from the root that is Palestine.

Honeymoon in Gaza

16 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

I had just finished off a plate of homemade bread knaffe yesterday with a family in the south of Gaza, when we got the call: farmers in Beit Hanoun, a village in the north of the Gaza Strip, requested that ISM volunteers accompany them to pick olives near the buffer zone.

The buffer zone. I had heard of this area back in the fall of 2002 when I had come to the West Bank for the ISM’s first olive harvest campaign. Back then, Israeli two-ton Caterpillar bulldozers were crushing homes, orchards and all other life forms to create this dead zone between Gaza and Egypt. Israel displaced more than 10% of the population of Rafah, Gaza’s sourthernmost town, at that time, making Palestinian refugees from 1948 refugees yet again.

Today, this unilaterally-imposed 300 meter buffer zone extends all around the sliver of land that is the Gaza strip, to the north, east, and south, an effective kill zone for all who dare enter it. (To the west is the sea, also patrolled by the Israeli navy).

Nonetheless, I was excited about the idea of going out with the farmers. I love picking olives! I love being out on the land, feeling the hard purple and green fruit pop off the branches and onto a tarp spread on dirt below. And besides, we weren’t going inside the buffer zone – those trees were long gone – just in some area nearby.

L, the woman who had baked the deliciousknaffesnack, and J, her husband, had also lost the majority of their farmland to the dead zone. J had just finished telling me about it, and L was quizzing me about my love life.

“Do you have any children?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Why not? Children are wonderful. I have five.”

I provide the response that seemed easiest at the moment. “Well I just got married a few months ago.”

“You should be on your honeymoon!” she exclaimed. “Where is your husband? Your husband should be here!”

Alas, I’m not sure if she really believed I was married, and I promised that next week I would bring photographs of my wedding.

The next day, Saturday, our group head to Beit Hanoun to pick olives.

“Be prepared to get shot,” said Saber, the founder of the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun, an organization which works with farmers in the buffer zone to resist the Israeli occupation through nonviolence. “The Israeli army, they don’t distinguish between foreigners or Palestinians,” he added, pointing to the fluorescent yellow vests and megaphone we had brought along.

Then why are we here, I wondered. Surely not for our physical prowess in picking olives. But I understood that he was making sure were fully appraised of the situation. The task may seem mundane, but here there is always a risk.

We drove out to the edge of Beit Hanoun, where the trees suddenly stopped and nothing but barren land lay between us and the border. It was a sunny day in Gaza, and if you squinted your eyes and looked really carefully, in the distance, army towers could be seen, and beyond them, the town of Sderot in Israel. Surely, there could be no danger from the Israelis back here, I thought, we are much farther back than the designated 300 meters.

Turns out I was right and I was wrong.

Mohamed AshureShimbari and his family had already begun picking olives by the time we arrived, on a small plot of land next to a cement block house. Every time the Israelis invaded Gaza, they locked the family in a room, and used their house as a base. And though we were indeed, 800 meters from the border, the area was far from safe.

We began picking olives, and the elderly farmer who owned the land seemed exhausted, not from picking olives, but from living life in Gaza. J too, though in his mi-50s and younger, had had that look as well. After his family had lost everything in 1948 and fled to Gaza, J had managed to by farmland after working in Israel for over twenty years, as an electrician, a restaurant worker — “everything” — only to see it taken yet again.

In this area of Beit Hanoun where we were picking what was now the barren buffer zone, ten years ago been filled with orchards of lemon, orange, grapefruit and olive trees. There were also greenhouses of tomato, eggplant and cantaloupe. Saber pointed all around, explaining what was where and how there was no clean water. I couldn’t imagine it. It was like pointing to the Sahara desert and saying, “ imagine these sand dunes are jungle.”

We picked for a couple of hours, occasionally breaking for tea, when someone called out “jeepat.” Jeeps. Israeli army jeeps were patrolling the border. Then came a tank. A few people stopped picking, to peer at the tank.

“What’s it doing?” I asked.

“Showing they are strong,” one of the young Beit Hanoun volunteers answered.

The army was relatively far away, but apparently, one never knows if the Israeli army will shoot at you. Since Operation Cast lead in 2009, the U.N. estimates that Israeli tank and gunfire killed five Palestinian civilians, three of whom were children and injured twenty in areas near the buffer zone.

