Wael Al Saad, joins Murad Alkhufash as partner of Marda Permaculture Farm. In this interview he talks about his experience as Palestinian permaculturalist and the vision and practice of a Global Green Palestine. Lastly he gives a call-out for project supporters and volunteers. Wael and Murad make a great leadership team for this West Bank Palestine permaculture project
Marda are currently planning a Permaculture Design Course for March of 2010 which will include a 3 day immersion course in Arabic, regional culinary courses, and historic tours of Marda region.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is a sustainable development NGO in the village of Marda in the West Bank of Palestine. The Farm is also recognized as a branch of the Global Village Institute, an international NGO based in Summertown, Tennessee.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is a working farm and a demonstration site for permaculture principles, techniques and strategies. Permaculture is an ecological design system that draws heavily from indigenous, local wisdom as well as cutting edge science to help individuals and communities maximize local resources toward sustainable production, generation, and recycling of food, water, energy, housing, and other resources.
We are looking forward to develop the farm to be a cell of a holistic green bottom up green economic body, using economy as vehicle for change and as social-ecological medium to connect Palestinians with each other and their environment.
The Marda Farm was founded in the fall of 2006 by permaculturist Murad Alkhufash, whose family has farmed the region for over ten generations. The project seeks to promote ecological, cultural, and economic resiliency in the region by developing a small scale permaculture site that serves as a model and teaching center for local farmers and international permaculture students. Farm staff will also facilitate permaculture design courses in diverse communities across Palestine.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is supported by a rich network of international and local sustainability visionaries and partners including Geoff Lawton, Director of the Australia Permaculture Institute, Albert Bates, Director of the Global Village Institute in the U.S., Starhawk, Jesse and Tanya Lemieux of Pacific Permaculture in Vancouver, Canada, Julie Firth of Drylands Permaculture Farm in Australia and many others.
Unforgettable account of the actuality of parts of daily life for the Palestinians with the Israeli occupation and apartheid. Ethan, a grandson of a Holocaust survivor, describes in detail from his own experience and facts about what is going on in Israel/Palestine.
October 8, 2009 — I have finally made my YouTube debut! As part of Just Peace Mideast’s series of films called “Americans Speak Out About the Middle East,” I speak for 14 minutes about the raw and ugly reality of the Israeli government’s repressive, murderous policies against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s impossible to capture the whole nightmare of what millions of Palestinians have been experiencing on a daily basis for decades in just 14 minutes, but this film does a very solid job of breaking down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into clear and simple terms for the education of ordinary Americans. As the producer describes, “Unforgettable account of the actuality of parts of daily life for the Palestinians with the Israeli occupation and apartheid. Ethan, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, describes in detail from his own experience and facts about what is going on in Israel/Palestine
Video: Murad al Khofash and traditional farmer colleague interviewed at Klimaforum09, Permaculture.TV
The Palestinian farmer who grows his own resistance
Mr al Khofash, dubbed the “Palestinian with a green thumb”, is picking up on a permaculture project that began in Marda in 1993 but was shut down by the Israeli army at the onset of the second intifada in 2000. The Sustainable Development Centre, in Marda, was initiated by Australian permaculturists and involved dozens of villages in the Salfit district. It ran training courses in water management, composting and other aspects of organic, sustainable farming that were attended by thousands of Palestinians, but was a target of nearby settlers who would burn trees and vandalise farm property before the Israeli military closed the centre completely in 2000. Now, locals say, the military use the building to question Palestinians that they have detained in the area.
The farm begun by Mr al Khofash in 2003 utilises all the skills he learnt while working a four-year stint at the centre, and during a remote-study permaculture course. The farm, which is a member of the UK Permaculture Association and the Global Ecovillage Network, is a blooming tract of land, on which everything is sown with careful consideration to the principles of permaculture.
Mr al Khofash is energised with enthusiasm and ideas as he bustles around the robust-looking farm, pointing out patches of aubergine, chilli, potatoes, beans and onions. Demand routinely exceeds supply for his vegetables.
“The methods we use in permaculture are some of the same methods of traditional Palestinian farming,” said Mr al Khofash.
With Marda as the Model: Be the Change for a Global Green Palestine
At Marda, we are calling for social equity, social justice, democracy, freedom, putting expectations on top-down change in politics, rather than down-scaling our expectations on building reality in our communities. Like in most societies, our mental efforts are spent on materialistic fights and crises, making money by poor value trading, and saving money through buying which ruins honest social relationships. Our lives are filled with commerce for profits rather than sharing and cooperation.
For many reasons the masses are not focusing on change and remain trapped in the old mould: reproducing miserable life conditions. Is there any way out? Which is the most effective vehicle of change?
