Palestinian Fair Trade

I'm back from the dead. In my three-month hiatus I've been getting my act together in print and online, writing up a storm about suburbanization in Israel at GreenProphet.com, and publishing an interesting piece on Palestinian fair trade in the Jerusalem Report. It's not available online; here are files.









I learned a lot from reporting this piece. The article was born in a roundabout way; I went to the Ministry of Agriculture in Bethlehem to speak to specialists and make connections for my thesis research on Palestinian farming. Here I am on a Bethlehem roof.


One of the officials I spoke to was Odeh, who said "you are most welcome in my home any time." He mentioned he was a grape farmer.

A week later I called him up and took along reliable Anthony for a day in Beit Ommar, a town of 15,000 on the road between Bethlehem and Hebron in the West Bank. Odeh took us to the office of the Beit Ommar Cooperative, where he started a nursery to sell cheap olive saplings and herbs to local farmers. We went to his house and met his wife, son and two daughters, along with his dad. Lunch was yoghurt with rice. Odeh also showed us the modern and traditional methods of grape farming. He mentioned he was trying to market the cooperative's grapes via Fair Trade to Europe.

I had filed the day away mentally when my editor at the Jerusalem Report said they were looking for a story on Palestinian affairs. Some interviews later, the article was born. By the way, if you are in the region and want to do Odeh a favor, he's looking for someone to clean up the English on the cooperative Web site.

Here are some of the photos that didn't make it into the piece:
Odeh getting the radio treatment in the Beit Ummar nursery.

Odeh looking out at his family's vineyards.

Odeh on his cellphone from his roof. In the background is the settlement of Karmey Tzur.
Odeh's father, who speaks Hebrew from years spent working on Israeli construction sites.

The red words on the white paper above the door say "Wizarat Al-Zira'a" - aka Ministry of Agriculture.

Bustan Qaraaqa: British Expats Getting Dirty

I'm writing my geography Master's thesis on traditional Palestinian agriculture, and on Tuesday I went to two farms for some fieldwork. The first one was in the village of Wadi Fuqin, southwest of Jerusalem. I wrote up that visit at GreenProphet.com.

The second one was a British experimental farm called Bustan Qaraaqa (Tortoise Garden), which is southeast of Jerusalem next to the village of Beit Sahour. If Wadi Fuqin is a centuries-old village full of locals, Bustan Qaraqaa has been around for a year, was started by British land lovers and is worked by foreign volunteers who blow in and out for a few days at a time, farming by day and by night sleeping inside the 100-year-old stone house that is the project's headquarters.


I went touring with my friend Anthony, who is launching an English-language program at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and is looking for ecologists to be professors. We met for coffee in a classy joint in West Jerusalem, then called up Alice at Bustan Qaraqaa and followed her directions to the farm.

From Hebron road in West Jerusalem, we took an Arab bus #124, which dropped us at the Gilo checkpoint south of Jerusalem. We got out and went through a turnstyle where a guard checked our IDs and waved us through. From there we traversed a metal maze and emerged, Alice in Wonderland style, on the other side of the mirror where a clump of yellow taxis stalled, their drivers shouting "Taxi! Taxi!"

The metal maze that leads from Israeli-controled Gilo checkpoint to Palestinian Bethlehem on the other side.

We wound up paying Nayef 30 shekels to get to Bustan Qaraqaa, about 7 kilometers away. He dropped us at a tall stone house with three cases of Taybeh Beer on the front step. We went inside and started talking shop with Alice over fenugreek cake.

For a complete history of the place, see the GreenProphet post or the Guardian article.

Alice, 28, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the region's plants, and of the ecological issues facing West Bank farmers, which she dispenses with starts and giggles and ironic interjections. She said she came to Israel/Palestine originally to keep her friend company, and started by working at the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem and other ecological groups. However, she soon realized she would rather actively work the soil rather than writing reports on it, and she and four other friends rented a stone house and the grounds around it from a Palestinian man for 3,000 shekels a month.


