Stories from Palestine

Narratives of Resilience

Marda Dunsky

• Editorial: University of Notre Dame Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780268200350
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Middle Eastern History

Stories from Palestine profiles Palestinians engaged in creative and productive pursuits in their everyday lives in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Their narratives amplify perspectives and experiences of Palestinians exercising their own constructive agency.

In Stories from Palestine: Narratives of Resilience, Marda Dunsky presents a vivid overview of contemporary Palestinian society in the venues envisioned for a future Palestinian state. Dunsky has interviewed women and men from cities, towns, villages, and refugee camps who are farmers, scientists, writers, cultural innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs. Using their own words, she illuminates their resourcefulness in navigating agriculture, education, and cultural pursuits in the West Bank; persisting in Jerusalem as a sizable minority in the city; and confronting the challenges and uncertainties of life in the Gaza Strip. Based on her in-depth personal interviews, the narratives weave in quantitative data and historical background from a range of primary and secondary sources that contextualize Palestinian life under occupation.

More than a collection of individual stories, Stories from Palestine presents a broad, crosscut view of the tremendous human potential of this particular society. Narratives that emphasize the human dignity of Palestinians pushing forward under extraordinary circumstances include those of an entrepreneur who markets the yields of Palestinian farmers determined to continue cultivating their land, even as the landscape is shrinking; a professor and medical doctor who aims to improve health in local Palestinian communities; and an award-winning primary school teacher who provides her pupils a safe and creative learning environment. In an era of conflict and divisiveness, Palestinian resilience is relatable to people around the world who seek to express themselves, to achieve, to excel, and to be free. Stories from Palestine creates a new space from which to consider Palestinians and peace.

CHAPTER 1

Made in Palestine

Adnan Massad receives visitors who have come to talk to him about why he farms and how he does it—and especially to see his tractor, which runs on recycled vegetable oil that was used in restaurants to fry falafel.

Here in Faqqu’a, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank, the early afternoon is awash in mid-May sunshine, the cloudless sky a brilliant blue, the breeze persistent—a whisper, perhaps, from the Mediterranean coast forty kilometers or so to the west.

Massad, a spry sixty-two, is known as Abu Nur (“father of Nur,” his eldest son). He sits relaxed, his knees folded under his lanky frame on brown furrowed soil in the shade of an olive tree. He wears a white baseball cap brim-backward over his thick white hair, which is matched by a full white mustache and beard. Clad in a light-green zip hoodie and jeans, he takes a drag on a cigarette as he describes his thirty acres: on just under half, he cultivates olive trees; on the rest, he grows almond trees, wheat, beans, peas, and animal-feed crops.

Massad works up to ten hours a day on this land, inherited from his father, Abd as-Salaam, who inherited it from his father, Mahmoud. The family has lived in Faqqu’a, about three kilometers east of Jenin, for at least six generations—“maybe more,” Massad says, “hundreds of years.”¹ His ancestors migrated from what is today Syria.

As a boy Massad helped his family raise wheat, barley, and lentils. After finishing high school in Jenin, from age twenty he worked in construction, three years in the West Bank and twenty-two in Israel. He found the work boring, but it supported his wife, four sons, and a daughter. By age forty-five, though, Massad had had enough and decided to farm his land full-time. He earns less farming than he did in construction; he says the choice to trade higher income for greater freedom was difficult but right.

“I am free to decide how to manage my time,” he says. “I work for myself, not others.” Like farmers around the world, he starts work early in the morning, returning to eat with his family at midday and rest before returning to the fields. To the original grain and vegetable crops he added olive and almond trees fifteen years ago.

Today Massad’s children are grown; his sons all work construction in the West Bank. The family works the land together at harvest time, but Massad does the year-round maintenance himself. He plows, fertilizes, and weeds his fields alone, riding high atop the red Massey Ferguson 185 tractor he bought used in 1981 and refurbished.

In 2016, with the help of the Center for Organic Research and Extension, a local Palestinian NGO that promotes organic farming and marketing of fruit, vegetables, and grains grown by small family farmers, Massad converted the tractor to run on used falafel oil, replacing diesel. CORE paid the initial $5,000 cost of the German-made peripheral converter and its installation. The move cut his tractor-fuel expenses by more than half, saving him nearly $2,000 a year. Reducing farmers’ use of fossil fuel and enhancing restaurants’ waste management are also good for the environment, which is referenced on the CORE placard affixed to the converter proclaiming in Arabic and English that the red iron horse is an “eco-friendly tractor.”

