Telling and Surprisingly Fair Guardian Report on Gazan Workers in Israel

The Guardian have published a report on Gazans increasingly being allowed to work in Israel.

It starts in a way you might expect from The Guardian, describing the Erez Crossing in ominous fashion. But it then manages to surprise, acknowledging some inconvenient (to the haters) truths - such as the security purpose for such a crossing, as well as the fact Israel no longer occupies Gaza.

There’s nothing quite like the Erez crossing, the only civilian route between Israel and the blockaded Gaza Strip, anywhere else in the world. The Israeli side looks like an airport terminal, but is in fact a fortress: surveillance balloons and motion sensors monitor above and below the sea and land that make up Gaza’s de facto borders, while semi-autonomous robots, equipped with machine guns, patrol the buffer zone.

Inside, Israeli border and military personnel use offices connected by walkways high above the ground to minimise the risk of attack. Single-person turnstiles, mazes of movable walls and caged walkways eventually lead to Palestinian territory.

Built in the 2000s at a cost of $60m (£50m), Erez was designed to facilitate about 45,000 Palestinians a day who used to leave the strip to go to work in Israel, but the militant group Hamas took over just four months after it was finished, leading the Israelis – who occupied Gaza from 1967 to 2005 before withdrawing their forces – to seal the frontier. For the most part, the crossing has been eerily empty for the past 15 years. An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza has never left the tiny 41km by 12km area, or ever met a single Israeli.

And it gets better, as one of the Gazan workers describes how he finds working in Israel.

A day in the life of 35-year-old factory worker Nasser – not his real name – is a window into a newly emerging reality in Israel and the Palestinian territories today – one in which a seemingly endless occupation has created a bizarre socio-economic hierarchy.

I have a degree and I work as an accountant in Gaza but like many people here I have debts from starting a business that failed; my vendors couldn’t get goods to me on time because of the blockade. It’s hard manual work in Israel, but I’m happy to do it because the money is great. I hope I will be clear of the debt in about a year. Maybe my permit will only be for six months, but it will still make a huge difference to me and my family.

I never left Gaza before this. The main thing that I wasn’t expecting is how beautiful Israel is. It’s breathtaking.

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Right now I’m working in the packaging department of a food factory on the night shift, which starts at 6pm. It’s pretty organised and I don’t have to worry about not getting paid at the end of the day; they’ve been good like that. One of the managers I am quite friendly with. He said he didn’t know that people from Gaza were not all terrorists.

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It’s difficult to describe my experiences in Israel to my family, it’s like another planet to them. I wish I could bring my wife and kids and my mother to see the clean sea in Jaffa or the Old City in Jerusalem. Maybe one day.

Note how Nasser calls it Israel and not "Palestine." It also sounds like he would agree Israel is anything but an "apartheid" state - which makes him more honest than most.

Hat tip: Michal