Abu Elias, a father of four, earns his livelihood by farming a small plot of land just outside the center of Jericho, West Bank, October 2012. (Evan Bryant)

A shortage of water, but not hospitality, in the West Bank's fields

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 05.01.13

Abu Elias is pretty much the man in Jericho, where he has raised his four children on the income he earns from growing cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I met him in the town square on a dusty October day while reporting a story about water shortages in the West Bank; he invited me to come see his farm – after he visited the local barber shop.

After he was all spiffed up, he had another idea: taking us to visit a local “composting” conference at a farm on the outskirts of town.

It didn’t sound very useful for my story but we agreed to join him and I’m glad we did. It turned out that the Palestinian minister of agriculture was there, along with chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. Amid manure piles and fish tanks, he introduced me to both.

Afterward we headed back to Abu Elias’s tidy plot. He used to plant 20 dunams (about 5 acres) of land, but has cut back to half that due to a water shortage, which he blames on mismanagement by the Jericho municipality.

"The spring of Ein Sultan produces the same amount but the distribution and administration of water is very bad, it’s inefficient," he says. "I am being given less water than what I deserve in terms of what I pay."

He has compensated by implementing new water-saving techniques, some of which he picked up from Israel. Among them are grafting regular tomato plants onto the roots of wild tomato plants, which are hardier and better handle drought conditions.

As Israeli fighter jets roared overhead toward the Dead Sea, he took a swig of clear, cold water from a clay jug and then poured us hot tea before sending us off with a hearty invitation to return again soon. Water may be in shorter supply here, but hospitality certainly is not.

Read here to read more about Abu Elias and the challenges – and opportunities – of providing Israelis and Palestinians with water as both populations expand and a peace agreement has yet to be found.

Judith Bar-Hay works for the Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, known as NATAL, in communities along the border of Gaza, the skyline of which can be seen from this picnic area near Sderot, Israel, April 18. (Christa Case Bryant/TCSM)

Israeli first responder searches for the good among Sderot's rocket-pocked streets

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.29.13

Judith Bar-Hay works on the frontlines of one of the most battered areas of Israel: Sderot, a blue-collar town that has been hit with more than 7,000 rockets from Palestinian militants in nearby Gaza over the past decade.

So when Ms. Bar-Hay, who works with Israel's Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, known as NATAL, offered to give me a tour of the town, I was expecting somber tales.

Instead, I was met by a spunky lady with spiky hair and funky jewelry outside Sderot’s hip cinematheque where, for $9, residents can choose from “The good, the bad, and the ugly,” an array of French films, and the latest Israeli flicks.

Bar-Hay’s tour of Sderot featured more of the good than the bad and ugly. She was determined to show that there is much more to this community than pockmarked buildings and kids with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

To be sure, there are both of those in this town of 20,000, as well as memorials to the roughly two dozen Israelis killed by rockets – about half of them residents of Sderot. One memorial takes the form of a community meeting place built by the parents of a girl who saved her brother’s life by shielding him with her body.

“I think they did a beautiful thing to remember her, because it continues life,” says Bar-Hay. “This is very unique to the way Israel copes with tragic death.”

We visit Sderot's Sapir College, which has more than doubled enrollment since the rockets began, and drive down vibrant boulevards, which are punctuated by artwork fashioned from Qassam rockets.

Bar-Hay, who lives on a nearby kibbutz and is a veteran member of NATAL’s community department, knows the routes well. Her work as the coordinator of NATAL's mobile unit and a first responder in emergencies takes her to everyone from schoolchildren who have lost a fellow student to an elderly grandmother who was too scared to leave her front porch for a week, since only from there could she see the public bomb shelter that she would need to reach within 15 seconds when the rocket alarm went off.

“I think this is my coping – my helping others,” she says. “If I have to go home, I think I will go crazy.”

Things have been quieter in recent months. She takes me to a picnic area on the edge of the city with a clear view of Gaza’s skyscrapers, which was filled with locals on Israeli independence day in mid-April. As the smell of freshly cut hay wafts through the pines, she sounds almost wistful about the severing of relations between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Until 2005, Israeli citizens were free to live and shop there.

“If I want a good dentist, a good mechanic, the people in Gaza are the best,” she says, noting that many Gazans also used to cross into Israel, many for work. “I think, and a lot of people think, that everybody lose in this war because the people of Gaza want the connection with us.”

