Good piece on surfing in Gaza in The National, by Brian Calvert. Surfing enthusiasts have managed to get 20 surfboards to Israel to go into Gaza. But they’re in a warehouse, blockaded. And Calvert couldn’t get in to cover the surfing movement:
I planned to meet [American foreign service officer Norm Olsen and his son, Matt, a surfer] on the other side of the blockade. But the plan did not get far. It was a quiet day in Jerusalem’s Government Press Office, a dingy, cluttered building near the Old City, when I arrived, assignment letter in hand, ready to go to Gaza. According to the office’s website, I needed a special press card to get past the blockade; such a card would be granted to any foreign journalist from “a recognised news organisation” who was covering “real time news (see criteria)”.
Within minutes, I’d filled out my application, handed over my passport-sized mugshots to a stern-faced, light-eyed liaison for foreign journalists and was leaning back in a chair waiting for her to return with a laminated pass. Instead, she came back with my letter, reading it carefully, frowning.
“This is a problem,” she said. “It’s not news.”
That I had come to write about surfers and not, say, the visit of the Pope, or the prime minister standing up for the first time on a surfboard, precluded me from getting a press card. No press card, no Gaza. I tried to explain that a massive story about surfers would inevitably unearth a lot of news, that I was to meet sources on the other side, that I had travelled all this way to do it, to no avail.
“This office does not exist to get you a pass to Gaza,” the woman said finally. Then she took a phone call and politely ignored me…
By then, it was becoming clear that the boards were not going to get through either. At first Olsen had been told by the Israelis that surfboards in the hands of Gazans posed a security risk: terrorists, he was told, might use the boards to cast themselves into the night-time seas and infiltrate the coast. After debunking that idea, Olsen was told, simply, that virtually nothing was going in or out of Gaza until Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel.
Shalit is a 23-year-old soldier kidnapped by militants in June 2006, whose abduction was a precursor to the war and whose return has become a condition for the lifting of the Israeli embargo. Only “essential” items could pass through. (Shampoo, yes. Shampoo with conditioner, no). And by Israeli standards, surfboards were decidedly non-essential.
And yet from his vantage inside Gaza, Olsen realised that the blockade had been more or less circumvented by the tunnels from Egypt. You could order virtually anything through the tunnels, provided it wasn’t too big. (It was still hard, for example, to supply major rebuilding efforts.) Olsen had met a man in Gaza whose father needed surgery in Egypt but couldn’t get the proper papers to leave. The family found a package deal; the cost of the surgery plus transportation from Gaza City, through the tunnel to Rafah, to the surgeon, and back, ran them $3,000.
“This is the ridiculous thing about the siege,” Olsen wrote me in one of his daily e-mails from Gaza, an arrangement we made when we learnt I wouldn’t be able to join him and the surfers. Hamas, he said, “is making huge amounts of money from taxing the tunnels.”
“If I had shipped the surfboards to Egypt instead of Israel and brought them in through the tunnels,” Olsen wrote, “I would have them by now.”
