Tag: Buffer Zone

Meanwhile in Gaza

by Radhika S.

15 November 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

Beit Hanoun locals march to Buffer Zone - Click here for more images

I awoke today with the news that the NYPD was clearing out Occupy Wall Street and that Israeli tanks were shelling “northern Gaza.”  In the West Bank, Palestinian Freedom Riders, inspired by the US freedom riders of the 1960s, were getting ready to board segregated buses to occupied East Jerusalem.

Here in Gaza, we head to Beit Hanoun for their weekly nonviolent protest in the buffer zone.  For three years, Palestinians in the north have been marching into the barren, no-man’s land which encircles the inside of the narrow strip like a slowly-tightening noose.

We arrived around 11 a.m. and gathered in front of a bombed-out house down a dusty road leading to the border. This was my second buffer zone protest. At my first, two weeks ago, the Israeli army had fired a few shots from the military towers at the border.  I wondered what would happen today.  As a foreigner, I was to don a reflective fluorescent yellow vest and walk in front of the Palestinians, which seemed to provide them a degree of solace.  They seem to think that the Israelis were less likely to use lethal violence when Americans, Italians, and Brits walked with them.

I was not so sure.

About two dozen people waving Palestinian flags marched down the dusty path towards the buffer zone.  The landscape reminded me of home, of California, with its thorny tumbleweeds and cactus.  It was hard to believe that only ten years ago fruit orchards and olive trees filled this area. But Israel had bulldozed it all, claiming it needed 300 kilometers of Gaza’s most fertile land, but in reality taking more.

Onwards we walked, the Palestinians singing songs and holding a giant Palestinian flag. I wondered what was in store for us today as Israel’s concrete wall and military towers became visible. Would they shoot in the air first? Or would they shoot at us? If they shot us, would they shoot someone standing in the middle first (as I was) or someone standing off to the side?  Would they shoot us in the legs?  And how good was their aim?

We past a small farm and the family waved at us. They were very brave to have stayed, I thought.  Another farm had stuck a large white flag in the dirt in front of their house, as I had seen other families near the buffer zone do. Other farm houses had clearly been abandoned.

We were getting close to the buffer zone now, and the journalists that had come along moved from the front to the back. They didn’t want to get shot either. I started to imagine what it felt like to get shot.  Excruciatingly painful, I decided.

At that point, I recalled that I had never made a will. If I died intestate, what law would apply? I had just moved from California to New York, but was I officially a resident of New York? And how would Gaza factor into it all?  Was Gaza like the West Bank, where Israel applied a strange patchwork of Ottoman, Jordanian and Israeli military law as it pleased? Not that I really had much to bequeath.

We continued on, and I could see the Palestinian flag we had planted in the earth two weeks before. It was a windy day, and the flag billowed beautifully. The Israeli army had not shot it down.  About 50 meters behind it loomed the wall and the military towers.

“Our flag is still there!” I exclaimed to Nathan, an American volunteer walking next to me.  The Israelis had used the last Palestinian flag as target practice.

“Do you want to sing the star-spangled banner?” he joked.  I smiled, I hadn’t intended to make the reference. Yasser Arafat had symbolically declared Palestinian Independence 23 years ago today, on November 15, 1988.

We stopped, well before the flag, at a large cement block painted red, black and green. Sabur Zaaneen from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, the leader of the march, had thought the area to be more dangerous in recent days.

He gave a brief speech on Palestinian independence and the countries that were standing in the way of Palestinian freedom. As he spoke, I stared at the Israeli towers and the wall, the Israeli flags on top and of the land beyond it on the other side. I wondered if at that moment, Palestinians were attempting to board Jewish-only buses in the West Bank, facing violence from Israeli settlers not unlike the KKK in the Jim Crow south.

The speech ended and the Israelis had not shot at us.  A few of the young men broke into a dabke dance, a Palestinian line dance of sorts, as one of them played the tabla and sung, and the women clapped in rhythm. I didn’t know the words but I clapped along as well.

We head back, and I had the star-spangled banner stuck in my head. “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

One day, Palestine too would be free.

Nasr Ibrahim Alean was murdered by Israel Thursday

by Nathan Stuckey

7 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Nasr Ibrahim Alean

Nasr Ibrahim Alean was a 23 year old farmer from Beit Lahia.  He was murdered on November 3, 2011.  He was picking strawberries in his field when he was shot in the leg by the Israeli army.  He called his friend Muhammad Abu Helmeyyah, 22 years old, to help him.  Muhammed tried to take him to safety, but they were both killed by a missile from an Apache helicopter.  Nasr was not the first farmer in Gaza murdered by the IDF, and he will probably not be the last.

When Nasr was killed he was working in a field 500 meters from the border.  Outside of the Israeli imposed “buffer zone” which is in reality a 300 meter zone of death that surrounds Gaza.  This isn’t uncommon; the high risk area around the border extends as far as one or two kilometers according to the UN.  Nasr knew that he risked his life when he went to work, but he had no choice.  He needed money to get married, and working on the land was the only work that he could find.  Gaza is under siege, and unemployment is rife.  Not only are many imports banned, but most exports are banned as well.

We set in the mourning tent talking with Nasr’s family, hearing their stories, seeing their pictures of Nasser.  A cousin showed us a video of them picking up the body.  There was a giant hole in his head.  They tell us that Israel did not allow the Red Cross to pick up the body immediately; it sat for several hours, until finally the ambulances came.  Too late, Nasr was already dead.  Muhammad was already dead.  They told us worse stories, of bodies that no one was allowed to pick up for ups, bodies that the IDF left to rot, everyone forbidden to claim them.

Nasr’s brother was getting married in two days.  One of his aunt’s heard the story as she had her eyebrows done in preparation for the wedding.  She says of him, “He wasn’t in the resistance, he was just trying to work,” and continues “They don’t even want us to work. If it wasn’t for the United Nations, I don’t know what we would do.”  His uncle tells us about how he used to work in Israel.  He worked as a driver.  One day a woman got in with her young child.  She abused him in front of the child.  He asks, “How can people who abuse you in front of their children teach their children about peace?”  He doesn’t seem to have much hope.  They talk of going to human rights organizations to complain about Nasr’s murder, but they do not really believe that they will help.   Nasr hadn’t given up though, he went to pick strawberries on Thursday because he wanted to live, because he wanted to get married and have children and a house of his own.

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?