Shyrine Ziadeh leads one of her three classes at the Ramallah Ballet Center, which she opened in December 2011 with the help of her family. (Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor)

Dancing around the conflict in Ramallah

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.26.13

In a place as unpredictable as the West Bank, a reporter meets quite the cast of characters, from militants to grandmothers. But Shyrine Ziadeh is the first and only interviewee who has greeted me in ballet tights and a sheer skirt.

This young woman, who opened the first ballet studio in the West Bank in 2011, is refreshing in many other ways as well.

She has Israeli friends, and hope. Those are rare commodities in the West Bank these days, where there is increasing social pressure not to associate with Israelis until they end their occupation of this land where Palestinians want to build a state of their own. Most Palestinians don’t expect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to budge, and they’re not too enthralled with their own government, the Palestinian Authority, either. 

“I don’t know if they’re giving up … but they don’t have the motivation to continue defending or at least have an opinion about what is happening,” says Shyrine, who has both Arab and Jewish friends in Israel.

I actually don’t know what Shyrine thinks about Israel or the PA; we didn’t talk about it (another rarity).

The occupation does pose obstacles for her, of course; she mentioned that because she doesn’t have a permit to visit Jerusalem, 30 minutes away, shopping for tutus and tights for her kids can require an international trip to Amman, Jordan.

But on an afternoon visit to the Palestine Ballet Center, Shyrine didn’t express the cynicism has become part of daily life for many Palestinians.

“Sometimes it’s weird to tell people you have friends living in Jerusalem but we actually have many [Israelis] with us, with the Palestinian cause.

“I love to see how we could live together,” she adds, “because we’re living in the same area but we don’t know each other.”

Read more about her studio here.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men run down a street in Jerusalem's Old City, last week. Israel, filled with religious tourism destinations, is exploring ways to make pilgrimages sustainable. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

Israel seeks another type of coexistence – between tourists and the earth

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.24.13

This week Jerusalem hosted its first green pilgrimage symposium, tapping the fledgling but growing interest in promoting local communities and environmental sustainability through religious tourism.

That’s a formidable task for a city where visitors have clashed for centuries, often ravaging the landscape. Suffice it to say that city officials are looking to improve on the Crusader model of pilgrimage. 

Mayor Nir Barkat seeks to leverage Jerusalem’s ancient brand, which for centuries has appealed to pilgrims of the three monotheistic religions. He seeks to triple annual tourism to 10 million by 2020. But to do that in a sustainable way, reducing the environmental impact and boosting local economies, requires the buy-in of a key sector.

“Nothing can be done seriously in Jerusalem without engaging the faith communities, because we’re not just any city,” says Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur. Green pilgrimage “is a platform to work with our faith communities but also the best possible platform to work with other cities and faith communities around the world.”

Jerusalem was one of 10 founding members of the Green Pilgrimage Network (GPN), established 18 months ago. Among the initial group were Sufi Muslims from Kano, Nigeria; Sikhs from Amritsar, India; and Taoists from Lougang, China. 

Next year, Shinto followers in Japan plan to join, and Ms. Tsur announced today that Israel would form a national chapter as well.

Lougang perhaps best represents the potential scale of the movement. It has poured $1.5 billion into greening the city, building a new green spa complex, teaching organic farming, and initiating water harvesting. Now the city is trying to recruit 15 new cities into the network, says Allison Hilliard of the Alliance of Religions and Conservations, which oversees GPN. 

GPN is also working on a chapter for the hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which draws nearly 3 million Muslims annually – who leave behind 100 million plastic bottles. GPN seeks to tap into values of environmental stewardship across all faiths to cut down on such negative side effects of tourism.

But it can be a tough sell. Despite the fact that Palestinians – most of whom are Muslim – make up more than a third of Jerusalem’s population, very few attended the symposium. 

Some of the pilgrimage routes with the greatest potential, like the Kidron Valley ascent from the Dead Sea, crisscross numerous political barriers and strong political pressures act against those trying to reach across the divide.

Elsewhere in Israel, projects like the Jesus Trail have demonstrated the potential for Arab-Jewish cooperation.

Prior to the construction of the trail, “One million tourists were visiting [the Arab town of] Cana every year, and they only stayed for one hour,” says cofounder Maoz Inon. With it came the first guesthouse in Cana, an ecotourist goat farm in nearby Ilaniya, and more Christian tourists who are spreading their dollars throughout the struggling rural communities.

