Planting Day @ Bustan Qaraaqa this Sunday

We warmly invite anyone who would like to come to join us this Sunday (25th January) to plant up our land. We will be sowing houmous and alfalfa down in the valley, and it should be a really nice day, working outside in beautiful surroundings.

We plan on starting at about 10.30am (it is fine to join later as well!), and if you could bring something to share for lunch, it will be really nice to have a picnic together.

If you have never visited us before, call us on 02 274 8994 for directions (although is you manage to get as far as Soukshab in Beit Sahour, most of the taxi drivers know where we are).

Hope to see you on Sunday

The Bustan Qaraaqa team
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Starting the New Year in hope and despair

What a way to start a year. Our days are dominated by the drone of Israeli fighter jets in the sky, on their way to bomb Gaza, their trails writing messages of death amongst the clouds. Occasionally our house is shaken by the force of the explosions happening 50km away, and sometimes at night as we sit around our fire we hear the sound of them carried to us on the still air.

Unimaginable carnage in Gaza - its darkness touches all of us, hovers behind everything we do and say at this time. The only hope we can have is that this time the world will look - truly look - at Gaza, and demand a better future for her people than the hell they have been subjected to for years.

Do look, if you can bear it. Flinch and look away by all means, but look back again and understand that those people need much more than a ceasefire to restore to them the norms of human dignity that we all expect as our rights.

This 'unilateral' ceasefire that has been declared is fragile and may not hold. Even if it does, it seems that, left to their own devices, the Israelis will only tighten the border control, holding up the desperately needed humanitarian aid, hampering development, intensifying suffering.

It is for the international community to intervene now, to come down on the side of human rights for Gazans, to demand and enforce conditions which will allow development in Gaza to go forward. We would urge anyone reading this to agitate for change, write to your politicians, demonstrate - whatever you feel you can do and whatever it takes to get the human rights of Gazans on the agenda, beyond the ceasefire. We suggest that peace and security will follow easing of humanitarian suffering much more surely than they will follow from the kind of hideous, murderous onslaught that Israel has unleashed over the past few weeks.

Well, besides watching, horrified, distraught and helpless from the sidelines as this horrible situation has unfolded, we have been busy at Bustan Qaraaqa this month. We started the year by sealing the floor of our rainwater cistern and are now working on the walls. However, at this stage it seems certain that this year will be an even worse drought than the last - which was the worst in 26 years. Rain is not falling in Palestine, water resources are not recharging, and we fear for the people and the environment, particularly the vulnerable communities who do not have regular water supplies - over 200 000 Palestinians in the West Bank are not connected to the water network and over half the people do not receive full coverage (constant supply).

Nevertheless, we have been planting crops. We are developing a companion planting system with many commonly grown food crops such as spinach, radishes, potatoes, lettuces, cabbages, strawberries etc. grown alongside various herbs and flowers (we will post a more detailed outline of this soon). We have also been planting trees in the nursery, especially drought tolerant native species which we believe could make good fodder crops for livestock. This is particularly important as overgrazing and soil erosion are huge problems in the West Bank and we hope to be able to do some work to remediate the degradation of the Eastern Slopes presently.

We have also been attending work-days in Al Wallaja at the weekends, working alongside Palestinians and Israelis to help our friend Abed develop his site and resist land confiscation.

Abed lives very close to the Israeli settlement of Gilo, in a cave on his family's land. His parents moved to Dheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem many years ago, but retained ownership of their land in Wallaja. However, in recent years, due to settlement expansion, their land has been threatened with confiscation. So Abed has gone to live there and farm, managing without electricity or running water, working with the support of Palestinian, Israeli and international friends who support his right to stay on the land his family have owned for generations. Absurdly he now faces an Israeli demolition order on his cave, but is fighting it in the courts.

We have been helping Abed to plant trees, build a water catchment and make a space for volunteers to sleep if they want to stay with him on his land.




We too have been lucky to have the help of many volunteers this month - Roman, Grace, Abby, Les, Amelia, Matthew, Avi, Noam, Vita, Osan and Frederick - and we look forward to new arrivals in the near future.

As ever, our funding situation is somewhat precarious....at the end of February we will no longer be able to pay living allowances to our long-term staff, although thankfully the rent is payed on the site until the end of June. If you would like to support our work please do get in touch with us (info@eag-palestine.org).

A small donation can go a long way in buying materials for the tree nursery and for the cistern (we think we need around 3000 shekels to finish the cistern, and about 1500 shekels for the nursery). Also, if you would like to support us on a monthly basis with a small amount, it could be very helpful to develop a steady income stream - any amount is gratefully received! If 100 people gave us £10 a month we would never have to worry about living allowances again :)

Well, dear readers, that is enough new from us for now. We will post more stories soon, and we hope to also have a proper website in the near future, with detailed information about the Bustan Qaraaqa project, its work and its goals - we will post the address when it is ready!

Stay tuned for more stories from the Tortoise Garden...............
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Picking up the pieces in Gaza

Picking up the pieces in Gaza
by Alice Gray

Eventually it will come to that of course. When this latest festival of death is over, when Israeli politicians decide that the status quo in Gaza has been suitably altered, when enough ‘militants’ have died to make the whole operation ‘worthwhile’.

