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Ongoing Israeli Repression Fuels Bitterness in Gaza
Uprooting the Olive Branch
By Alisa Solomon
The Village Voice
Week of August 29 - September 4, 2001
A checkpoint in the West Bank: 20-minute trips can now take five hours.
(photo: Alisa Solomon)
GAZA STRIP-Ahmad Abu Fadi gestures out over the brown expanse of rubble baking
in the relentless August sun. "It used to be so green here," he says, "so
peaceful." But that was before the Israeli military destroyed 20 acres of his
orange groves and parts of his cucumber, tomato, and sweet potato fields, and
two greenhouses as well. Since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa intifada late last
September, the Israeli military has ruined thousands of acres of farmland in
Palestinian territories, among them the farm that Abu Fadi tended here, in
Gaza's fertile patch between the refugee camps of Khan Yunis and Rafa.
With the trees gone, it's now easy to see tanks looming and an Israeli flag
flapping atop a military post in the distance, and the red-roofed houses of
Jewish settlements on the emerald slope below. Abu Fadi shakes his head and
laughs bitterly when asked whether his trees provided cover for Palestinian
snipers shooting at the settlers-the reason Israel gives for uprooting hundreds
of thousands of olive, fruit, and citrus trees throughout the Gaza Strip and
the West Bank over the last 11 months. There was never any fire from his
groves, Abu Fadi says, and anyway, if the issue were security, the Israeli army
(or IDF) would simply cut the trees, not uproot them so that they can never
grow back. Indeed, one Gaza farmer, anticipating IDF bulldozers, chopped down
his own orchards, hoping, with a desperate sort of optimism, to salvage their
potential for the future. Soldiers came and dug out the roots. Even low-lying
crops in which no one can hide-squash and lettuce, for instance-have been run
over by tanks.
According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, based in Gaza City,
one-fifth of the area's crops have been flattened by the IDF since the conflict
flared. Agriculture represents 60 percent of the local economy. For Abu Fadi
and others like him, the bulldozers were just the beginning of an irreversible
spiral of devastation. Now, as the crops that are left begin to ripen, Abu Fadi
and his three sons must watch them rot on the vine-or dodge Israeli bullets as
they go out to harvest. The risk is hardly worth it, he says. The produce they
do take in goes bad in its bushels, since merchants who used to buy the crops
for international sale are now forbidden to export goods from Gaza. As for
local dealers, their trucks are often held up for hours at checkpoints, their
goods perishing in the hot sun. Besides, the markets are deserted. Given the
shelling and even occasional invasions of tanks or army helicopters, customers
are afraid to come out to the main road. And anyway, with unemployment topping
64 percent in Gaza (Abu Fadi had to dismiss 30 farmhands after his lands were
destroyed), they have no money for shopping.
Unseen IDF soldiers manipulate a traffic light down below. It can stay red for
an hour at a time, then flash green for half a minute, allowing half a dozen
cars to continue on their way.
The Gaza Strip, jutting up from Egypt along Israel's western coast, has long
been destitute-refugees fleeing their homes in nascent Israel in 1948 turned
the 238-square-mile area into one of the most densely populated places in the
world. Today the population exceeds 1.2 million. But never have times been as
hard as these last 11 months, says Raji Sourani, director of the human rights
center. Gaza has been sealed off from the rest of the world, he says, and "we
are under complete economic and social suffocation."
The airport is closed, roads leading out of Gaza are blockaded by the IDF, and
even streets within the strip are blocked, dividing the region into four
disconnected areas. Tens of thousands of workers have been barred from their
jobs in Israel for almost a year. And fishermen on the Mediterranean are shot
at by Israeli gunboats if they float out more than two miles from the shore.
According to surveys released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics
in July, 80 percent of Gaza's residents live below the poverty line-subsisting
on less than $400 a month for a family of six. "The most Kafkaesque thing about
it," says Sourani, "is that the Western press takes Israel's skewed
perspective-that we are victimizing them. We are choking under this occupation,
and people are more desperate every day."
Israel's own military coordinator for the West Bank and Gaza, General Amos
Gilad, has summed up the consequences bluntly: The economic strangulation and
political repression in the territories is precisely what is driving young men
to enlist as suicide bombers. The conditions in the territories, he told the
Israeli press in late August, produce "a fool's cycle of violence in which
Hamas grows stronger, we respond, and, as a result, the hardship in the
territories grows and Hamas grows even stronger. If the situation continues, we
are likely to be confronted with . . . five terror attacks a day."