The trail head is in the old city of Nazareth, one of the most impoverished areas of Israel, at Mr. Inon’s Fauzi Azar Inn. Since he established the inn in 2005, five more guesthouses have opened in Nazareth.

“If we had 10,000 more of him, we’d be much further along in having a truly sustainable product,” says Deidre Shurland, a symposium speaker and coordinator of the United Nations Environment Program’s Global Partnership for Sustainable Tourism.

Arin Shaabi works at a military base on the seam of Israel and the West Bank, crossing just over the threshold each day to prosecute Palestinians from the territory. (Christa Case Bryant)

The trials of an Israeli Arab prosecuting Palestinians

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.22.13

Arin Shaabi walks a fine line between Arab and Jew every day. 

When she drives to work, she crosses from Israel into the northern West Bank, not far from Jenin. Just over the border, inside her small trailer office on an Israeli army base, a stack of folders awaits her attention – pink for criminals, green for terrorists.

All the files belong to Palestinians, who live beyond the maze of rusty fences, barbed wire, and concrete barriers that separate her from the offenders. Some are just kids, accused of throwing stones or Molotov cocktails. Others are suspected of transferring enemy money into the territory, or making contact with enemy agents. As a military prosecutor, it’s up to Shaabi to review the evidence and shepherd the cases through the military courts.

It's a sensitive task, especially because Shaabi is herself Arab. Very few of Israel's 20 percent minority of Arabs serve in the military. In 2011, Shaabi was one of only 94 Arab Christians in the whole Israel Defense Forces (IDF) (with another 155 Arab Muslim soldiers). 

While most Israeli citizens are required to serve in the military, Arabs like Shaabi are exempt. So the fact that she volunteered, and even fought against cultural and bureaucratic resistance to get a job in which she is responsible for prosecuting fellow Palestinians, initially earned her the hatred of Palestinian defense attorneys who work on the base.

“One told me that in the beginning he hated me because I didn’t have to do military service,” says Shaabi, a soft-spoken woman who joined the military out of a sense of responsibility to her country. “But when you work with them and they get to know you, it disappears.”

There have been tough moments in the past two and a half years, such as when she was exposed to the gruesome evidence of a Palestinian attack that killed a sleeping couple and three of their children in the Israeli settlement of Itamar in 2011. Worried about the effect the evidence would have on a fellow prosecutor, a Jewish woman, she forbid her from looking at it.

Shaabi admits it took extra courage to make it here at all, coming from the Arab city of Nazareth, where it’s strange to see any Israeli soldiers in uniform, let alone Israeli Arabs. She says she found strength in her mom’s support, and inspiration in the stories her maternal grandmother – who was born Jewish – told her as a kid.

With two Jewish uncles from her grandmother’s first marriage, Shaabi grew up with a pair of IDF soldiers in the family. And since Judaism is passed through the maternal bloodline, some would even consider her to be Jewish. But since Shaabi's grandmother converted to Christianity when she got remarried to an Arab Christian man in the late 1950s, her mother was raised Christian, and chose to raise Shaabi that way.

“At home we didn’t have any racism or anything,” Shaabi recalls, saying her grandfather was courageous to marry a Jewish woman just a decade after Israel declared independence and some 700,000 Arabs either fled or were forced from their homes. Her grandfather was among the small minority who stayed.

“I grew up with the idea that this is where we live, this is our country. And in the same way that we have rights, we have responsibilities,” she adds. “So I felt that even though it’s not mandatory for me to join [the IDF], it’s my responsibility to do it.”

Nader Abu Turki and Hamoud Salah, former Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank, prepare nablusi in their new shop. The sumptious version of kenafeh, a traditional Palestinian dessert, includes sheep or goat cheese and pistachios. (Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor)

Former Palestinian prisoners once jailed for murder, now dole out dessert

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.19.13

Nader Abu Turki and Hamoud Salah are accustomed to cramped quarters; they spent 13 and 12 years, respectively, in Israeli jails.

But since being released two years ago, they have carved out a tiny niche for themselves that has a much sweeter savor than prison: a kenafeh shop. On a recent afternoon, customers fairly mobbed the counter, waiting for a fresh batch of the traditional Palestinian dessert to emerge from the shop’s sole oven.