My conclusion is that we should start a new large-scale initiative within the field of gathering energy masses to spend their daily efforts within a new economy. Everyone has or needs a job. Palestinians helped building their own separation wall from Israel, and the nearby Jewish settlements, because they needed jobs. Thousands of Palestinians from rural areas, especially from Jenin spent cold nights in bad conditions in Ramallah constructing Palestinian National Authority leaders’ trade towers, and also over in Israel as cheap workers. Thousands have immigrated out of the region to find jobs.
Livelihood is the main agenda of the majority of people here. It’s not resistance and it’s not politics. The need for money has replaced the human need for each other and for their eco-system. It looks as though there is nothing no better choice, neither for the elite nor for the masses, but a systemic change and the development of new radical alternatives.
The Marda Permaculture Farm (MPF) is a sustainable development NGO in the village of Marda in the West Bank of Palestine. The Farm initiated in 2006, is also recognized as a branch of the Global Village Institute, an international NGO based in Summertown, Tennessee, in the fall of 2008.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is a working farm and a demonstration site for permaculture principles, techniques and strategies.
Permaculture is an ecological design system that draws heavily from indigenous, local wisdom as well as cutting edge science to help individuals and communities maximize local resources toward sustainable production, generation, and recycling of food, water, energy, housing, and other resources.
The Marda Farm was founded by permaculturist Murad Alkhufash, whose family has farmed the region for over ten generations. The project seeks to promote ecological, cultural, and economic resiliency in the region by developing a small scale permaculture site that serves as a model and teaching center for local farmers and international permaculture students. Farm staff will also facilitate permaculture design courses in diverse communities across Palestine.
The Marda Permaculture Farm is supported by a rich network of international and local sustainability visionaries and partners including Geoff Lawton, Director of the Australia Permaculture Institute, Albert Bates, Director of the Global Village Institute in the U.S., Starhawk, Jesse and Tanya Lemieux of Pacific Permaculture in Vancouver, Canada, Julie Firth of Drylands Permaculture Farm in Australia and many others.
We are currently planning a Permaculture Design Course for March of 2010 which will include a 3 day immersion course in Arabic, regional culinary courses, and historic tours of Marda.
Recently Wael Al Saad joined MPF-team. With his visionary concept about Global Green Palestine, he is helping to develop the Marda Farm into a model for an alternative holistic green bottom-up economy
Murad al-Khufash spent four years working on that first project in Marda. When efforts to re-open the Centre foundered on a lack of funds and the threats of the on-going Israeli occupation, he decided to use his family’s land to create a demonstration farm, continuing the work of trialing and adapting permaculture techniques for the West Bank’s environment.
Permaculture, a movement which built on organic principles to develop a whole range of techniques for living self-sufficiently and with minimal impact on the environment, is more often associated with Westerners seeking alternative lifestyles. But, says al-Khufash, it has direct political relevance in the Israeli occupied West Bank.
“I like to help my people by teaching them the idea of growing their own food and to be independent in their markets and food” he says, “because if every farmer or Palestinian started to grow their own food we will be independent from the Israeli market.”
Murad al-Khufash hopes that his new project will grow, creating jobs in the local area and allowing Palestinians from Marda and the wider area to stay at home with their families, rather than having to work overseas as he did for five years. But the savings he accumulated by working in the United States have almost run out, and he has had to make some tough choices about the project’s future.
Resilience
At five in the morning on 8 November 2000, Israeli troops invaded the Sustainable Development Centre in the West Bank village of Marda, tearing doors off their hinges and smashing windows. They destroyed seven years of work on the permaculture project. During the two-and-a-half hour rampage, the plant nursery, seed bank, agricultural equipment, computers and files were all wrecked.
The Centre had been established in 1993 to explore ways in which permaculture’s principles of self-sufficiency could help Palestinian farmers whose lands were being confiscated and polluted by settlements like Ariel, which overshadows Marda village.
With the help of funding from Europe, the US and Australia, the Centre had managed to store and grow over 300 native plant varieties and had on its two-hectare site run courses for agricultural engineers from across the Middle East on permaculture techniques such as composting, irrigation, grey water recycling and using organic pesticides. It also offered local women training in computer and English-language skills.
The only danger that the Marda Sustainable Development Centre posed was the “threat of a good example” to Israeli military control over civil society in the West Bank. At the time of the November 2000 attack, a spokesperson for APHEDA, one of the Australian non-governmental organizations which supported the Centre, called the Israeli army’s actions “a senseless attempt to destroy the morale of the community and another example of the unnecessary force being used by the Israeli military.”
Sarah Irving is a freelance writer from Manchester, UK. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the West Bank in 2001-2 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-6. She now writes full-time on a range of issues, including Palestine.
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