Support the Cause. Spread the Stoke
Riding the sea at Gaza
•Last Updated: August 28. 2009 6:43PM UAE / August 28. 2009 2:43PM GMT
Arthur Rashkovan talks with young Arab-Israeli surfers at a surf session and bonfired sponsored by Surfers 4 Peace at Jaffa Beach in Tel Aviv. Bryan Derballa for The National
Surfing has spread across the globe but foundered on one war-torn coast. Brian Calvert on the struggle to launch a surf club behind the Israeli blockade.
It took Mahmoud El Reyashi nearly a year to get it right. At first he just imitated the surfers he’d seen on television. The swells would roll in from the deceptively powerful Mediterranean toward the shore, where they would break sometimes into decent waves, and in the beginning, he couldn’t get anywhere on the beat-up boards he used. There were other surfers to watch in the water, guys who’d bought a couple boards from a second-hand shop in Israel in the mid-90s, and they taught him things. He practiced. First he could only stand for two metres, then five, then ten. But on one summer day in 2005, when the sea was good, he stood up and he stayed up. He was 16 years old, and after he’d ridden the wave to shore, he dashed home, to a three-storey building 100 metres from the beach in jam-packed Gaza City.
“Come and look,” he cried to any of the 29 family members in the house who might hear him. “I can make it. I can do it.”
Most of them followed him back, uncles and brothers running video cameras, snapping photos. He paddled out again, stood up, rode another. He saw people standing on the beach watching him. He felt like a hero, like a star. It was one of the best days of his life.
As 20th century memes go, surfing is an undeniable success story; the sport keeps turning up in the unlikeliest of places. Among serious surfers, competition for waves exerts a steady outward pressure on the sport, driving its practitioners farther and farther afield in search of new breaks. At the same time, because surfboards are ungainly things, surfers sometimes leave them behind where they’ve traveled. And so, bit by bit, shorelines around the globe have been pollinated, so to speak. The sport has become so widespread that the most intrepid surfers, pushing into the far corners of the globe – the atolls of Micronesia, the shores of Africa, the tsunami-wracked coast of Sri Lanka – can’t find an empty beach.
Gaza is, among other things, a natural place to surf. Waves that build across 3,000 miles of the Mediterranean break on its beaches with surprising frequency and occasional intensity. But of course, Gaza is also the crowded home of 1.5 million refugees and descendants of refugees, isolated under an Israeli blockade and reeling from bombardment. If it weren’t for that grisly reality, outside surfers might find their way there. As it is, the handful of locals who ply Gaza’s beaches do so on a diminishing supply of ragged surfboards.
But there’s another reason why surfing has been so successful at propagating itself, and it has less to do with competition than with its opposite. Surfing is not just the solitary act of standing on a hollowed-out plank on the face of a breaking wave; the culture of the sport breeds an intense solidarity. Almost as soon as word got out that there were surfers in Gaza, help was on the way.
Matthew Olsen was nine years old when the first intifada broke out in 1987. He was watching the TV news at home in Washington, DC. The uprising had begun in northern Gaza, then spread through the rest of the Palestinian territories – places Olsen knew nothing about. On television, he watched young Palestinians throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, saw snippets of gunfights, tanks and violence.
“Dad,” he asked finally, “who are the good guys?”
His father, Norman, a foreign service officer for the US State Department and a cold-water surfer, answered: “It depends on who you ask.”
The exchange stuck with the boy, and he remembered it years later, when he found himself attending an international high school in Tel Aviv, where his father was posted with the embassy. All told, Olsen spent four years in Israel, while his father, a political officer assigned to the Gaza Strip, made more than 400 runs in and out, always reporting back to his family stories of life inside the occupied territory.
“He certainly seemed to me to be more interested in the environment around him than the other kids at the American School,” Norm Olsen told me recently. “He always wanted to know what I was doing in Gaza, how it worked. He had this interest in the conflict.”
The other interest Olsen took from his father was surfing, which he’d picked up when the family lived in the Marshall Islands. Then he continued in the surfing circles of suburban Tel Aviv.
Like other enduring cultural institutions, surfing is often passed down from fathers to sons; but it has made its greatest leaps across the globe via more fleeting encounters. US servicemen brought their boards and a fashion for surfing to Japan after the Second World War. The crew of Apocalypse Now introduced surfing to the Philippines when they left behind their boards after filming the iconic “napalm-in-the-morning” surf scene.
Similarly, the surfing culture that Matthew Olsen found as a teenager in Israel traces its origins to a single moment – and a single man. In 1956, a Jewish surfer from California named Dorian Paskowitz travelled to the Middle East, having turned away from a life as a successful doctor. “Doc” Paskowitz brought several boards with him and spent a golden year in Israel, where he tried to join the army. When he was refused, he went to a beach outside Tel Aviv, rode some waves, amazed the local lifeguards and left his boards behind. Now Israel has 20,000 surfers in a $60-million industry that includes board manufacturing and shaping, surf camps and international competitions. Hardly a decent wave on Israel’s western shore goes unridden, as riders jostle for position, line up and drop in on breaks from Jaffa to Haifa.