Mr. Abu Turki and Mr. Salah, who just opened their doors in March, are certainly not the only folks in Gaza making kenafeh, which combines rich cheese with a sweet, crusty topping. But they make the most sumptuous version of the dessert, called nablusi, that makes it more dense and rich. They say demand is so high they’ll soon have to open a second shop.

Nablusi comes from Nablus, a city in the northern West Bank. So does Salah, originally. But upon his release, he was exiled to the Gaza Strip along with Abu Turki – a native of Hebron – and nearly 150 other prisoners. They were sentenced to 22 and 15 years, respectively, for conspiracy to murder and planting bombs, among other things.

In 2011, they were among 1,027 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier, Sgt. Gilad Shalit, who had been captured and held by Hamas for five years. They saw that as a great victory, since the release came about not through mutual negotiation but an act of “resistance” – the kidnapping of Shalit.

“We forced the Israelis to release prisoners,” says Abu Turki.

While he and Salah are now separated from their families in the West Bank, they have started new lives in Gaza. Salah found a wife from Nablus. Abu Turki, who was already married when he was jailed, has a wife and kids back in the West Bank, but has married a second woman in Gaza and just welcomed their first child.

How is life with one wife in each of the Palestinian territories?

“It’s like the political split,” jokes Salah, answering for his partner. In 2007, the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, got into a violent confrontation and Fatah was ousted from the coastal territory. Hamas, the Islamist organization that Israel and the US considers to be a terrorist group, has run Gaza ever sense.

Reconciliation efforts have been under way for years, but have yet to unify the two territories once more. But the people still feel they are part of one nation.

“We as Palestinians consider ourselves as one family,” says Salah, plunging his hands into the mixer as he whips up another batch of nablusi.

Avner Goren, former chief archaeologist for Israel in the Sinai, now lives and works in his native Jerusalem and the surrounding area – such as the Arab hilltop towns in the background. (Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor)

Israeli archaeologist finds common ground underneath Sinai's shifting sands

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.17.13

When Avner Goren walks in your door, thousands of years of history come sweeping in like the desert sands.

After Israel captured the Sinai peninsula from Egypt in the 1967 war, Dr. Goren was appointed chief archaeologist of Israel. He moved his young family to the rugged mountainous region and began getting to know the local Bedouin. By the time he left in 1982, after Egypt and Israel made peace, he had learned Arabic and become thoroughly integrated into the Bedouin culture.

“The people really opened their hearts,” says Goren, a world-renowned archaeologist. “When I’m not careful, I speak about them as ‘my tribe.’ ”

During his time there, he and other archaeologists from around the world uncovered the civilization of Nawamis, the forefathers of the Bedouin, who established homes in the Sinai in the 4th millennium B.C. – before the pyramids were built. Some of the buildings still had roofs on them, making them perhaps the oldest roofs ever found.

“That was a new thing and even a new, I would say, branch of desert archaeology that forced us to develop completely new tools,” says Goren.

When Israel made peace with Egypt, however, he had to oversee the transfer to Egypt of all the archaeological artifacts uncovered in the Sinai during Israel’s occupation.

“I have a lot of personal attachment to the finds but … I do believe it was the right thing to do,” he says. 

Today, however, he’s worried that some of those artifacts, which he spent more than a year cataloging before sending back to Egypt, may have been stolen in a wave of looting since former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011.

"My understanding is that the Sinai things that Israeli returned to Egypt were returned to Qantara,” says Goren, referring to one of the targets of the looting. “A lot of museums and other places, including the storerooms of the Antiquity Authority in Qantara, have been looted."

Back in Jerusalem, he is applying his understanding of Arab culture, gained during his years in the Sinai, to help promote various coexistence projects in Israel. Among other things, he is the Israeli representative for the Abraham Path Initiative, which aims to unite people of all faiths around the experiences and example of the patriarch.

“It takes for me tons of energy to help people understand how to express themselves,” he says, but he is undaunted. “I do believe very strongly that naiveté is a very good and important tool to accomplish dreams.”

A Palestinian girl runs past a laundry rope at Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, last week. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

Hebrew lives on in Hamas-run Gaza

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.14.13

Every day, Daniel Fares watches Israel's two main news stations, Channel 2 and Channel 10. But despite his Jewish-sounding name, he’s not Israeli. He doesn’t even live in Israel.

