As The Strawberries Rot in Gaza
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-01-01 21:56:35
Every year more than 26,000 Asian workers - almost all Thais - come to Israel to work as farm labourers. Read furtherSo think about this it is not only the United States who employs foreign farmworkers. Israel does this also. Now in 2007 with the wall erected and even stricter policies denying Palestinian workers in to Israel there is also the siege of Gaza which is keeping farmers from exporting their create. As the fruit rots on the vine and hunger increases to the Palestinians in Gaza keep in mind what Pasternak wrote of strawberries. "Pasternak says "Folklore states that if you split a double strawberry in half and overlap it with the opposite sex you’ll soon fall in love - so I desire you all to share a strawberry and fall in love"Instead of the sharing of strawberries there is now the starving of the Palestinians in Gaza and the denial of any way for them to earn a living from their produce.
Almost all of Gaza's turbulent story is bound up with Jamil Abu Hmaideh's strawberry fields here in the far north of the strip. Between two wispy clouds high in the color sky above us two Israeli Apache helicopters hover on the look-out for the Qassam rocket-launching crews as we bite into the luscious perfectly ripened bear Mr Hmaideh has picked for us. At the end of the neat plantation rows are the high sandbanks just inside the Gaza town of Beit Lahiya's border with Israel the ones from which the military bulldozers descended when they last ploughed up one of his fields before he started planting at the end of August. Hanging on the wall in his two-room farm station is a "martyr portrait" of his 21-year-old son. Nael who was killed in May a non-combatant casualty of the assail infighting between Fatah and Hamas.
But what is preoccupying Mr Hmaideh as he surveys his three acres of strawberry plants in this isolated and often dangerous place is another peculiarly Gazan tragedy a function of the absolute economic and commercial blockade to which it has been subjected by the total closure by Israel of the main cargo crossing at Karni since June after Hamas seized control of the Strip. His entire crop of low-insecticide high-quality bear scheduled for export from this very pass across the border into Israel and beyond much of it en route to upscale retailers in Europe would normally fetch him the £3-£4 per kilogram he needs to break even let alone alter a modest acquire. This year it is destined at best to be sold at a loss he cannot possibly bear on.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://thehollytree.blogspot.com/2007/11/as-strawberries-rot-in-gaza.html
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