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19-12-2023
GAZA CITY: In Baqa al-Gharbiyye, an hour’s drive from Haifa, city folk have temporarily traded pens for boots to aid farmers facing a labour shortage exacerbated by Israel’s war on Gaza.
The volunteers hailing from different backgrounds have come together during their leisure time to lend a helping hand to Palestinian citizens of Israel who are farmers like Marwan Abu Yassin for the harvest.
Palestinians with citizenship account for about 20 percent of Israel’s population, descendants of Palestinians who remained after mass expulsions at the time of Israel’s founding in 1948.
“I had 16 Thai workers, but nine left the country because of the war, and I had 15 workers from the West Bank who no longer come to Israel because of the roadblocks,” said Abu Yassin, 55.
Meanwhile, since the war began, Israel has suspended work permits for about 130,000 day workers from the occupied West Bank.
On October 7, Hamas fighters from Gaza stormed across the militarized border into Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking some 250 people captive, according to Israeli figures.
Israel retaliated with a devastating air and ground offensive that has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, about 70 percent of them women, children and elderly, according to the Ministry of Health.
It was the farmers themselves who launched calls for volunteers, said Ibrahim Mawasi, 65, who helped coordinate the effort.
“A week after the war, we got together and decided to mobilize all the people who wanted to save agriculture,” he said.
Though they have helped, Mawasi said they really needed experienced farmers.
On Abu Yassin’s farm, he normally cultivates 150 dunams (around 15 hectares) of land, but can only work around 50 this season, with only seven employees, and still has costs to maintain the rest.
In his fields, volunteers were picking cucumbers, placing seedlings on stakes, and were preparing for the strawberry harvest when the rains interrupted them.
Yusef Sader, a retired physics teacher, said he knew the work would leave him exhausted, but was happy to have “given a little boost to the farmers.”
For Guy, 56, an Israeli Jewish social worker who did not give his surname, volunteering for the harvests was “very important for good relations between Jews and Arabs”. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
