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.

Shireen Qawasmi, a divorced mother of three from a prominent Hebron family, says she always teaches her children that 'Palestine is for us.' (Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor)

Fashionable and ready to fight

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.10.13

This is one of the first posts of a new regular feature from the Monitor's Jerusalem bureau chief, Christa Case Bryant. Read the introductory post for more explanation. 

When I went to visit the Al Quds Open University in Hebron to follow up on rumblings of a third intifada, Shireen Qawasmi immediately stood out for her ensemble: long manicured nails, a faux fur wrap, a rich purple coat over her jeans and black boots, and a big sparkling ring on her index finger.

After the students began voicing their frustrations with Israel and their consensus that armed resistance was the best way to fight back, I asked how many of them would be willing to fight themselves. 

Shireen, a divorced mother of three young children, was the first to pipe up. “I will carry arms and be the first one to go and fight,” she said.

Shireen comes from a prominent family in Hebron, where tensions tend to run higher than other West Bank cities. Home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is sacred to both Muslims and Jews and there are frequent clashes between Palestinians and a small but fervent community of Israeli settlers in the heart of the Palestinian city.

“We are not war lovers, but when you see your children getting killed, and your land confiscated, you are forced to fight,” she explained. “I teach my children always that Palestine is for us.”

You can read more about Shireen and her fellow classmates’ views on the potential for a third Palestinian intifada here.

Antique car collector Mahfouz Kabariti points out the license plate on his 1956 Oldsmobile, which was registered before Israel took over Gaza in the 1967 war with its Arab neighbors. (Christa Case Bryant / The Christian Science Monitor)

In Gaza, a dream of sailboats meets land's limited horizons

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 04.09.13

This is the first post of a new weekday feature from the Monitor's Jerusalem bureau chief, Christa Case Bryant. Read the introductory post for more explanation. 

When life gets tough in Gaza, Mahfouz Kabariti takes refuge in his garage.

It’s not that it’s all that safe in there; last fall when Israel pounded the coastal territory with airstrikes during an eight-day conflict with Hamas, a piece of shrapnel came flying through the garage’s one tiny window and shattered the back windshield of Mr. Kabariti’s old white Fiat.

Fortunately his 1938 British Standard – the oldest car in the Palestinian territories, he reckons – was unharmed.

But it’s here, in this dusty den of antique motor cars, that Kabariti tinkers away and leaves behind the pressures of living in perpetual conflict.

“The happiest place I spend time is here,” says Kabariti, who repaired the Standard’s engine himself. “When you concentrate on something like this hobby, this makes you feel calm.”

This closet collector is by no means a hermit. Outside the garage sit six sailboats – three Olympic standard and three kids’ boats – part of a 10-boat fleet for the new youth sailing center he opened last fall.

The average 13-year-old here was born against the backdrop of the second intifada against Israel and was just finishing first grade as Palestinian rival factions Hamas and Fatah factions clashed in vicious street battles that ultimately led to Fatah’s ouster. The next year, Israel retaliated against persistent rocket fire with a fierce three-week war on Gaza, in which more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed. Just as the youth became a teenager, Hamas and Israel entered another round of violence last fall.

Since Hamas assumed full control of Gaza in 2007, Israel has blockaded the territory, citing security concerns. It took Kabariti more than four years to get his sailboats to Gaza; much of the time they sat idle in Cyprus. In the end, he brought them into Egypt via the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria and sent them overland to Gaza.

He won’t say they came through the illegal tunnels along that border, which are used to smuggle everything from motorcycles to weapons. But there is no other way, since the sole legal crossing is open only to people, not goods.

Now the kiddie boats are nestled in the corner of his seaside compound, next to a 1971 VW bug with a gaping hole in the left front fender – another casualty of the November conflict. In all, he has half a dozen antique cars, but he doesn’t drive any of them because the Hamas-run Ministry of Transportation would tax him as if they were brand new. That means about $400 per year for his 1956 Oldsmobile, and another $300 for insurance. In a territory where the per capita income is less than $1,000 per year, that’s a lot.

But despite the flaws of the Hamas government and the pressures of living in a state at enmity with Israel, Kabariti says he’ll never leave.

“Maybe to travel, for leisure,” says the businessman, enjoy coffee amid his flower beds. “But to stay forever and live, I don’t prefer any place [to] Gaza.”