Alice checks some of the 1,000 local and foreign tree seedlings growing on one of the terraces.

There, they implement local and foreign techniques to coax the most out of the soil without use of pesticides and fertilizers. I was most impressed with how although Bustan Qaraaqa's founders are well-educated British expats, they approach their work through the eyes of a cash-strapped Palestinian villager. Farming methods are time-intensive but low-technology and low-cost.

When they first started farming, Bustan Qaraaqa's staff painstakingly marked out the contours of the land using a water-level. Two people walked the grounds, each holding a pole attached to a plastic pipe filled with water that stretched between them. When they were on ground of equal height, the water didn't fall out of the pipe.

Along these contour lines, Alice and the crew dug swales, which trap water going downhill and help use it for plants rather than allowing it to flow downhill, taking the topsoil with it.


Melons are planted in a mound, at the center of which is an upside-down plastic bottle with its bottom cut off. This allows for irrigating the roots of the plants. The water doesn't burn the melons' delicate leaves this way, and it also is slower to evaporate.


The swirling dirt and stones help maximize water use. Alice said she will plant a tree at the center of the swirl and smaller plants on the higher parts of the outside. This way, water gets to the plants first and concentrates at the roots of the tree, which eventually grows to shade the plants around it.

A recently completed project is the rainwater storage tank. This was dug out of cinderblock and painted over with waterproof paint. Alice said three big winter storms could fill it, and provide enough water for irrigating crops over the summer. She plans to fill it with tilapia to prevent the water from going bad, and to cover it with thatch to forestall evaporation. Alice said of the paint, "It's not environmentally friendly, but it's more environmentally friendly than letting all the rainwater get away."

Alice and Anthony sit on the reservoir's edge, with the farmland stretching behind them.

The house has no fridge, a situation poorer farmers off the electric grid might sympathize with. The running water used in the house gets filtered and reused for irrigating the fields. No water is used for the compost toilet.


The toilet, which stinks a bit but whose stone room is lined with quotes from Jack Kerouac and Mark Twain, as well as T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in its entirety.


One of two "refrigerators," created by nesting two pottery urns and keeping sand, water and zaatar (to repel insects) in between.


The kitchen's pastry brush is a palm frond.


Bustan Qaraaqa saves beer bottles as building materials; here is an international collection of the local Taybeh Beer as well as the Israeli Macabbi brew.

While we were there, we saw the close relationship between Bustan Qaraaqa and its neighbors. One woman came to pick weeds like hubeiza, which can be eaten in a salad. The neighbor took his goats out to pasture; Alice said Bustan Qaraaqa buys goats for meat when they have money. A little girl walked along the stone wall along the edge of the property and said hello.

Alice said she hopes to turn over the farm to a Palestinian in five years. In the meantime, Bustan Qaraaqa has established connections with farmers at the village of Wallaje, where each Friday volunteers go to help in some way. The latest project is building a compost toilet there.

First Podcast Up

While home in summer I invested in some audio recording equipment, and the first fruit of my labor has just ripened on the GreenProphet.com vine. Check out this podcast of a morning spent with a friend, Robert Lavenstein, who's herding goats in Israel.

Rahat by Bike

The southbound train from Tel Aviv always stops at "Lehavim-Rahat" before pulling into Beer Sheva. For the past year, I have wondered what might be found at that stop, and on Monday I finally satisfied my curiosity.

Rahat, pop. 42,000, is the only Bedouin city in Israel, established in 1972 to settle the former nomads who had adopted a sedentary lifestyle. It is consistently ranked as one of the most impoverished cities in Israel as well as one of the least desirable to live in. A city for Bedouins is an oxymoron, and I wanted to go to understand what that meant. Here's the skyline:


There is only one bus a day from Beer Sheva to Rahat. On the other hand, most buses going north make a stop at or near Lehavim, the upscale Jewish bedroom community that shares the train station. To solve the issue, a friend and I pushed a pair of bicycles into the Lehavim bus luggage compartment and then biked the four kilometers along a paved road to the entrance of Rahat. The bus ride was 15 minutes long and cost 11 shekels, including a surcharge and disgruntled driver for the bikes.