Surfing’s progress into the Gaza Strip was more halting. The sport came to the locals via a handful of used boards a couple of Gazans bought in Israeli second-hand shops in the mid-1990s. Before that, it seems, the only people hitting the surf were Israeli settlers, and they kept the best beaches and breaks to themselves. The sport didn’t exactly take off, but enough Gazans surfed to keep it going, even if most of the boards they could find soon broke. (Surfing is hard on boards, which dent and ding, tearing rifts in the fibreglass-resin casing and letting water seep into the foam cores).
Eventually, the guys were riding the waves on giant windsurf boards with the masts removed. By the time El Reyashi learnt to ride a wave to shore, the scene was barely hanging on.
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Gazan surfers have retrofitted broken surfboards and even used windsurf boards without their masts. Alexander Klein for The National
Then in July 2007, Doc Paskowitz – still surfing at the ripe age of 87 – read a story in the Los Angeles Times about surfers in Gaza. “Unlike their California counterparts, the surfers of Gaza don’t have access to high-end gear or glossy magazines,” the article said. “There are no surf shops, schools or competitions. Beach Boys songs are never played on the radio. And there’s no Arabic equivalent of ‘dude.’ Because surfboards are difficult to come by and most of the surfers can’t afford them anyway, they rent decrepit, heavy boards for about a dollar an hour.”
Paskowitz read the article as a call to action. At that point, he was well known on the American surf circuit as a health and lifestyle guru who, after his trip to Israel in the ‘50s, had gone on to raise nine surfing children in a succession of cramped motorhomes; they were sometimes referred to as the “first family of surfing”. That August, Paskowitz travelled to Israel, gathered 14 used surfboards, and talked his way across the Erez checkpoint, passing them off to a couple of Gazan surfers in no-man’s land.
To carry off the whole operation, Paskowitz enlisted the help of a young Israeli surfer named Arthur Rashkovan, who in turn started up an organisation called Surfing for Peace, thinking he might get Gazan surfers in the water with Israeli surfers. “In Israel we hear about so many peace initiatives, it kind of gets boring, I have to say,”
Rashkovan, who is 30, told me one morning at his Tel Aviv apartment, where a shag rug and a stack of surfboards in the corner could have put us in southern California.
“They ask me, ‘What do you think, you’re gonna make peace?’ I tell them, ‘No, I just want to meet a few guys and go surf with them; that’s the story.’” Rashkovan made T-shirts quoting Doc Paskowitz: “God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good.”
Word of Rashkovan’s efforts reached another surfer who was, by coincidence, formulating his own plan to help the guys in Gaza. Matthew Olsen, now 29 and living in Washington DC, had been a buddy of Rashkovan’s during high school when both surfed in the same Tel Aviv circles. Lately, Olsen had been mulling the idea of setting up a surf clinic in Gaza. When he saw Rashkovan’s name in the news, Olsen says, “that really got everything jump-started.”
In October 2007 Olsen travelled to Tel Aviv and reunited with Rashkovan. The American spent nearly a year visiting the occupied territory on weekends, laying the groundwork for what he hoped would become the Gaza Surf Club. By the end of his trip, he’d identified and befriended a loyal crew of about 20 Gazan surfers, young and old. Olsen’s idea was simple: bring them some more boards, teach them to care for them, and help them keep the culture going. He didn’t want 1,000 Gazans to surf once and go on to something else. He wanted maybe 20 to stick with the sport, then pass it along to further generations.
But nothing in Palestine is ever simple. Together, working through an organisation called Gaza Surf Relief, Olsen and Rashkovan managed to solicit the donation of about two dozen boards – many of them brand new – from Huntington Beach, California. The boards were shipped to Tel Aviv in early 2008. Olsen and Rashkovan knew they would have to get the boards past the Israeli blockade of Gaza that had been in place since Hamas came to power the previous June. But then things got worse. War broke out.
From December 27, 2008, until January 20, 2009, Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza, leaving over a thousand Palestinians – and 13 Israelis – dead. When Israeli forces withdrew, the government tightened the blockade against the traffic of all non-humanitarian goods into the territory.
In June this year, Olsen and his father travelled to Gaza. The 20-odd surfboards from California were languishing in storage in Tel Aviv, and Matthew was determined to see them across the blockade himself. Norm had retired the year before, leaving him free of government restrictions to meet with whom he wanted. He came along, he said, “because I consider it an embarrassment that the United States government doesn’t have anybody who goes to the Gaza Strip regularly, the home of 1.5 million Palestinians, the seat of the legally elected Hamas government, and the home of a large body of Palestinians who will absolutely play a critical role in determining whether we have a peace process.”
