Tag: Buffer Zone - Page 17 - International Solidarity Movement

Thanksgiving in Gaza

by Radhika Sainath

25 November 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

Layla and her daughters with the turkey in Faraheen (Photo: Radhika Sainath, Notes from Behind the Blockade) - Click here for more images

It all started with a simple question from Jabar, a Palestinian farmer from Faraheen, during Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice.

“Is there an American eid (holiday) where you slaughter an animal?” he asked Nathan, a colleague here in Gaza, a few weeks ago.

Thanksgiving and turkeys came to mind.

And so, I found myself celebrating “Thanksgiving,” Gazan-style, this afternoon in the small, southern Gazan village.

Nathan painstakingly put together a variety of ingredients over the past couple of weeks to make a proper meal: turkey, baked beans, sweet potatoes, biscuits and chocolate chip cookies! We had to nix the stuffing, gravy was too difficult, and pie, out of the question.

After six weeks of falafel (delicious as it is), I was really looking forward to Nathan’s Midwestern cuisine. But would it all come together given Gaza’s regular power outages, Israel’s recent shooting at farmers in the area and the lack of key ingredients due to the siege?

We rose early to accompany farmers in Faraheen to their land within Israel’s 300 meter ”buffer zone” – or “kill zone” – as Palestinians here frequently call it.

The week had not been a good one, and I was concerned that our belated Thanksgiving would turn into Black Friday.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army had shot live ammunition in the air when our group went with farmers to the buffer zone in nearby Khuza’a.

The day before, the Israeli army had called the Palestinian Office of Coordination and told them that they “wanted to shoot” us and twenty Palestinians while we were in northern Gaza nonviolently protesting the Israeli occupation, the buffer zone, and 63 years of dispossession in the buffer zone. The Palestinian Authority frantically looked for the phone number of Saber Zanin, the organizer of the weekly Beit Hanoun protests and told him, “We are trying to ask the Israelis not to shoot you. They wanted to shoot you and kill you.”

And yesterday, 3 nautical miles of the coast of Gaza, an Israeli naval warship chased our small humanitarian boat, the Oliva, along with several Palestinian fishing boats, towards the shore for no apparent reason.

Today just couldn’t be good. Would our Gazan Thanksgiving look more like the original Thanksgiving — a symbol of land seizure, dispossession and ethnic cleansing — than the delicious turkey-filled version I was hoping for?

I rose early, gulped down a cup of sugary tea and dry floury date cookies that Jabar’s wife Layla made before heading out to the buffer zone. The sky cleared and I heard Israeli drones overhead.

On the way to the buffer zone, we met 26-year-old Yusef Abu Rjeela, the farmer who want was hoping to sow wheat on his land. We asked him what he wanted to do if the Israelis started shooting.

“Stay on the land,” he said. If the Israelis shot in the air, he didn’t want to run. And if they shot at us, well…

We continued onward, and my cell phone rang. It was Nathan. “I put the beans in the pressure cooker for 30 minutes and they’ve become bean soup!” he exclaimed. “Layla says I shouldn’t have soaked them and used the pressure cooker.”

“Stay calm,” I said. “Do you have more beans?” He did. We continued on our way.

Five of us foreigners donned our yellow vests, and accompanied Yusef and another farmer as one sowed wheat and the other plowed the land. The drones went away.

All seemed quiet on the eastern front.

An Israeli military tower stood in the distance. A white balloon equipped with an aerial surveillance camera flew overhead. The former farmland was dry and brown from years of Israeli bulldozing and tank traffic.

After a while, we made bets on when the Israelis would start shooting. It was 11:25 a.m., and I put in for 11:45 a.m., another person for 11:50 a.m. Hussein, a Palestinian university student who came with us, didn’t think the Israelis would shoot at all.

At noon, the farmers had finished and we all started to walk back to the village. Yusef explained to us the lawsuit his family had filed against the state of Israel for murdering his younger brother the day after Operation Cast Lead ended in January 2009. His father, who had witnessed the murder, had gone to Israel to testify.