Running tractors on used vegetable oil is not new—“you can see it on YouTube,” Massad says. CORE adopted the method as a focal point of its Green Track Palestine project and has also enabled other Jenin-area farmers to convert their tractors. CORE recruits restaurants in Jenin—including the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise there—and in surrounding towns and villages to save the oil they fry falafel in for two or three days and then sell it for a token price to the farmers, who pick it up. Massad gets most of his oil from two eateries in Faqqu’a and extra supply from restaurants in Jenin during the harvest.

He says the benefits of working with CORE extend beyond the oil to additional agricultural extension support including supply of beehives, which he uses to pollinate his almond trees and produce honey for market. He has also bought almond and jojoba seedlings from CORE at a deeply discounted price.

Although the Palestinian market for organic produce is relatively new, it does command higher prices, he says, even though fertilizing and weeding crops by hand, without chemicals, is more difficult than in conventional farming. Then there is the challenge of water, faced by all Palestinian farmers. With rainfall insufficient to sustain most crops and with working wells in short supply, he must buy water, adding significantly to his costs.

Nur stops by the grove to drop off refreshments for his father and the guests: cold bottled lemonade, sweet pastries, and thick Arab coffee. Massad chuckles as he pours it, considering the question of why farming is important to him.

“If I weren’t a farmer—if we didn’t farm—where would we bring farmers from?” he grins. “Pakistan? China?” Farming is instinctive, “something that comes from inside, telling you that you have to maintain your land,” he says.

The visit ends on a light note with Massad recalling his visit to kin in the U.S., where he toured Chicago, Washington, DC, and Las Vegas. He bids his guests farewell in typical Arab fashion after they thank him for his time and hospitality.

Ahla wasahla, Adnan Massad says. “You are welcome.”

Land is the ultimate prize in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—but Palestinians are continually confronted by harsh realities of the Israeli occupation that makes cultivating their land difficult and in some cases impossible.

Like Adnan Massad, though, they continue to farm, a steadfast expression of their presence and heritage.

In many other parts of the world, their stories would be ordinary. In Palestine, prevailing circumstances render them remarkable.

The toll of land confiscation under Israeli occupation has been constant and consistent. Palestinian agricultural lands shrank from 2.4 million dunams (approximately 593,000 acres) in 1980 to 1.03 million dunams in 2010—a loss of 57 percent, according to UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.² Before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 after the Six-Day War, agriculture constituted more than half of the Palestinian GDP. By 2012 it accounted for only 6 percent.³

Expansion of Israeli settlements—including confiscation of Palestinian land—and restricted access to water are chief causes for decline in Palestinian land use, the UN agency reported⁴—contributing in significant measure to Palestinian dependence on Israel. By 2018 the Palestinian economy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was running a $2.65 billion trade deficit with Israel, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics—accounting for 49 percent of its overall trade deficit of $5.4 billion, with a population of just under five million. In food and livestock alone, the Palestinian trade deficit for 2018 was $1.27 billion, or 23.5 percent of the overall deficit.⁵

This is not what was intended in the now-defunct Oslo Accords of 1993, a plan for a permanent settlement of the conflict by 1999 based on the land-for-peace principle contained in UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). The accords implicitly envisioned the establishment of an independent, demilitarized Palestinian state coexisting side by side with a secure Israel. While Israeli military forces withdrew from Palestinian population centers in the West Bank as a result of Oslo, the major issues of the conflict remained unresolved and became more complex, with Israeli settlement and land confiscation unabated.

In the generation that has passed since the iconic Rabin-Clinton-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn at the signing of the accords in September 1993, population and land ratios have continually shifted in Israel’s favor, adding a distinct economic overlay to a conflict marked by violence and political stalemate. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has more than tripled since 1993: according to the Israeli NGO Peace Now, by 2019 the number had reached approximately 430,000 (accounting for 13 percent among a Palestinian population of approximately 2.9 million), with another 215,000 settlers in east Jerusalem (among a Palestinian population of approximately 340,000); media reports in 2019–20 put the overall settler total at 700,000.⁶

Although the rate of settler growth has slowed, at 3.4 percent in 2017 it was still more than one and a half times greater than population growth in Israel proper.⁷ While the number of West Bank settlements officially recognized by Israel has remained fairly constant, from 126 to 130 (and about 100 smaller “outposts”),⁸ the settlements have continued to grow in population and area, sanctioned and subsidized by a succession of Israeli governments despite having been deemed illegal in UN Security Council Resolutions 446, 452 (1979), and 465 (1980).