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I planned to meet the two 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.
There was nothing to do. I was not getting past the blockade. And that was not the only part of the plan that was running into trouble.
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.”
Without the boards, Olsen looked for other things he might do to help the surfers. A surf club needed a clubhouse, he thought. While visiting friends in a southern neighbourhood of Gaza City, he walked past the former headquarters of the Internal Security Services, pounded to rubble by Israeli air strikes during the war. A block away was Al Quds Hospital; on the other side of the road were the charred remains of a Red Crescent ambulance, also destroyed by the war. The vehicle was completely gutted but surprisingly clean, he thought; maybe if he took the shell of it, he could turn that into a shaping and repair room for the surfers’ boards. Olsen made a note of it for future visits.
Despite the frustrations of the trip, spending time among the ragtag band of surfers in Gaza only strengthened Olsen’s resolve to help get a club off the ground. “They all live near the beach,” he wrote me one day from Gaza. “They hang out there all day whenever they have the time, and so surfing is just the natural thing to do.”
“In Israel, surfing is all about trying to look like the magazines,” he said. “Here in Gaza, the surfing is in its purest form.”
My minibus climbed out of Jerusalem, past Ammunition Hill and Mt Scopus, beyond the Wall and the checkpoint and into the West Bank, where graffiti paid homage to Yasser Arafat, and someone had painted a larger-than-life militant, masked in kaffiyeh, cocking a blazing red heart in a slingshot toward Israel: “From Palestine, with love.”
After being turned away at the Israeli Press Office, I made landlocked Ramallah my base of operations for a few days. After a while I got used to dealing with the eyebrows that cocked when I said I was in Ramallah to write a story about surfers in Gaza.
One afternoon, I managed a call to three members of the Gaza Surf Club, including El Reyashi. The young man who’d felt like a superstar on his board just a few years before was forced to flee his home as Israeli mounted the war on Gaza last year. (One of El Reyashi’s cousins, Reem, was Gaza’s first female suicide bomber, killing three Israeli soldiers and one security guard at the Eretz checkpoint in January 2004; the family feared reprisal.)
Yousef Abu Ghanem, at 15 years old a young member of the Gaza Surf Club, spent the war in his house.
“We couldn’t leave,” he said when I asked if anyone had dared to surf during the offensive. “It was too dangerous. Israeli boats were deployed all over the beach, you could see the beach full of Israeli gunships. Besides that, they would shoot sometimes.”
The blockade, the surfers said, was taking its toll in ways that went far beyond the lack of surfboards.
Al-Hindi Ashour was 36 years old and worked as a lifeguard on the beach where he and many of the guys surfed; the others in the surf club looked up to him. On the day I spoke with him, he was in a dark mood, having told the family of a young man from a refugee camp their son had drowned; his body had washed up on Ashour’s beach the evening before.
While we spoke, he took another call from the local swimming federation: so far there were no documents allowing him to travel to Rome for the FINA swimming championships. (He’s a distance swimmer, trains in the sea and placed in the Top 10 in a French competition in 1998). Worse still, he couldn’t travel to have an eye condition looked at. He lived with a pain that went from his left eye to left ear; a bubble of swelling showed through the skin.
“It really damages you mentally,” he said of the blockade. “The best thing to do, in order to stop thinking about anything, is to go swimming.” It was the same with surfing, the others said.
“We feel like we’re in prison in this place,” El Reyashi said. “We want to feel freedom like everybody in the world.”
“Surfing is like freedom,” 15-year-old Ghanem said. “When I practice my freedom, I feel like I have broken the siege.”
Given all they were dealing with, I asked, Why didn’t they join Hamas or some other political or militant group?
My interpreter drew in a breath of concern. “That’s a personal question,” he said. “Usually we don’t ask this question, but I will ask it for you.”
He did ask, and I heard laughter cutting through the wind on the phone.
“My faction is the sea,” El Reyashi said, with quick agreement from Ashour. “We don’t believe in anything else.”
Because Olsen and Rashkovan both grew up surfing off the beaches of Tel Aviv, and because the region’s surfing origins lay there, I ended my sojourn in Ramallah and headed toward the coast. People call Tel Aviv the bubble, and its hedonism is famous.
Where in Ramallah and East Jerusalem I’d been awakened in the wee hours of the morning by the calls of the muezzin, here I woke to the shouts of a desperate, drunken youth, in loud, thick English: “Christine! I love you!” During the daytime on the beach, music blasted from vans and cafes, dozens of couples played paddleball in the sand and joggers lumbered by, iPods strapped to biceps. At Chinky Beach, a gaggle of surfers jostled for the smallest of waves, catching them, riding in a few seconds toward shore, then sinking.