As we left the buffer zone, I congratulated Hussein on being right about the shooting. Then we heard it — Israeli army gunfire in the distance. The time: 12:05.

We promptly head back to Jabar’s house in the village. There, Nathan was immersed in a whirlwind of preparation.

“Get the baking soda out of the bag!” he directed.

“You mean baking powder?” I asked him, looking the plastic bag he had brought from Gaza City.

“No, soda.” There was no baking soda. We were in for a biscuit disaster. Moreover, Layla and four of her five children were swirling around the kitchen, unsure of these strange American preparations.

Beans with sugar? In the oven? Nathan opened the ancient iron contraption, and held out a spoon for me. I stuck my tongue out and slurped up the brown deliciousness.

“Is it good?” asked Layla, suspiciously. “Is Nathan a good cook? Can you cook better?”

“Zacky ikthir,” I responded. Very tasty. “Not quite done,” I said to Nathan. “I can cook, but maybe Nathan is better than me,” I added to Layla. She didn’t seem convinced.

Nathan shooed everyone away, but we stayed in the kitchen, it was the warmest room in their small, cement block, metal sheet-roofed house. And, I was clearly the only one cut out for the role of taster. Layla turned to more important questions.

“You’re a lawyer, can you sue Israel for me?” she asked. “All our problems come from Israel. When I was 14, they shot me in the hip. Then they bulldozed our olive trees and took our land. What can we do?” I hadn’t realized that Layla’s limp stemmed from about 1980, when the Israeli army entered her school and shot her as she tried to help a wounded friend.

She turned away to take the turkey out of the pot. The oven wasn’t big enough for a whole bird, which was only sold in pre-cut pieces. All in all, it was a delicious lunch, and no one got shot. And that, is something to be thankful for.

No go zone protest in Beit Hanoun

by Nathan Stuckey

24 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

We gathered in the road in front of the Agricultural College of Beit Hanoun, the same place that we gather every week. There were about forty people, members of the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, the International Solidarity Movement and citizens of Beit Hanoun. Like every week, we planned to march into the no go zone. The chanting started immediately, with more energy than usual. Soon music began to pour from the loudspeakers. The march was to begin.

We walked down the road, into the no go zone. We walked past the flag that we had painted on piece of rubble, past the olive grove that we planted last month, we marched all the way to the flag which we have left to fly over the no go zone. We only enter the no go zone once per week, but we the signs of our presence are always here, the olives the flag. If Israel destroys them, we return them again. The no go zone seems to encapsulate Israel’s attitude toward Palestine, erasure, nothing is left living there, even memory is erased, it becomes truly a land without people. The people who have been left without land are not the Zionists, but the refugees that are confined to the prison that is Gaza.

We reach the flag, the flag has become tattered from its weeks of flying amidst the bullets of the no go zone. A few weeks ago the Israelis had shot the flag pole until it fell; we planted it again that day. Now though, it is tattered, some young men pull down the flag, and replace it with a new one. We are standing only about 70 meters from the wall, six meters of gray concrete ugliness. Smokestacks belch pollution in the distance. Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative speaks, “The resistance will continue until the Israeli occupation is no more, we ask the free people of the world to stand with us in our resistance to oppression.” An Italian activist speaks; she too denounces the occupation and its crimes and calls on the peoples of the world to support the Palestinian struggle for freedom. We leave to sound of music.

As we walk back to Beit Hanoun, Sabur gets a call. It is the office at Erez, at the border crossing. They are warning him that the Israeli’s had wanted to fire into the crowd, the Israeli’s claimed that they were scared in their concrete towers of civilian protesters with their flags. Perhaps we were like a nightmare, the people that they thought that they had disappeared forever coming back to haunt them, ghosts returning to their homes which had been stolen from them. That is the problem with living on stolen land, in stolen homes, sometimes, no matter how far away you have driven the owners, sometimes you see them again, and you are reminded that the land you live in belongs to someone else. We are not ghosts, we can be killed by Israeli bullets, but no matter how many you kill, the land remains stolen, and nothing stolen is ever really yours. No matter how big your guns, how thick the concrete of your walls, you are afraid of the ghosts which haunt the scene of your crime.