As we entered town, there were billboards in Arabic for health care and for political candidates (local elections were two weeks ago). Our bikes made us a curiosity as we rode up and down asphalted hills. Having no map and no contacts, we headed toward the industrial zone in search of the Rahat olive oil press.

First, we found a slaughterhouse where 10,000 chickens are dispatched each day. One of the workers there, Khaled, showed me around the factory where the chickens are hung on hooks by the legs, killed, cleaned, plucked, and packaged in cardboard. It was 1 pm and the day's animals had already been processed.



Then Khaled and some of the other factory workers invited us to drink coffee with them. They pulled out a thick loaf of white bread and a plastic bowl of the thickest olive oil I have ever seen and insisted we eat. We spoke about whether or not Barack Obama is a Muslim, with Khaled navigating the Hebrew-Arabic divide.

From there we found the olive press, where the owner, Fuad, showed us how olives are processed.
Local farmers bring their crop to him and pay a fee per kilogram of olives pressed.

When we were there, a Bedouin named Moussa was waiting for his yellow plastic jugs to fill up, while a Jewish man from a farm in the desert was standing around waiting for his turn.


As we left the factory, we came across a building with white plastic sacks of flour stacked high and asked the workers if we could come inside. They were eating lunch and hurriedly cleared space for us on the thin mattresses they were using as chairs. We ate pita with labane and spicy tomato salad with them. Two of the workers were Rahat residents; two others were from the southern West Bank and get permits every three months to enter Israel.



Then the factory manager Farid agreed to give us the flour tour. He processes white flour, which Jewish Israelis like, and "baladi" flour, which is coarser and which Bedouins use. As we spoke, he turned the machines on and we watched as they shuddered and churned out fluffy white powder. He said he lives in an unrecognized Bedouin village, and that his 12 children are so well behaved that they make less noise than two Jewish ones. He said he has built a house without a permit that may be demolished, but that he doesn't want to move out of his village. One of his daughters, in eleventh grade, is in a med school preparatory program.


We had seen enough of industrial Rahat and headed toward town to get some sweets and coffee. We rode through one of the main thoroughfare to the central market, which for the most part was closed with a few stores selling cheap-looking trinkets. A shady character lurked around us for a while, giving us "a tour" of the closed shopping avenues until we shook him off by jumping into a pastry shop, Nazareth Sweets.

Since it was empty, the owner, Eid, 28, and his two workers, both named Mohammad, let us go into the kitchen and watch the baking. At Nazereth, the kenafe was made by squirting a line of cheese down a strip of dough made of hair-thin threads, then tightly rolling the dough around the cheese on the diagonal to make a long rope. Here's Mohammad:

We asked to roll knafe ourselves, and Eid snapped photos while we each rolled a rope out, to the amusement of the people who actually knew what they were doing.

Eid said the store fills up completely toward the weekend. He is from Nazareth; he said the shop is a chain with 60 outlets across Israel, mostly in Arab towns. We asked him about the mosques in Rahat. He said they were only open to men, which made me lose some interest in visiting one.

At this point it was about 4 and dusk was coming. We unlocked our bikes and the shady tour operator from earlier half heartedly tried to get us to pay him 20 shekels for watching them. Good thing we didn't pay up, because my bike basket took a beating under his care and the seat was at a funny angle.

As we rode away from Rahat, we passed a scrap yard with cars piled incomprehensibly high one atop the other. The road had a very narrow shoulder and cars were whizzing by, so we rode along a dirt track parallel to it. Unfortunately, this is an informal dump and strange smells accompanied even stranger sights - dead chickens, the corpse of a cat, animal legs torn from their bodies. We hurried along, eventually reaching the main highway, exhausted, and from there the bus back to Beer Sheva.