One early morning, I went to the Ultrawave surf shop, outside the city. Ultrawave was started by a man named Musa Jarom, who had been hanging around on the beach when Doc Paskowitz came to town in the ‘50s. Along with other lifeguards on the beach, Jarom had learnt to surf on the boards Doc left behind. He was a large man, now 63, getting round in the belly but still broad-shouldered and strong, and he worked in his shop with his son, Perry, who also surfs. (“I’m Musa’s son,” Perry told me. “It’s kind of hard not to be a surfer.”)
Ultrawave had donated a couple of the surfboards that Doc Paskowitz had carried into Gaza in 2007. Also, Olsen hoped to enlist the services of one the shop’s shapers to give a clinic in Gaza on board repair – that is, once there were boards to repair.
Jarom’s shop was in Herzliya, a shop north of Tel Aviv. The shop occupies the second floor of a building, and the walls of the main staircase were crammed with surfing photographs from the 1950s to the present. One photo showed a young Jarom planing a board, shirtless, in a white face mask, in a shop he’d set up next to his lifeguard shack, where he’d worked until starting his own company. Another showed an early surfer, one of Doc’s progeny, bronzed and muscled like an Olympian, standing in pinstriped shorts before a giant white longboard, the Star of David emblazoned on the tip, along with the words “Israel Surf Club.”
Other photographs showed surfers in exotic locales: “Puerto Escondido,” “Sunset Beach, Hawaii,” “Playa Hermosa, Costa Rica.” In the early days of the Israeli surf scene, there were only Doc’s boards, and then, as more surfers travelled, they would beg and borrow and bring back more, Jarom said. It went that way until there were a few hundred surfers; finally Jarom decided to start making his own boards. He travelled to California, where he worked for Gordon Clark, founder of Clark Foam, the industry standard in surfboard blanks (unshaped boards) until a few years ago.
That morning, 45 boys and girls from the Extreme Surfing School in Hadera were scheduled to come in and tour the shop. Before they arrived, Jarom stood in the stairwell to sneak a cigarette before they came. “In Israel, God didn’t give us good waves,” he said wryly, shaking his head and grinning on one side of his mouth. There had been talk once, after World War II, of establishing a Jewish enclave in New Zealand, he said. The surf would have been better there. “It’s an island,” he said, “and the only thing you fight with are the sheep.”
He heard the children coming, marching in a single-file line, and quickly stubbed out his cigarette. He led them into his shop, where Ultrawave boards lined the walls, along with board shorts, T-shirts, leashes, wax and other equipment. They broke the group into two, with Perry explaining the equipment in the showroom, and Musa leading the children through the back of the shop, where three employees cranked out more than a dozen boards a week – producing as many in two weeks as had made it into Gaza over the past couple of years.
The Israeli children shuffled through the shop, grinning, jostling and pointing at the unshaped, unpainted boards on the walls and racks, and the droplets of resin that fell on the floor. A heavy chemical smell wafted through the place. Jarom predicted that maybe 10 per cent of these kids would go on to be lifelong surfers; that was from one school alone.
The tour ended in the stairwell, where some of the boys stared at the photos in awe – at massive barrels, crystalline faces, riders nailing kick-outs and carving bottom-turns. For them it was a plausible future. They might take trips one day to the Maldives or Mexico, Hawaii or Bali.
It was also the kind of future that Olsen saw for the Gaza Surf Club. Never mind that the guys at Gaza’s Sheik Khazdien beach were down to three surfboards from last year’s 9 (the others had been broken by inexperienced kids). Never mind that the boards from California were still sitting in storage in Tel Aviv, and that the Gaza Surf Club was not much closer to taking off than it had been two years earlier. Both Olsen and Rashkovan said they weren’t worried; in time the boards would come, the club would form. Surfing would find a way.
Brian Calvert is a writer based in South East Asia covering military and security affairs. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere.
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Pepperdine University Graphic
Surfer works against hate in Gaza Strip
Ashley Welling
News Assistant
When searching for an end to violence in war-torn nations, most would not assume surfboards could be the answer. But, one Pepperdine alumnus, Seweryn Sztalkoper, sees things a little differently.
“A lot of people look at this idea and wonder, ‘What is the point of what you are doing? How is this going to bring about a peaceful solution,’” he said. “Well, we aren’t trying to solve the problem, we are trying to give these kids another outlet versus some kid putting on a vest and blowing himself up. If they get the same kind of feeling I get when I surf, I know it will be all worth it.”
Since graduating in 2005 and then spending five weeks in the Middle East, Sztalkoper has taken steps to combine his passions, the Middle East and surfing by creating and directing The Gaza Surf Relief, which provides surfboards to those who do not have the means to obtain their own.
“I hung out with a lot of international students when I came to Pepperdine,” Sztalkoper said. “Some of them were from the Middle East, so that really sparked my interest in learning more about what was taking place and the turmoil that they had to face every day.”