Sowing wheat in Israel’s kill zone

by Radhika Sainath

22 November 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

One need not be an agronomist to know that its been a long time since the farmers of Khuza’a, Gaza have tended to their land near the border. When we arrived on Friday, the densely packed soil formed small hills with alien, ridged, patterns: Israeli tanks had roamed here, dozens of them. It was hard to imagine how anything ever grew on this brown, barren soil, much less the hundreds of olive, orange and grapefruit trees the Qudaih family reminisced about.

Mahmood Suleiman Qudiah sows wheat near the Buffer Zone (Photo: Radhika Sainath, Notes from Behind the Blockade) - Click here for more images

But those groves and the greenhouses too, were long gone: the Israeli army bulldozed them in 2002 to create the ever-expanding no-man’s land Israel calls the “buffer zone” and Gazans call the “kill zone” — any Palestinian who steps foot inside is subject instant death or dismemberment by the Israeli army fire.

Khaled Mahmood Suleiman Qudaih called us a few days before, asking us if we would accompany his family to his father’s fields so that they could sow wheat. We met them inside a small tent and they explained to us the situation. The Qudiahs and many other farmers were afraid that the Israeli army would shoot them if the attempted to reach their land near the buffer zone. We informed them that we could not guarantee their safety, that the Israeli army had killed foreign civilians too.

Alas, our presence and our video cameras was all the impetus they needed to risk life and limb.

On Friday, we arrived to the south Gaza village early, drank two cups of sugary tea with sage, jumped on a cart pulled by a white donkey, and were on our way. We slowly rode down the main street locals waving as we passed by. Then we head east out to the farmland, passing between giant slabs of concrete placed at the outskirts of the village in an attempt to protect children playing in the streets from Israeli army gunfire.

The donkey cart pulled us down the lone road heading towards the school. I had been down this road before, my second week in Gaza, when I and 3 local children had been shot at by the Israeli army without warning, reason, or explanation. I understood why those farmers feared the Israeli army, and had not tended to this land in four years.

Our donkey continued on, and we passed the bombed-out shell of a house, covered in fuchsia bougainvillea. We had now reached the point where the Israeli army had shot at me three weeks before, where the road curved towards a high school.

It was quiet. The sky was cloudy, and the Israeli military towers could be seen in the distance. The donkey turned off the road and onto the land, we were now slowly approaching the border, which was about 300 meters away. Khaled’s father, Mahmoud, took the bag of wheat off the donkey cart, and I along with the other foreign volunteers donned our fluorescent yellow vests.

Mahmoud got right to work, briskly walking back and forth across his land, towards the Israeli military towers and back, sprinkling wheat on the barren surface. Those who attempted to photograph him would get a fistful of wheat in their face; it had been five years since he had come to this land and nothing would deter him.

I wondered how these seeds would materialize into actual wheat just lying there on the hard ground, and when the Israeli army would start shooting. Would we get actual warning shots this time? According to the farmers, the machine guns were operated remotely – there were no actual human beings inside the towers.

Then the tractor arrived, and it all started to come together. More farmers emerged with donkeys and equipment. They too wanted to visit their land. One of us sat on the tractor, and others spread out, video cameras out, ready to record should the Israelis shoot at us.

But it was still early, and the people farmed in silence, certain that it was just a matter of time before the Israeli army started shooting. Indeed, the border seemed very close. Could this nonviolent farming action end well?

I spent my time staring at the towers, thinking up different iterations of how the Israelis would shoot us. Unlike the day before, when I discovered what a crappy cabbage harvester I was while accompanying farmers in north Gaza, there wasn’t any actual work I could help with.