Fencing in Rahme

The nice thing about Beer Sheva is it's a great place to start trips to places in the South of Israel. As a bonus, these places are in worse condition than Beer Sheva, and so it's heartening to return home.

On Saturday, I went to Rahme, a Bedouin community in the Negev, to help build a fence around a new kindergarten. The main organization involved was the Forum for Coexistence in the Negev, which tries to get Jews and Arabs in the region involved in projects together to build cooperation and trust.

Rahme, pop. 1,200, is near Yeruham, a Jewish town of 9,400. The two names in Hebrew look alike and the Bedouins say the Jews who came in 1951 incorporated the Arabic name into the Hebrew one. They share the R, H, and M and so sound quite similar.

Bedouins are former nomads who have settled into mostly sedentary communities in Israel. However, the nature of where they settle is a thorny issue. Just over half of the 160,000 Bedouins live in seven government-recognized townships, where they get basic services like water and electricity and can plan and build. However, the remainder live in 45 unrecognized villages, which don't get any of these services. Although Bedouins comprise 25% of the Negev's people, they occupy 2% of the land, and Israeli policy points to a desire to keep things that way. To that end, unrecognized village residents have difficulty getting permits to build permanent houses or other structures. If they build without permits, the IDF can destroy their homes. Rahma is an unrecognized village.

Chaya, a middle-aged woman who is one of the main organizers of the Forum drove me, along with a Bedouin university student named Ibrahim, and another middle-aged Israeli woman. We did not go into the residential part of Rahme, which from a distance was a collection of corrugated tin houses. Instead, we pulled off the two-lane road ribboning through the nearly empty desert and took a gravelly track up to a modest white building, built with corrugated metal sides and roofing that loudly rippled in the wind. The school was quite a distance from any homes. Apparently this is the second time the school has been built. The first time, when it was built more centrally, the IDF knocked it down because it was not built with any permits.

Our task was to plant stakes in the ground, wrap wire around them, and then tie metal fencing onto the stakes and wires to make a fence for the school kids. It took us about a half hour to get started because only one person knew what he was doing, as he had recently built a cage for chickens in his backyard.


The rest of us bumbled along, sharing about ten pairs of pliers among the 20 of us. At any given time, there was a handful of earnest volunteers kneeling near the fence and wrapping wires. The rest were wandering off, chatting with each other, snapping photos on digital SLRs, or lurking inside the school waiting for food. Full disclosure: I took all the pictures here while wandering around with a Canon Rebel XtI. Toward the end, some of the Bedouin kids from Rahme came and started helping. They were embarrassingly faster than all of us with the pliers and wire.


Eventually, the fence was up if a bit overstretched in some points and saggy in others. We went inside the school, where the Rahme residents brought over trays heaped with yellow rice and chicken, covered in thin, warm pita bread.


While we ate, we heard from some of the leaders of the community about their issues. The speeches were sad. One man in his 50s, in a long robe and a colorful headscarf, said that even though he had served in the Israeli army, his Jewish friends didn't want to keep in touch after his service was over. Another said that the government was confiscating his land and asked us to come to his court hearing in Beer Sheva two days hence (i.e., today). Another said the kids of Rahme often don't go to school because the closest one is 25 kilometers away.

On the drive back home, the people I rode with commented on badly the State of Israel has bungled its relationship with the Bedouin. These Israeli citizens are so willing to be a part of the state that they voluntarily join the IDF. And yet, Israel has found no real solution for as many as half the Negev Bedouin that will give them a secure and dignified place to live in the land they have been in for centuries.