Coming to America in 1985 from communist Poland, and returning to visit later after communism fell in 1989, Sztalkoper said he is now aware of the changes a country can make. He said one of his hopes is to see this change within the countries of Israel and Palestine.
Located next to the border of Israel and claimed as a territory of Palestine, the Gaza Strip has become a place of violence and separation. With missile attacks, suicide bombings and parades of tanks being a daily norm on the streets of Gaza, Sztalkoper is searching for a way to bring the citizens some peace.
Sztalkoper said after reading a Los Angeles Times article written in May 2007 by Louise Roeg, he became inspired to make a difference.
“The article said that all the people of Gaza needed to be peaceful with one another was surfboards,” he said. “I read this and then I thought, ‘If that’s all they need, I will give it to them.’”
Shortly after the article was published, Sztalkoper set in motion his idea to create a relief organization.
Cofounder and Artistic Director of the Levantine Cultural Center Jordan Elgrably also read the article and decided to used his own experiences to help Sztalkoper’s relief program.
“I believe that providing surfboards to would-be Palestinian surfers in Gaza is a great outlet,” Elgrably said. “I’ve been working on co-existence projects with the Israelites and Palestinians for over a decade, and this was just a natural progression.”
Soon, he received 25 donated surfboards from local surf-shops and overseas manufacturers. With all the shipping fees totaling $10,000, waived by Dalsey Hillblom and Lynn (DHL), said he felt his plans taking shape.
Soon his relief program joined with two other similar organizations, Surf for Peace and Explore Corps. Director of Explore Corps Matthew Olsen helped Sztalkoper take his ideas to the next level. Because Olsen’s father had been a Consulate for the United States government in the Israeli embassy and his girlfriend also worked there, he had connections.
Coming up with the idea and making it happen, however, were two separate things. Sztalkoper would soon find this out.
In May of 2007, Olson was finally able to get the boards ready to cross the Israeli-Palestinian border into Gaza. However, there was a new issue to face: the relations between an influential Palestinian organization known as Hamas, notorious for suicide bombings and other attacks, and the Israeli government were straining. These tensions resulted in the closing of the border. Only people and basic necessary items could cross.
Olson then decided to take matters, literally, into his own hands. Grabbing hold of two surfboards and placing one under each arm, he crossed the border past the guard tower with armed soldiers and crossed successfully into Gaza.
He was then able to secure a six-month pass to cross the border after his initial crossing. Sztalkoper said it was then that everything seemed to be going their way.
“At this point we thought, ‘Man this is going to easy,’” he said. “The last thing we saw coming was problems within Gaza itself.”
Soon after hearing of their ideas, the Israelite Naval Commander decided to halt their plans. The commander was weary of granting the Gaza citizens access to surfboards because of his fear that they would use them as a method of attack. He was unaware that they already used surfboards on a daily basis. This development, along with new laws for non-profit organizations within the region, dampened the spirits of those looking to reach out.
“It’s just really frustrating, it’s just always one thing after the other” Sztalkoper said. “But, right now we are able to provide at least 15 kids with supplies they can rent and use to surf. I haven’t met them yet, but I hope to.”
With all the turmoil and stress that has come hand-in-hand with this relief effort, Sztalkoper said his only hope is to show these young Palestinians they have options that don’t include violence and that maybe someday, they can reach peace.
Submitted 09-25-2008
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Pepperdine University Press Release
September 10, 2008
Audra Quinn
Writer, Public Relations and News Dept.
Seaver Alumnus Sends Surfboards of Hope to Gaza Strip
Missile attacks. Hamas. Bloodshed. Burning buildings. Terror.
These are the typical images conjured by Americans when they hear the words “Gaza Strip,” the narrow, overcrowded strip of land bordering Israel, governed by militant group Hamas and embroiled in conflict with the Israeli Defense Forces.
Now picture this: Twenty-five miles of postcard-worthy coastline. Silence pierced only by the cries of sea gulls plunging into the foam-capped waves. Surfers paddling out across the glassy waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
This is the Gaza Strip that Seweryn Sztalkoper believes is possible. He has started his own non-partisan movement, Gaza Surf Relief, collecting donations and surfboards to send over to Gaza in an effort to spread peace, or what he believes to be the closest thing to it – a feeling he calls “the stoke.”
“This is all about surfing,” he says. “No politics, no religion, and no hatred.”
Sztalkoper, who goes by “Sev,” got into surfing as a Seaver College senior in Pepperdine University. “I needed one more credit to graduate, and at the same time couldn't let myself leave California without learning how to surf, so for my last class I enrolled in surfing,” he says.
As a competitive swimmer and water polo star growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, Sztalkoper was a natural, and felt a spiritual connection to surfing. “When you're sitting out there in the water, waiting for the waves, taking in your surroundings, you're not only thinking about when that wave is coming, you're appreciating the beauty that is all around you,” he says.