In the face of these circumstances, though, Palestinians continue to work the soil, innovating as they go to overcome short supplies of land and water. Most are small family farmers like Reja-e and Musaab Fayyad, who in 2016 were growing organic strawberries, juicy and sweet, on a three-dunam patch of land—three-quarters of an acre—in the village of Zababdeh, just south of Jenin. The brothers box their red fruit in pint-size plastic containers labeled “The Brothers Farm, Zababdeh Palestine”; the stickers echo the motif and colors of the Palestinian flag.

“We are local producers,” says Musaab, twenty-six, who has a degree in finance and a family line of farmers at least three generations long. “Our customers come here to pick the berries themselves—and they feel good about it.”⁹ The cartons that the Fayyads use to pack their produce bear slogans in Hebrew such as “from the peaks of Galilee-Golan,” a region roughly seventy-five to one hundred kilometers north of Zababdeh, across the Green Line, the internationally recognized demarcation separating Israel from the territories it occupied in 1967. Such Palestinian-made containers are in short supply, says Reja-e, forty-one, so the brothers use Israeli ones.

To overcome limited access to water, the Fayyads built an eighty-thousand-gallon rainwater catchment basin to irrigate their crops, and they stocked it with musht, otherwise known as tilapia or St. Peter’s fish. The brothers pipe the water into their greenhouse to irrigate the plants and feed them with fish waste, saving 90 percent on fertilizer costs.

The Fayyads’ ingenuity is also on display underneath the hanging strawberry crop in the greenhouse, where ripening red fruit dangles above rows of greens planted in the ground, including arugula, string beans, broccoli, celery, scallions, parsley, and hot peppers. Not only does combined above- and below-ground cultivation maximize the small growing space, but the in-ground crops also divert disease-carrying insects from the strawberries, increasing the yield of the brothers’ cash crop. “Each plant attracts specific insects and diseases,” Reja-e says. Varietal intercropping serves to confuse insects, decreasing the diseases they carry up to fivefold. To this cornucopia the brothers later added tomatoes and pineapples.

The Fayyads’ agricultural techniques are born of necessity and, perhaps, pedigree. Their paternal grandfather, Assad, originally from Haifa, grew corn, wheat, lentils, and beans. In 1948—when the State of Israel was established and military campaigns displaced approximately 55 percent of the indigenous 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs to clear the way for a Jewish majority within the borders of the Jewish state drawn by the 1947 UN partition of Palestine¹⁰—Assad was among thousands of Arab refugees who migrated to the West Bank. There his son Abdullah, a schoolteacher, continued to farm in Zababdeh on rented land, raising wheat, corn, watermelon, and beans.

Reja-e and Musaab farm that same land, which Abdullah eventually came to own. After growing strawberries in the ground for five years, they invested $20,000 to build the greenhouse and buy another 18,000 strawberry seedlings to plant above ground. Musaab, a graduate of the Arab American University just up the road in Jenin, turned to agriculture for lack of available finance jobs; Reja-e has supplemented his income working as a security officer for the Palestinian Authority. The brothers have averaged about $2,300 a month during the seven-month strawberry season but took little profit early on, reinvesting the proceeds to pay down loans and build their business, realizing small but increasing gains from economies of using rainwater and fish-waste fertilizer.

In season, they have sold up to three hundred and twenty kilograms of organic strawberries a month, about a third to vendors in Ramallah, about sixty kilometers south, and the rest to local customers. Strawberries grown in Israeli settlements in the West Bank are also available in local Palestinian markets but spoil faster, Musaab says, because Israeli growers use chemical pesticides and fertilizers to get a higher yield. “Not many of our customers are aware of the health benefits of organic food,” he notes, “but they like the taste of our strawberries. They are sweeter and won’t liquefy after a few days.” In the meantime, the Brothers Farm contributes to the small but growing Palestinian market for organic produce. “For us,” Reja-e says, “it’s a way to spread awareness.”

For Palestinians, the very act of cultivation and its resulting harvests spread another kind of awareness, in the view of Nasser Abufarha, who has built a business rooted in sustaining Palestinian agriculture and exporting its produce. “Many people around the world see injustice in the conflict,” he says, “but they don’t know what Palestinians have to offer to them.” Reducing Palestinians to victims of oppression is an unfair characterization, he maintains; keeping Palestinians visible as cultivators of the land is crucial.

“We’re still producing some of the best treasures the earth has to give. It’s important that the world sees this, including Israelis,” Abufarha maintains. When people around the world consume Palestinian produce, he says, they bond with Palestinians. “And in this bonding, Palestinians become relevant, and are not dismissed as bad news.”¹¹

Images of young women bearing harvest baskets and water jugs are iconic in Palestinian folk art. Young male balladeers declare their love fo...