One of the other farmers even brought me a giant metal bullet he found in the earth. It wasn’t like anything I had seen before three to four inches long, and much heavier than a bullet from an M-16 military rifle. And then he showed me one of the hundreds of white flyers I had seen stuck in the earth containing a little map of the Gaza Strip and lots of writing in Arabic.

Israeli planes had dropped “thousands” of these flyers over Khuza’a, which state:

Involving yourself in terrorist activities will bring danger to you, your children, your families and your possessions. Distance yourself from this danger . . . Consider yourself warned.

The flyers had blown east, inland, towards the border. I wondered if any of them had blown back to Israel.

A couple of hours passed, and the mood grew celebratory. I wanted to caution them. It wasn’t too late, the Israeli army could still shoot us. Surely, if they shot at 2 women and three children farther away from the buffer zone, they would shoot at a large group of farming closer.

But it was not so.The farmers plowed the field twice, tank tracks erased. Little black beetles scurried out of holes as we walked across the soft, upturned earth back towards the white donkey. It started to drizzle but moods were high.

“For four years I did not reach my father’s land!” said Khaled.

But the victory was bittersweet. “Before, [this area] was full of greenery and trees and now it’s like a desert,” he explained. “But still I’m very happy to reach my land and plant on it.”

Gaza lives on

16 November 2011 | Al Jazeera English

The Israeli blockade may have taken a heavy toll on Gazans, but this film reveals life and hope among the devastation.

Since 2007, most of the approximately 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have suffered gravely from an intensified land, air and sea blockade imposed by Israel.

The blockade, deemed illegal by the United Nations, was implemented after Hamas, a Palestinian faction labelled a terrorist organisation by Tel Aviv, took control over the territory and ousted Fatah officials from power in the battle of Gaza.

After more than two decades of tight sanctions and even though Israel eased the restrictions on non-military goods in 2010, the blockade continues to take a heavy toll on Gaza’s civilian population, with many essential and basic goods banned from being exported or imported. This has led to rampant poverty and a massive unemployment rate in Gaza.

But Gaza once had thriving economy and was a major exporter of key staple foods, including fruits and vegetables, to countries across the world. Israel’s policies since the occupation, however, have forced the vast majority of Gazans to rely on foreign humanitarian aid for survival.

According to the UN, about one-third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 per cent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to the Israeli blockade.

Abu Anwar Jahjouh, who has worked as a corn seller for the past 15 years and lives in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, says it is a daily struggle to scrape out a living: “Back in the 1960s, we used to export oranges. Ships would come from Turkey, Spain, Germany and all of Europe. We used to export oranges, lemons, clementines and grapefruits. But those ships stopped coming to Gaza after 1967. No one comes to Gaza anymore. We can’t export anything. That’s why we started selling corn here on the beach. We sell anything.”

Rebuilding … without materials

The Israeli blockade has also prevented construction materials from entering the Strip, with the exception of some materials intended for internationally-supervised projects.

According to an Oxfam report, in 2008, 95 per cent of Gaza’s industrial operations were suspended due to lack of access to material needed for production and the inability to export produced items.

Kamal Khalaf, a construction contractor, said Israel’s war on Gaza between 2008 and 2009, in which the UN estimates 60,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, made the blockade much more problematic: “After the siege, the import of construction material into Gaza was banned. We had no cement, no steel, nothing. I stayed for two years with no work. There was nothing to build.”

Even construction material needed to build schools has reportedly been blocked from entering the Strip. With half of Gaza’s population under the age of 18, children are attending overcrowded schools – with many running multiple shifts – which has severe repercussions for the quality of education they receive.

In addition to this, thousands of children remain displaced from their homes – having lost all that is familiar to them, including clothes, toys, school books and a secure environment.