Born in Brwinow, Poland, Sztalkoper and his family escaped Communism in 1985. They settled in Cleveland, Ohio, but Sztalkoper grew up as a very global citizen. He majored in International Business and Finance at Pepperdine, and upon graduating in 2005, he spent the summer traveling to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey. “I don't think the world is America,” he says. “Everything matters; we are all connected.”
Upon his return, Sztalkoper began work as a trading associate for a hedge fund in Santa Monica, but continued to quench his thirst for current events through various news outlets. One article in the Los Angeles Times caught his eye in particular. "Gaza Surfers Find Freedom in the Sea,” the headline read, and writer Louise Roug detailed the feeling of peace that a few people in Gaza experience on a surfboard. “Because surfboards are difficult to come by and most of the surfers can't afford them anyway, they rent decrepit, heavy boards for about a dollar an hour,” Roug writes.
Sztalkoper knew he had to do something to help “spread the stoke” to these would-be surfers in Gaza. “We have tons of boards and equipment here in Los Angeles,” he thought. “It will be easy to get my hands on it and send it over."
Sztalkoper reached out to the people he knew in the surf community and garnered support and donations. He contacted the Los Angeles Levantine Cultural Center, a non-partisan, pan-cultural center for the Middle East and North Africa, and connected with Director Jordan Elgrably, who had read the same article. They began talking about the potential for this humanitarian cause, and the Gaza Surf Relief was born.
“Surfers gave a great response; all they care about is spreading the stoke,” says Sztalkoper, though he met his share of adversity along the way. “Non-surfers were the ones who got into the politics of the region – something we are avoiding.”
At one point, Sztalkoper was storing 25 surfboards and equipment in his Los Angeles apartment. “That really started to annoy my roommate,” he laughs. And he wasn’t sure how he was going to afford the $10,000 it would cost to ship the cumbersome, not to mention fragile surfboards to the Middle East. The scope of “the stoke” apparently reaches across the country, as the Israeli unit of shipping company DHL based in Queens, New York graciously offered the shipping free of charge. “They even came direct to my apt to pick it up and waived all customs fees,” Sztalkoper marvels.
On May 8th, 2008, a shipment of 25 surfboards, leashes, replacement fins, duct tape, warm water wax, and rash guards arrived in Israel. The shipment has yet to make it to Gaza, however. Since 2007 when Hamas came to power, Israel has allowed only the barest essentials into Gaza, and unfortunately, that does not include surfboards.
Though they are frustrated, Sztalkoper and Elgrably remain hopeful. “We’re going to try to get more publicity and get it to be a higher profile project,” Elgrably says, noting that the project already has a Web site at www.gazasurfrelief.com, and a documentary is in the works.
As a director of the Levantine Cultural Center, Elgrably relishes the moments in which people of opposing backgrounds and ethnicities come together through a shared interest in arts, and believes surfing could provide as a similar bond. “People connect, they feel something, they share something, then they have a conversation about what they’ve experienced,” he says. “At that point it becomes difficult for people whose cultures are ostensibly in conflict, to be vociferously angry with one another.”
Sztalkoper foresees future surfing competitions among the Israelis and Palestinians to bring unity to the people there, but for now, he just wants to bring relief to the people of Gaza who have little to no control over their situation. “Catching the wave and feeling like a king is why I surf and why people all over the world need to surf, especially the people in Gaza, where their lives are constantly in danger and their beliefs are challenged every minute,” he says. “We want to give kids who have never even surfed the opportunity to experience the joy of flying on the water.”
Contribute to the Gaza Surf Relief by visiting www.gazasurfrelief.com and check out future events at the Levantine Cultural Center at www.levantinecenter.org.
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13:53 PM 7 Elul 5767, August 21, '07
Israeli Companies Donate Surfboards to Gaza
(IsraelNN.com) Water-sport companies in Israel got together this week and donated 10 surfboards, each worth around $450, to children in the Gaza Strip, at the behest of a California surfer - Seweryn Sztalkoper. He took the action after being captivated by an LA Times’ article entitled "Gaza Surfers Find Freedom in the Sea”. Sztalkoper hopes to collect 25-30 surfboards in all and distribute them in Gaza.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/131991
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Local California Surfer Starts First-Ever Surfboard Relief Drive for Gaza Surfers
By Rima Abdelkader
NEW YORK, 10 August 2007, ( Arabisto.com):
Local Californian, Seweryn Sztalkoper, after being captivated by an LA Times article entitled "Gaza Surfers Find Freedom in the Sea," has initiated a non-partisan relief drive for donations of used/new surfboards and equipment to Gaza. Surf boards, he says, are in limited supply and are economically unfeasible for local Gazans. In an exclusive interview, he tells me what propelled him to action in empowering local Gazans to surf the sea with ease.