NYTimes takes on food

Hats (and heads) off to the New York Times for publishing an excellent Jewish food photo: Meet Andy Kastner, 28, who was dismayed that contemporary rabbinical training doesn't include lessons on how to slaughter animals for kosher consumption, as it once did before Jewish mass-meat-production made local butchers unnecessary. Mr. Kastner goes to a live animal market in Yonkers, chooses a chicken, whispers a blessing in its ear and slits its throat. Talk about a kosher beefcake.

This week's Times magazine is all about food - beginning with Michael Pollan's letter to the future president, also known as Farmer in Chief (we need to solarize our food, he says, instead of eating oil). Other choice pieces are on a San Diego restaurant where no tipping is allowed, on the Vietnamese catfish industry and on a cantankerous restaurateur who kicks customers out of his 20-person eatery if they criticize the food, take cell phone calls or waffle indecisively over his 900-item menu, including 300 varieties of pancakes. It's a feast for the senses, and one of my favorite magazine issues of all time.

However, when I finished the magazine I wandered into a bookshop where one of the newest arrivals was on the meat industry. I began to think about the serious glut of food articles, books, magazines, television shows, and any other kind of media expression of our obsession with dinner. While this is good on the one hand, because our heavily sprayed, high-oil food system is broken and needs help, I worry that saturating every media outlet may cause a public fatigue and we won't have the patience to contemplate yet another craven animal feedlot. And more importantly, my potential readership may grow sick of reading the awful stories behind their shopping carts.

Ironically, the majority of food crisis writers call into question our American propensity to overconsume - we eat too much meat, too much corn syrup, too many imports and too much period. Yet the only way we can process this information is by eating too much news.

Tamra, Land of Amazing Dairy

Last week I bought a liter of yogurt that really blew my mind. It was a little sour, but not overwhelmingly so. It had a great consistency - not too thin or thick. It comes in a large jug. Since a lot of food here comes with the phone number of who made it, I called up the Rajab dairy and asked to come on a tour of the factory. So at 9 AM on Friday I got off the bus at the entrance to Tamra, a Muslim town of 26,000 about 20 minutes away from the city of Akko in the north of Israel.


The factory is a bright teal building topped by a massive white sign in Arabic and Hebrew at the entrance to Tamra. The factory floor is downstairs, where workers in blue suits and white rubber boots take milk and turn it into yogurt, labane and cheese. In one area of the factory, giant yellow bags hung, dripping whey onto the floor as labane hardened inside. In another, a machine spun plastic sheeting into little bags to hold the labane, which is a white spread between cream cheese and yogurt.

Labane in large cloth sacks, which are washed and reused.

Eyal Hen, a truck driver, showing the scale of the bags.

Labane goes into bags on the factory floor; the workers spend a lot of time horsing around.

Rajab is owned by seven brothers who inherited the plant from their father, Mustafa Abu Rumi. The dairy was founded around 50 years ago, and grew from a local outfit into a national brand. Rajab is the largest dairy run by Palestinian-Israelis, and it's also one of the biggest businesses run by Palestinian-Israelis, according to Hashem Abu Rumi, one of the dairy's owners.


Umaima, the wife of Mahmoud Abu Rumi (another brother/owner), makes lunch for the workers each day. They plowed into hummus, ful, cheese, pitas and vegetables.

Mahmoud holding the labane and brinza he gave me as a sample to take home.

Mahmoud and Umaima fight over whether she should be in the picture or not at the factory's entrance.


Like the factory, the town of Tamra is also warm and friendly.


I walked around for an hour before going to Rajab and asked a family if I could photograph them drinking coffee. "Come and join us!" they insisted, and poured me Turkish coffee, then brought out zaatar-covered pita and olives. Here are Ahmed and Musa. Ahmed's mother declined to be photographed.

The buildings are different colors like blue, pink and orange.

Tractors drive through the streets in the morning.

These are blankets printed with the face of Fulla, the Islamic barbie doll.

And Tamra, just like most Israeli cities, has cats digging in its trash cans.