[Peace-discuss] Excellent Article in Today's Chicago Tribune

[David Green]

Palestinians short of food and jobs
Israeli clampdown sparking self-help
  
By Uli Schmetzer
Special to the Tribune
Published July 31, 2002

BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- On
days when the curfew is lifted for five hours, Maha
Abu Dayeh hurries to the small patches of land that
have become her lifeline since Israel's army clamped
down on most of the 3 million Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip.

Dayeh, 43, tends her tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers,
cauliflower and eggplants with devotion. Her plants
grow on slivers of land wedged between houses and
often used as trash dumps.

Like other urban Palestinians, Dayeh has learned to
nurture the crops to feed her family.

"I didn't know how to grow anything before this
tragedy," said Dayeh, a mother of seven. "My
14-year-old son taught me from books."

A few miles away at Beit Jala, Elias Zabourah, 58, has
converted a part of his idle metal workshop into a
hatchery and a nursery for hundreds of peeping quail.
He initially raised them as meat for his large family;
now he sells the tiny birds or barters them for other
food.

"I couldn't sit around and do nothing," he said. "So I
built an incubator, and now hundreds of people buy my
quail."

This is life in the Palestinian territories under a
new kind of Israeli occupation. University graduates,
architects and engineers, men who once wore suits, now
hawk flavored water, fruit, paper napkins and chewing
gum alongside street children with their hands for
alms.

A study commissioned by the U.S. Agency for
International Development, due to be released next
month, found 30 percent of Palestinian children under
the age of 6 suffer from chronic malnutrition. Two
years ago, before the current intifada, a similar
survey found malnutrition among 7 percent of children.

The USAID survey found half the women of child-bearing
age were diagnosed with mild to moderate anemia and
half the Palestinian population depend on outside food
assistance to meet their daily needs.

Israel defends the curfews and other restrictions as
well as its military presence in most West Bank towns
and cities as necessary to combat Palestinian attacks
on Israeli civilians. Palestinians see lockdown as
"collective punishment."

"It's the type of collective punishment in terms of
health that will have implications for generations,"
said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, who published
an advance summary of the USAID survey.

Official Palestinian statistics say 78 percent of
workers in the Gaza Strip are unemployed, as are more
than 60 percent in the West Bank.

Factories have closed, unable to function without raw
materials that once were imported from Israel but now
only trickle through army checkpoints. Trucks
exporting goods to Israel have to wait five or six
hours in the summer heat, putting their cargoes of
livestock or fruits and vegetables in jeopardy.

Monastery's wine turns sour

At Cremisan, the Salesian Monastery near Bethlehem,
famous for the wine it has produced for 127 years, the
once-jolly custodian of the cellar is at wit's end.

"The wine is turning into vinegar in its vats," Father
Ruffo said with a sigh. "We haven't sold any for the
last year. We have no more containers to bottle it."

Few Palestinians have the collateral to get bank
loans. Men such as Salim Abdullah say they are afraid
to walk the streets of their neighborhood in Gaza City
"because I owe money to every store and mini-market in
my area."

Israel has banned 200,000 Palestinian workers from
jobs they held in Israel before the intifada. "Why are
we all being punished?" asked Abdullah, 34, who once
earned $50 a day with a Tel Aviv construction company.

Alleging that Palestinian gunmen use fields and
orchards for cover as they shoot at Jewish settlers,
Israeli troops have flattened Palestinian crops,
uprooted olive trees and banned farmers from working
their crops.

"It's worse for the farmers," said Diana Mubarak, head
of the Department of Social Affairs in the West Bank.
"They often have to watch as their crops rot."

Mubarak has organized regional relief committees whose
young members often defy Israeli curfews and sieges to
deliver food and medicine to remote areas or to
families in dire need.

"Sometimes one of them gets caught. If he is lucky,
and the soldier is a good guy, he gets a warning. If
the soldier is not a good guy, he is arrested or
beaten up. All of us know the soldiers have shot
people dead for breaking curfew," Mubarak said.

The International Red Cross, United Nations and other
international agencies have tried to fill in the gaps
in the food supply.

Palestinians also have learned to help themselves in a
new spirit of defiant solidarity, Mubarak said. The
richer, she said, help the poorer. The few jobs
available are rotated to give more people a chance to
earn money.

"We have committees now in every region that people
can contact if they are out of food. No one has died
of starvation yet, but I believe more than 60 percent
of our people are badly fed," she said.

Mubarak said domestic violence and sexual abuse have
risen sharply as men accustomed to working and
socializing take out frustrations on their wives. Many
young women have run away seeking help in the shelter
Mubarak runs in Bethlehem for juvenile delinquents.

Israeli officials contend that only 600,000
Palestinians are subject to curfews. But tens of
thousands of others are cut off by permanent
roadblocks or periodic travel restrictions.

Checkpoints depress travel

It used to take half an hour to travel from Gaza City
to Khan Yunis inside Gaza. Today it can take six hours
due to checkpoints and barriers constructed by Israeli
army bulldozers.

Even truckers traveling within the Gaza Strip and not
destined to cross into Israel must wait and have their
cargo and papers examined by Israel soldiers.

"Sometimes I wait six hours in the heat. Then the
soldiers say: No more today. I then have to drive back
to Khan Yunis with my cargo of live chickens and
convince the farmer who sold them to me to take them
back. The farmer often refuses, and I'm stuck with
dying chickens," said Naim Sawafiri.

Collecting food during curfew or after shootouts
between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli settlers can be
fatal.

Late last month, Abdul Samed Shamalek, 10, and his
brother Mohammed, 12, picked tomatoes on their
father's land on the periphery of Gaza City. It was a
quiet morning. Then rifle shots from the nearby
settlement of Netzarim killed Abdul.

The boy, taken on a donkey cart to a Gaza hospital,
was dead on arrival, shot in the head. He was the
116th child killed in the Gaza Strip since September
2000. Palestinian statistics say 267 children under 16
have been killed in the in the West Bank and Gaza over
that period.

Hours after Abdul died, an army bulldozer flattened
his father's tomato crop.

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune 


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