Sztalkoper, a 23-year old, originally from Brwinow, Poland, escaped communism with his family in 1985, and later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until the age of 18. He soon after moved to Los Angeles on his own to attend Pepperdine University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 2005 in International Business and Finance. He then spent that summer in 2005 traveling to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey.
Sztalkoper says, ""I began surfing in 2005 and fell in love with it ever since. It's nice to break the surfer stereotype of us having "too much saltwater in our heads" and not knowing anything about the world." He works as a trading associate for a hedge fund company in Santa Monica and volunteers his time as project manager for the Levantine Cultural Center also based in California.
The purpose of this relief drive, Sztalkoper explains, is "to provide Palestinian youth with the feeling of joy and bliss achieved through surfing, and to provide an alternative way to escape life's daily hardships."
A self-proclaimed avid LATimes.com reader, as he surfed through the web articles, he told me he noticed a small title with the words " Gaza" and "Surfers". "I was interested," he said, "so I clicked to read and was blown away." He continued, "I knew there was surfing in Israel , but also in Gaza? So, it was after reading how they just want to surf and they actually pay to rent boards that I thought, we need to spread that surfing stoke (the feeling you get when you ride a wave) and send some boards over there, because I know for a fact that people have tons of boards that they can part with especially for a cause like this."
Sztalkoper then contacted author Louise Roug of the LA Times piece who put him in touch with BBC Gaza correspondent Hamada Qammar who is currently assisting the committee with the distribution of the surf boards from Jerusalem to Gaza.
After posting a discussion thread on a forum at A Small World ( www.asmallworld.net ), Sztalkoper came across a message from reader Haithem El-Zabri offering his support and help. He quickly learned it was "a small world" indeed. El-Zabri used to live in Los Angeles and worked with the same organization Sztalkoper currently volunteers, the Levantine Cultural Center. El-Zabri is now a part of this project and is currently searching for an organization in Gaza to collect these surf boards.
"I think it's important to implement this because not only does it spread an amazing feeling, but it can get youth surfing rather than being a possible victim elsewhere," Sztalkoper further added.
His website, www.gazasurfrelief.com , launches today. His goal is to collect at least 25 surf boards, leashes, replacement fins, duct tape (for repairs), warm water wax, and rash guards. Donations for bubble wrap are also being accepted. Monetary donations, he says, can be sent to the Levantine Cultural Center where all contributions are tax-deductible.
The Gaza Surf Relief Action Committee is comprised of Seweryn "Sev" Sztalkoper, the Gaza Surf Relief Project Manager; Jordan Elgrably, the Levantine Cultural Center Artistic Director; Erik Andersen, Webmaster – www.gazasurfrelief.com; and Dave Marshall, the Executive Committee Member and Africa Surf Project Coordinator – The Surfrider Foundation, Malibu Chapter.
The committee, Sztalkoper says, has already received 3 surf boards, with 10 pledged from the Los Angeles Area, 10 from Hawaii, 4 from Costa Rica, and some from Australia and Portugal.
They hope to collect 25-30 surfboards and equipment over to Jerusalem, have an NGO take on the shipment, transport it to Gaza, and distribute it.
To learn more, visit www.gazasurfrelief.com.
Rima Abdelkader is a NY-based journalist and a graduate of Pace University in NY.
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From the Los Angeles Times
Gaza surfers find freedom in the sea
In the isolated, battle-scarred strip, waves provide an escape.
By Louise Roug
Times Staff Writer
July 29, 2007
GAZA CITY —The surfer paddled out from the shore.
Lying on his battered board, he scanned the horizon. The turquoise water glittered in the midday sun.
Moments later, he caught a wave, effortlessly.
Back at the shore, Ahmed Abu Hassan, a 28-year-old Palestinian, pulled his board from the water and walked along the Gaza beach where green Hamas flags competed for space with red and yellow umbrellas. It looked as though Islamic militants and ice cream vendors had engaged in a turf war over the golden sand.
"It's a joy," said Hassan, a taciturn and graceful surfer.
If surfing is a quest for freedom, nowhere is such a pursuit more relevant than in Gaza, an overcrowded, poverty-stricken strip of land on the Mediterranean controlled by Hamas and cut off from the rest of the world by Israel.
"Gaza is like a prison," said Bashire Watfa, owner of Al Shira (The Sail) beach cafe. "There's nowhere to breathe except the beach."
Rival Palestinian factions recently fought running battles in the scarred apartment blocks that tower over downtown Gaza City. After four days of bloodletting, Hamas prevailed over the more secular Fatah forces. In response, Israel quickly shut down its border crossings with Gaza, allowing only limited international aid to pass into the territory.
For the surfers of the Gaza Strip, the popular Al Deira beach is a refuge where catching the perfect wave trumps politics.