The hatred festers especially because Palestinians experience the siege as
plain, gratuitous cruelty. There's no better symbol of this than the bizarre
checkpoint at the intersection of the main north-south road of Gaza and a
Jewish-only road that leads to the Netzarim settlement. A tall, concrete
cylindrical structure stands beside the crossroads like a medieval guard tower.
Machine-gun barrels and a megaphone protrude from a slit near the top, manned
by unseen IDF soldiers. They manipulate a traffic light down below. It can stay
red for an hour at a time, then flash green for half a minute, allowing half a
dozen cars to continue on their way. Occasionally a voice will emerge from the
megaphone: "You, in the blue shirt, in the second taxi. Get out!" And the man
in the blue shirt will oblige, only to hop into a taxi farther down the line to
try again.
Palestinians can't interpret the scene as anything other than an exercise in
control and humiliation. After all, the crowded taxis, crop- and water-bearing
trucks, private cars, and buses are not attempting to enter Israeli territory,
only trying to move from one point to another in Gaza-an area that is supposed
to be under autonomous Palestinian control. The soldiers up high in the guard
post never search a car trunk or check an ID, so the claim that they are
performing a "security function," says one driver stuck in the mayhem for an
hour in the noontime sun, is "utterly preposterous." And he lets out a deep
guffaw, explaining that finding humor in the absurdity is the only way he
manages to survive. Boys walk from car to car, peddling lemonade and nuts.
Of course, Palestinians in the West Bank feel much the same way at checkpoints
where soldiers actually do inspect cars and IDs. Drives that once took 20
minutes can take upward of five hours as roadblocks delay and redirect traffic
all over the territories, even as settlers whiz along on the Jewish-only bypass
roads. And while some Palestinians grant that looking in trunks for weapons may
be legitimate, they still question the way soldiers flauntingly take breaks
after each inspection, before calling the next car forward. Meanwhile, those on
foot-old women with parcels on their heads, men with briefcases, kids with
knapsacks-generally walk right through. Young men, though, are frequently
stopped, and, according to recent reports in the Israeli press, forced to stand
in the sun for several hours, or even beaten. Indeed, in mid August, six IDF
soldiers were arrested on suspicion that they had brutally beaten a group of
Palestinian taxi passengers, and forced them at gunpoint to thrash each other.
Recently, in the leading Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, columnist Gideon Levy offered
his fellow citizens a colorful description of the checkpoints, concluding, "If
more Israelis were exposed to this slice of reality, which is a regular part of
Palestinian life, and saw with their own eyes the ordeals endured by ordinary,
innocent Palestinians, they might gain a better understanding of the roots of
the hatred the Palestinians feel for them. One roadblock is enough to
understand it."
Even so, the ubiquitous checkpoints are only the most visible manifestation of
the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. One of its most
punishing aspects is literally underground: water.
Water has long been a crisis in the region. Israel faced its own dire shortages
this summer, and citizens were discouraged from watering their lawns. Even so,
according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, the average
Israeli consumes six times as much water as the average West Bank resident.
B'Tselem reports that some 200,000 Palestinians living in 218 West Bank
villages are not connected to any water network and thus have no running water.
Meanwhile, Gaza's water is increasingly salinated and polluted by untreated
sewage and fertilizers running off from Israel, and the settlements' heavy
water use has contributed to the "over-extraction" of the local aquifer,
putting future supplies in doubt. The crisis has intensified since October
because water tankers have not been able to move freely through the
territories.
Naifa, 30, prays that the water tanker will make it up the road to her village
near the southern West Bank city of Yatta on its regular run every 20 days. And
if it does, she explains, she has a new worry: how to come up with the 200
shekels (about $50) she pays each time to supply her family of seven for the
three weeks. Her husband had been working in nearby Ber Sheva until the
intifada started. He's been jobless ever since.
Though a city of 50,000 with a plumbing system, Yatta is not much better off
these days than the villages without any infrastructure. Last Saturday, when
the town was visited by a mobile clinic from Israel's Physicians for Human
Rights-who defied Israeli law forbidding them from entering the territories to
help address the medical crises the closures have aggravated-Yatta had been
without water for four days. According to Yatta's mayor, Khalil Mo'sd Younis,
men from the nearby settlement sabotage their system repeatedly, turning off
the pipes at night. "Who are we going to complain to," he asks with a
rhetorical sweep of his hand, "the IDF?"
"Israelis think that the occupation ended with the Oslo accords," notes Ruchama
Marton, president of the physicians group. "So they think that zero hour for
the current conflict is Camp David. What they don't recognize is that the
oppression has continued for the last 34 years. And so they also don't
recognize that the Palestinians are, quite simply, resisting it."
Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