To get to his home from Israel, you have to cross through Israeli border control to Gaza, wait for a heavy metal door to open, walk through a half-mile covered walkway enshrouded with wire mesh, give your passport to the Palestinians who serve as intermediaries between Israel and Hamas (who are not on speaking terms), then finally go to the Hamas checkpoint and present your Hamas permit, which enables you to finally enter Gaza.

From there, you drive into the Jabaliya refugee camp, down a sandy street, until you get to the right alleyway. Turn left, duck under a few clotheslines, and steer clear of the leaky plumbing and haphazard streams of water, and you’ll arrive at Mr. Fares’s simple home with nine of his 15 children (the others have married and moved out). You might notice a rusty key hanging on the wall of the front room, which is bare except for a few beat-up plastic chairs arranged on the cement floor.

That’s the key to his family’s former home in Yavne, southern Israel, which they had to leave during the 1948-49 war between the newly established state of Israel and its Arab neighbors.

But despite the bitter history between his people and Israeli Jews, Fares has a clear fondness for Israel – and his former boss at the Coca-Cola plant where he worked for years.

Fares worked in Israel from boyhood until 2003, when Israel tightened the border and he was unable to get a work permit, learning Hebrew along the way. Between a round of tea and Palestinian pizza, he quotes a popular proverb: “In our religion, it says if you know the language of your enemy, you will protect yourself from their hatred and from their evil deeds.” 

He suggests Hebrew can help improve understanding between Jews and Arabs. He recalls one time when he saw a Jewish mother and daughter walking down the street in Israel, and the daughter dropped her chocolate on the ground. Because he speaks Hebrew, he understood what the mother said when the girl leaned over to pick it up: “Don’t be like the Arabs.”

He told the mother – in Hebrew – she shouldn’t teach her children to think that way.  

His own children haven’t learned Hebrew, but he hopes that a new Hamas pilot program will expand to include their schools, and prepare the rising generation for a possible thawing of ties between Gaza and Israel. 

“In the future they could be translators, analysts, businessmen,” he says.

Read more about the Hamas pilot program here.

Avi Yankelevitch pours hot goat milk through a strainer. His daughter, Hadar Barkai, turns the milk into rich cheese for the meals she provides for hikers on the Jesus Trail, which passes near their village of Ilaniya in the Galilee region of Israel. (Evan Bryant)

A goat farmer, lured by the green Galilee

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.12.13

Avi Yankelevitch, a burly goat farmer, shows us the way to our yurt and then whips out his pocketknife to cut a passion fruit straight off the bush. He offers it to us on the palm of his thick, weathered hand. 

He and his family never intended to be farmers. 

If it wasn't for David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister – somewhat akin to George Washington in Israeli terms – they probably never would have ended up in the rural village of Ilaniya, located on the Sea of Galilee, halfway between the hills of Nazareth and Capernaum.

But while Mr. Yankelevitch’s mother, a Romanian immigrant, was working as a housekeeper for the Israeli president in Jerusalem in the early days of Israel’s existence, she had the opportunity to meet Mr. Ben Gurion.

Why in the world was she living in Jerusalem, the prime minister asked. He encouraged her to move to the beautiful village where he had worked as a farm laborer in the 1920s as one of those early Zionists who cultivated not only the land, but the new ideal of the Jew as a tan, strong pioneer.

“She couldn’t refuse, and here we are,” says Mr. Yankelevitch. 

He got his start in farming by growing carnations, and once had the largest goat farm in the country, with 120 goats, but had to close it in the 1980s because farm banks collapsed. 

Today, he runs an eco-lodge and organic goat farm –  named “Yaroz Az,” which has the double meaning of green goat and intense green – with his daughter, Hadar Barkai, and her husband. They started the initiative when they heard that an Israeli entrepreneur and his American hiking buddy were launching the Jesus Trail, aimed at bringing pilgrims into the countryside where Jesus walked and not just to a select few places where the tour buses unload. The idea was to help boost small businesses, and thus help the Galilee’s depressed rural economy gain new life.

“We hope that the Jesus Trail will develop and it will be like El Camino de Santiago in Spain,” says Yankelevitch, referring to The Way of St. James, a major Christian pilgrimage route. 

For more on the Jesus Trail and Yarok Az, read here.