"We go to the beach to forget about the suffering," said Mohammed Juda, 20, who surfs with his 15-year-old brother, Wadia. The Juda brothers, who paddle out into the surf every morning at 6, wore identical blue T-shirts and black swim trunks.
What the Palestinians euphemistically refer to as "the situation"—a dark and intractable reality of violence and poverty—dissolves in the big blue. You can't ride the waves and worry about factional violence at the same time.
"When we surf, we think about surfing," said Islam Assar, 17, sounding as Zen as his California brethren. "We don't think about the situation."
Assar had been polishing his technique for hours. But the sun was unforgiving, and his clique of surfers had dragged their boards onto the sand for a break.
"When I'm surfing, I feel like I'm flying," said Mohammed Jayab, 34, a surfer who is legendary in Gaza. Lean, tan and wearing a drenched but trendy Italian soccer shirt, Jayab looked like he had just walked off Huntington Beach, except—perhaps—for the Palestinian flag embroidered on his cap.
Recently, Jayab and his friend Hassan had volunteered as lifeguards after the six regular guards walked off the job. With little money in the government coffers, they had not been paid for several months.
The two surfers seemed to enjoy their new responsibilities and eagerly made use of their whistles as they patrolled the edge of the water.
Hassan, who wore a T-shirt from a Santa Cruz surfing company, sized up the other beachgoers.
There was a lot to keep an eye on.
In one corner of the beach, a couple of harried kindergarten teachers sought to contain the havoc created by a gaggle of children whose periwinkle uniforms were sticky with water and sand.
Elsewhere, older men smoked narghile water pipes and good-naturedly discussed politics under palm tree parasols.
Mothers, meanwhile, played with their children or swam in the shallow surf. The women wore traditional full-length abaya dresses and head scarves that appeared to be weighing them down in the water.
In the aftermath of the factional fighting, Islamic militant groups have mostly stayed away from the beach. But the armed wing of Hamas, the Executive Force, which is now Gaza's de facto police squad, came to Al Deira once. They cracked down on a couple of guys who were "chasing women" and generally misbehaving, Jayab said.
"Now all those things are gone," he said, with approval.
Cafe owner Watfa, a Fatah supporter, was less sanguine about the recent changes. He had fought against Israel, and his tan torso bore bullet scars. But now Watfa wants peace and prosperity. The Hamas takeover was bad for business, he said, then yelled at children who were burying a cafe chair in the sand.
"There are a lot of people on the beach, but most don't have any money so they keep to the public places," he said.
Jayab, who described himself as sympathetic to Hamas, is the top dog on the beach—admired by many of the youths for his flawless style. He developed his tricks and technique by imitating surfers on TV, he said.
Like the other Gaza surfers, he watches reruns of "Baywatch" episodes. But he doesn't ogle the bikini-clad lifeguards on the show, he said.
"I close my eyes and watch through my fingers," Jayab said, laughing as he held his hands in front of his eyes to illustrate. "We think of the joy of surfing, and how to develop our style."
Unlike their California counterparts, the surfers of Gaza don't have access to high-end gear or glossy magazines. There are no surf shops, schools or competitions. Beach Boys songs are never played on the radio. And there's no Arabic equivalent of "dude."
Because surfboards are difficult to come by and most of the surfers can't afford them anyway, they rent decrepit, heavy boards for about a dollar an hour. Jayab bought his beat-up board for about $70 from a Palestinian who had brought it from Israel. Hassan, who dreams of riding waves in Australia one day, is a collector and has somehow amassed four boards.
Although the strip's 25-mile coastline offers some of the best beaches in the region, with broad swaths of fine sand dotted with palm trees, Gaza's reputation as a hub of killings, kidnappings and urban warfare keeps most tourists away.
Still, there is enough business for at least one boutique hotel, designed to resemble a Moroccan villa. The Al Deira hotel offers spectacular sunset views and wireless Internet service on the grand terrace, but no meaningful mini-bar in the rooms, because alcohol is banned.
A "Surf Atlas" on the website http://www.wannasurf.com lists the Al Deira beach, but locates it, erroneously, in Israel. The site also warns that travel to the beach is "difficult, as you must drive into Gaza City [and] cross Erez checkpoint (a long and tiring process.)"
Although Israel formally ended military rule of the Gaza Strip in 2005, it still controls access to the coastal enclave, and since the Hamas takeover, the Israeli military keeps an especially close watch.
On some days, the Israeli navy fires warning shots toward the beach, cautioning fishermen and swimmers not to venture too far from the shore.
But the patrols can't contain the surfers.
They may be trapped in Gaza, but riding the waves seems like the great escape.
"I feel free," Hassan said.
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Special correspondent Hamada Abu Qamar contributed to this report.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
Ahmed Abu Hassan, 28, and Mohammed Jayab, 34, surfers who hang out at the Al Deira beach in Gaza. Photo © Wissam Nassar / For The Times