Who knows? Perhaps Israel will even manage to force regime change in Gaza and oust the Hamas government, although it seems unlikely. Similar tactics (and by that I mean mass murder of civilians in the hope that they will turn on their leaders) have failed utterly in the past to produce the desired results – think Lebanon 2006 or Operation Defensive Shield, 2002. Neither Arafat nor the Hezbollah suffered any diminishment in their popularity on these occasions – rather the reverse in fact.

Even if Hamas where ousted, it seems unlikely that the Fatah party would be foolish enough to accept an Israeli enforced coup. And so it seems likely, as Robert Fisk has recently observed, that Israel will in time talk to the ‘bloodsoaked terrorists’ of Hamas, just as they talked to the ‘bloodsoaked terrorists’ of the PLO before them, the bombing will stop and the troops will withdraw. And what will be left, as the spotlight of the global media swings to some other crisis in some other troubled land?

An impoverished and traumatized population, mourning their dead. Shattered, overcrowded cities and refugee camps with inadequate infrastructure to serve the needs of their residents. A poisoned and degrading environment with inadequate resources to sustain the people of Gaza. A government with no sovereignty over borders, airspace or coast. A frozen development process, with little possibility to improve the humanitarian situation or halt the environmental degradation. This is the status quo in Gaza and this is what needs to change.

Wearisome as it is to trot out the same facts again and again, it is necessary to remind the world of the ongoing tragedy of Gaza, the slow rot that is, day by day and year by year, destroying the very fabric of the country, so that, in effect Gaza’s population are on life-support, with Israel controlling the lifelines.

Here are some of the facts again:

Gaza’s population numbers 1.5 million people, compressed into 365 square kilometres, further compressed because Israel controls a ‘buffer zone’ along the border which varies in width from 150 metres to over 1000 metres.

There is insufficient land to supply the food needs of the population, and such land as there is is increasingly degraded and polluted with agricultural chemicals, industrial effluents and untreated sewage.

There is insufficient water in the aquifer that underlies Gaza to supply the basic needs to the population. As a result, the aquifer is overdrawn and degraded as year by year the water level drops and sea water spills in from the neighbouring Mediterranean. In 2000, 90% of the drinking water was unfit for human consumption by international standards, and the situation has only deteriorated since then.

Sewage infrastructure is completely underdeveloped. There are 3 wastewater treatment plants in Gaza but all are overloaded and in need of upgrading. In March 2007, a sewage lagoon in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza broke, and the resulting wave of sewage swamped a nearby village, Um Nassar, killing 5 people and making thousands homeless. 80% of sewage is discharged untreated into the environment, contaminating soil, water and coastline.

Gaza has one oil-powered electrical plant, supplying electricity to water pumping stations, sewage works, hospitals and residents. In addition, electricity is imported from Israel via 10 feeder cables. When the power supply is cut, pumping stations and hospitals function on diesel powered standby generators. Israel controls the flow of fuel into Gaza and since October 2007, heavy restrictions in the supply of both fuel and electricity have crippled Gaza, interfering with water supply, sanitation and the operation medical machinery in hospitals.

Efforts to implement development projects in Gaza are severely hampered by Israeli restrictions which obstruct the import of vital materials such as cement and pipelines. Vital infrastructure is damaged during Israeli military operations, and it is not always possible to repair it. In June 2006, the transformers at the Gaza Electric Company were destroyed in an Israeli air-raid. The capacity of the power-station was reduced from 140 megawatts to 80 megawatts. Numerous water-wells, pumping stations and pipelines were also damaged.

According to the latest report from Gaza’s water authority, at least 3 wells and one major pipeline have been hit by Israeli airstrikes. In addition, the power-lines supplying other wells have been brought down. Over 530 000 people are without water supply, sewage is backing up in the streets and there is concern that the Beit Lahiya sewage lagoon will break again as the level is rising by 2 cm every day. A major sewage pipeline in Beit Hanoun has broken and is flooding the area.

And so the catalogue of destruction and suffering goes on. Israel restricts supplies of food, fuel and electricity and hampers development, heaping privation on privation, pain on pain. Desperate youths cobble together homemade projectiles and fire them at nearby Israeli towns, Hamas leaders posture and pour forth a delusional rhetoric of revenge and reprisal.

A delusional rhetoric. Even with their full firepower unleashed, Hamas have managed to kill just four Israelis in the last week, adding to the total of 23 killed by rockets or mortars in the last 7 years. Tragic deaths to be sure, but set against the total carnage in Gaza at this time (over 500 dead in the last few days and rising), the suffering of the economic siege, the general festering misery of life in Gaza? Well, what are we to conclude?

Perhaps Israel’s leaders would do well to remember that terrorism has not only a physical but also a psychological infrastructure, an infrastructure that they are building even as they destroy tunnels and rocket launching platforms; that desperate people will resort to desperate measures, that suffering breeds hatred and hatred breeds revenge.

Israel does indeed have the capacity to change the status quo in Gaza, by stopping this endless abuse of the human rights and human dignity of her people. Now, while the eyes of the world are on Gaza, it is time to demand that end.
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