Israel even bans fishermen from going more than three miles from Gaza’s shoreline for “security reasons”. Those who breach the rule regularly run the risk of being shot at by Israeli navy patrols. At least seven fishermen have been killed by the Israeli navy in recent years and many more have been injured or arrested.

An underground lifeline

As a result of the blockade, underground tunnels have been Gaza’s main lifeline to Egypt and the rest of the world.

“We wanted to live, so we had to look for solutions …. We started to bring sacks of concrete into Gaza through these tunnels. It was exhausting to lift those heavy sacks inside these tunnels,” Khalaf says.

As well as being used for the smuggling of goods, the tunnels have also helped reunite families unable to enter Gaza through legal means.

May Wardeh met her husband Mohammad in the West Bank, but had to travel for four days via Jordan to Egypt and then through an underground tunnel to reach Gaza. She says she almost died just to get to him in Gaza, but then they had a big wedding party at the beach and she now lives with her husband in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

“I thought I’d see a worsening situation in a city full of refugee camps. But when I reached Gaza, I saw something completely different from what I had imagined,” Wardeh says, recalling her first day in Gaza.

Sharif Sarhan is a photographer from Gaza who works with several news agencies and international organisations. He is amazed by the Gazans’ strength and determination to live their lives and rebuild their city despite the siege and destruction.

“You can always find life and hope in Gaza,” he says. “Amid this devastation, you can see that people still want to live.”

This episode of Al Jazeera World can be seen from Tuesday, November 15, at the following times GMT: Tuesday: 2000; Wednesday: 1200; Thursday: 0100; Friday: 0600; Saturday: 2000; Sunday: 1200; Monday: 0100; Tuesday: 0600.

Independence Day in the Buffer Zone

by Nathan Stuckey

16 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Photo: Hama Waqum - Click here for more images

Twenty three years ago today the Palestinian declaration of independence was released. Written by Mahmoud Darwish, and unveiled to the world by Yasser Arafat in Algiers where he was living in exile like millions of other Palestinians. Today, in Beit Hanoun, we, the Local Committee of Beit Hanoun, the International Solidarity Movement, and local citizens of Beit Hanoun marched into the no go zone just as we have done every Tuesday for the last three years.

We gathered on the road beside the Agricultural College, raised Palestinian flags, and started to sing as we marched. We were about fifty strong. Men and women, Palestinians and Internationals, marched together to celebrate independence. As we crested the hill that lies on the border of the no go zone the person next to me commented how nice it was that the flag that we had placed in the no go zone was still there, the previous flag had been used by Israeli soldiers for target practice, we had found it laying in the dirt, it’s staff smashed by a bullet. Our flag was still there, the flag that has been flying in the face of Israeli bullets for sixty three years, through the Nakba, the Naqsa, the Occupation, the Intifada’s, the flag still flies.

We marched into the no go zone, this area of life transformed into a place of death. The scarred earth that so little is allowed to live in, ripped up every couple of months by IDF bulldozers. Beyond our flag is giant concrete fence lined with towers full of guns. Above us a giant white balloon to watch our every move. Demonstrations in Gaza are not met my soldiers with batons, or tear gas, or even rubber bullets, they are met with live fire, sometimes with tank shells.

We paused by a giant concrete block that we had painted with the Palestinian flag in an earlier demonstration. Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun climbed onto the block to speak. He vowed that the Palestinian people “continue the popular resistance and the struggle, until the end of the Occupation and the Palestinians gained their freedom and independence.” His message to the world was that “we invite you to work with us in the struggle for freedom in Palestine. Free people of the world must reject political blackmail and bribes from Israel and America as we recently saw in the United Nations.” His speech was followed by a release of balloons into the no go zone and debka dancing.

Palestine is still not free, the Occupation continues. Declarations of Independence are not reserved for peoples that are already free; they are statements of desire, of hope. The United States released its Declaration of Independence only one year into its war for independence, fighting would continue for another three years. Palestine released its declaration of Independence one year into the first Intifada. The struggle has continued for twenty three more years, it will continue until victory.