After we stripped the trees of their olives, we dumped them into large, 40 kilo bags and then head back into town. The day passed without incident, as it should have, but it was no honeymoon.

There is no east: Olive harvest in Gaza

15 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Gaza doesn’t have very much farmland left. The expanding no go zone imposed by Israeli bullets and bulldozers constantly erode the amount of land left for Palestinians to farm in Gaza. Mohamed Ashure Shimbari lives on the edge of the no-go zone. If you look east from his land you see the no go zone, what Israel euphemistically refers to as “the buffer zone.” Little grows there. Israeli bulldozers regularly come to kill anything which has managed to find a life there. You can see the destroyed well which once provided water for the orchards that used to cover the no-go zone. Now, there is no water, and no life, only a zone of death. Israel claims that the buffer zone is “only” 300 meters wide, but Mohamed’s land is about 800 meters from the border, and still he is afraid. The Israelis often shoot into this area, especially at night. The olive harvest has begun in Gaza. The Beit Hanoun Local Initiative and the International Solidarity Movement went to Mohamed’s land to help him harvest his olives today. The trees are pregnant with fruit, green and black olives line the branches. Mohamed’s family depends on these olives to live. We join Mohamed and his sons in the morning, the weather is beautiful and the trees are picturesque. We spread plastic under the trees and begin to pick. Thankfully, it is quiet. The Israeli’s are not shooting today. We work quickly, stripping the branches of olives, climbing up on ladders or into the branches of the trees to get at the higher olives. Unreachable olives are smacked with a stick to knock them off the tree. Any olives that fail to fall onto the plastic sheeting are carefully picked up; these olives are too precious to waste. The olives are transferred into bushel sacks. Tomorrow, they will be processed, either cured for eating or crushed for oil. As the sun climbs higher into the sky and the work becomes hotter we break for tea. We decide to walk over and visit Mohamed’s neighbors, a Bedouin family. We meet their young son Abed who has just come home from school. He walks five kilometers to school every morning, and he walks home at night, he does this with his sister and his brother. Abed is 10 years old. He is a shy kid; he wants to be a dentist when he grows up. He doesn’t seem to think that peace will ever come to his family, that they will ever live a life without worrying about the shooting from the Israeli’s at night. He lives a life of three directions, north, south, and west. There is no east really, you can’t walk that way, you would be killed. His family is forced to truck water from Beit Hanoun, the well that they used to depend on for water has been destroyed by the Israeli’s. His mother comes out; she tells us that she prays for peace, for a life with water and without fear of the bullets. We return to work the olives. Tree by tree, up and down the rows, we move gathering olives. Mohamed tells us about his life. When the Israeli’s invade Gaza his home is one of the first places they came to. Not because they are afraid that he has guns, but because they want to use his house. He and his family are locked in one room while the soldiers use his house as a base for their attacks on Beit Hanoun. During Cast Lead his family was locked in the room for 23 days while the IDF carried out their slaughter on Gaza. Throughout the world, the olive is a symbol of peace, but in Palestine it is also a symbol of people’s ties to the land. The no-go zone east of Beit Hanoun is constantly expanding. Every year or two the Israeli bulldozers come and destroy even more land. Mohamed’s house is now on the edge of the no-go zone. Maybe next year his house will be destroyed, the olive trees which we are picking from will be uprooted. Yet maybe his house will be spared, after all, if it is destroyed where will the soldiers sleep when they invade Gaza?

The lonely olive tree of Bil’in

14 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Near the concrete wall which separates Bil’in from Modiin Illit colony, occupied by ultra-Orthodox Jews, there is an olive tree. It is impossible to know how it survived the construction of the wall and how it continues to resist to the lack of a few cares that the specie demands – a lack caused by the Israeli barbed wire fence that prevents the access of the residents to the point where it is, in the buffer zone. This survivor came to the attention of the villagers since some time ago. Today they finally managed to breach the fence and to go to the lonely olive tree for harvest.

The tear gas grenades fired by Israeli soldiers, who lurked on the other side of the wall, attempted to prevent the harvest, a time of year that mobilizes the entire population of Palestine. One of the canisters fell on dried plants, and the heat of the metal caused a fire which the residents were able to control. Spread by the strong wind the gases reached even the activists more distant from the site – people from the village, from Israel and from around the world –causing suffocation, burning eyes and skin.

October 14th’s demonstration was dedicated to Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike and to the beginning of the olive harvest.