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The disengagement tragedy no one is talking about

19 years ago
32 Comments
by Laya Millman
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Lettuce is good

At the risk of sounding petty, ever since they first announced disengagement I’ve been dreading the day the lettuce finally dries up.

The main industry in Gush Katif has been in agriculture. Alei Katif in in the Gaza settlement of Kfar Darom started selling the worlds first guaranteed bug free vegetables several years back, and now I’m freaking out that it’s all gonna end. Grown in hermetically sealed greenhouses, it’s the best, crunchiest lettuce anywhere in Israel, available at the shuk for just under a dollar a head.

Why does no one else seem concerned about this? Can someone please tell me that they will start growing it in the Negev or something? This is seriously going to affect me and the rest of the salad eating community. Won’t someone please think of the children lettuce???

Laya Millman
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32 Comments

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  • Layoosh– You know my love for greens. It really is a big concern. After being on an organic farm for the past few weeks, I have been contemplating how i am going to steer away from the beautiful yet deceiving fruits and veggies of the shuk and try to find organic. If anybody know of an organic farm in Israel (around the Jerusalem or Tel Aviv Area) let me know–I need good greens! Laya-great post -I want to print the yehudi lo megaresh hasa banner

  • yeah. I have some friends in Ramat Raziel, who say they would love to support Gush Katif, but just can’t use the hyper treated hydro vegetables.
    80% of OG veggie in Israel are grown in Gush Katif? Are you sure you don’t mean, in Gush Etzion? As far as I know, Gush Katif generally refused to grow organic stuff, they felt the people didn’t want it.

  • Judi,
    I had that problem once and enquired further. The issue of bug free is not directly relate to [larger] bugs that might get in afterwards, but rather the prevention of the tiny worms and larvae that are a given with ‘regular’ lettuce.

    While ‘regular’ lettuce needs to be soaked in a salt and vinegar mix for a certain amount of time (to kill the small and tiny bugs) and then washed and scrubbed thoroughly (to rinse them off), the Gush Katif lettuce needs only to be rinsed well to get off anything that might have gotten on afterwards and the sand too. It still strikes me as incredible that they managed to grwo anything in sand.

  • Well, the history of agriculture has been in some way a long process of the removal of nature. Cultivation of crops is not natural in itself – it is taking wild crops and altering them by planting them in an orderly fashion and also breeding them in order for them to produce more useful yields. It’s nothing new. So as long as we’ve already been breaking with the natural way for the last 10000 years, why not get rid of those crunchy little aphids while we’re at it?

  • Does anyone else out there think it’s a little strange that the pinacle of agricultural progress is the eradication of nature from the process?

    One Pesach, I had bug-free lettuce from Israel. Oddly enough, it was full of bugs…

  • I already feeling the loss of my lettuse.

    My regular supermarket stopped carrying the Gush Katif bug-free lettuce, parsley, challots, celery and replaced it with some other stuff that comes prewrapped in bags to give the same image of bug-free, but not the same thing.

    Shabbat shalom

  • laya and others in Israel – if you’ve been reading the inside pages of the papers, you will know that there will also be NO reduction in the army presence in the area – that is partly what Condi was going on about during her visit.

    They will still have to patrol the Egyptian border, still have to go on tunnel-busting raids, still have to go on raids in response to mortar and missile launches.

    This is the dirty “secret” of the expulsion – the ONLY change is the removal of the settlers. I put “secret” in quotes because the non-politicized echelons of the army have repeatedly issued communiques that say this, but they have been buried by the media.

    A few weeks ago, Ha’aretz published a most revealing editorial. It cited statistics that indicate that by 2010, most Israeli schoolchildren will be religious – and called this “the REAL demographic threat”. The editorial went on to say that the motivation for the expulsion was primarily to undercut the people’s connection with any Biblical/religious aspects of the land of Israel.

    In other words, the Left is trying once again to impose its “ultra-secular” vision of the “New Jew”, 30 years after it lost its stranglehold on power. The ENTIRE purpose of the expulsion is to mortally wound the Religious Zionist movement, whose ideology – and material success – are the greatest challenge to the secularist vision.

    It’s not about lettuce – OR security.

  • Of course, but the issue is, for the PA to be a serious group, what I’m saying is, for those who support this move, they are not getting any assurance of what they want, which is a situation
    that exists w/ Jordan and Egypt. THis is what they would want to happen. I am not saying that the Egyptian peace is so great, but it has not been bad for close to 30 years now, no major wars. Smuggling there is.
    Those who would give up the land should be getting something for it. Not just the piece of paper, but a piece of paper that means something.
    I would have preferred for a US military buffer in there but they are too bogged down inthat stupid Iraq war.
    Peace,
    Jobber

  • Jobber, my 5-year old cousins doodlings carry more validity then any piece of paper from the PA

  • I, too, have been, lulei demistafina, secretly concerned about the lettuce.

    However, in light of the life-and-death nature of this disengagement question, I thought it would be a petty thing to be concerned about.

  • The British did all right enforcing the Balfour one. They let the Jews create a formal defense force, though they impeded its effectiveness. They allowed a Jewish council to help administer the country, allowed the Jews to build hundreds of miles of roads and some rails, and they allowed a significant number of Jewish immigrants at the strenuous objections by the Arabs. All this, when the British Army and most of the mid-level politicians were unambiguously stating that they should leave Palestine, that is would be a drain on the Empire, which it eventually became.

    Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what happens to the price of food (up, but how high?) when all those greenhouses are dismantled.

  • But Jobber, we already have a piece of paper from the PA saying they will prevent suicide bombers. Several of them, in fact. The problem is not in the pieces of paper, it’s in the enforcement.

    We should learn from the British. They always enforced their pieces of paper when it came to the Jews! Except that Balfour one, but everyone makes mistakes.

  • 70 % of organic produce used in Israel is grown in GK. The Disengement Manager was trying to set up alternative farms in the Negev for the farmers.

    The major problem I have is that Israel is getting nothing in return from the PA. Not even a piece of paper that says, we will prevent suicide bombers.

  • Screw the Lettuce!!! Thats the least of our troubles, how about the victory going to the enemy! How about the plans the enemy has for the land!!! How about the new acts of terror waiting to be excuted from their new staging grounds, I shudder to think…..

  • No one cares? The Jerusalem Report had a cover story about the loss of the greenhouses and their bug-less delights last month.

  • g-d bless hippies 🙂 This is exactly the kind of thing i’d be sweating too, had i the ability to make aliyah. If you ever move back to the states, you really ought to check out Oregon, you’d love it.