Internationals who have worked with farmers around the world, find themselves meeting some of the most dignified, hard working and family oriented people. This holds even more true from our experience working with Palestinian farmers, especially for those whose land happens to be near the Israeli border, where a third of Gaza’s most arable land is located. For those unaware of the environment, the additional challenges put before Gaza farmers and their families and workers have to be seen to be believed, and include:
• Getting shot at each day while planting or harvesting your crops with live ammunition by armed men behind a fence with F16 machine guns
• Having your crops and land overturned and destroyed by enormous bulldozers protected by jeeps, tanks and snipers of the Israeli army
• Having your farmhouse crushed or demolished losing your possessions, farming equipment, livestock and water-wells.
• Having huge areas of farmland bombed, with crop growth stunted by contamination from banned chemical weapons such as white phosphorous
• Replacement of equipment, rebuilding of houses, restocking of crops made impossible by a blockade preventing materials and equipment from reaching the population, such as saplings, pesticides and fertilizers, plastic sheets for greenhouses and hoses for irrigation
The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) report that the fertile farmland located around the buffer zone was in recent times the source of half of the food needs of Gaza’s population, the industry has since been devastated. Purely due to Israel’s siege of Gaza’s borders and their continuous attacks, farming has now become a very unproductive industry. Oxfam report that the combination of the Israeli war on Gaza and the attacks on the buffer zone make approximately 46 percent of Gazan agricultural land useless or unreachable.
The level of destruction from the last Israeli war on Gaza alone accounted for the destruction of 35 to 60 percent of the agricultural industry, according to the UN and World Health Organization.
As Israel has kept increasing the size of the buffer zone from 50m to 300m the threat has left many farmers only growing wheat near the border that does not require so much attention. Other areas have been abandoned. This is why the efforts to keep a presence in this land are so courageous and important, as well as to show the world the brutal face of Israel against one of the most noble, peaceful and important livelihoods. For that we thank the courage of the farmers and farm workers for exercising their right to their land in the face of live ammunition. Despite the bullets, it has been a pleasure to accompany farmers into the buffer zone and we are happy to be contacted by any farmers who would prefer to work there with internationals present. We also thank groups like Local Initiative who continue to make demonstrations into the buffer-zone refusing to accept the deprivation of human rights and justice.
As one such farmer Abu Thaima we work with told us, whose ethos we share: “It is not possible to leave our land. This land was full of orange and olive trees, and greenhouses – my house was here. This is our land, even if I’m killed, we will stay here forever.”
In the same way, you can rest assured that the growing international support for justice for Palestine will never leave Gaza, and will always be ready to help out with any action concerned with what is rightfully Palestinian.
