For the flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv, I sat next to two women who appeared to be in their late 60s. One was thin and angular; the other was plump and round. Both wore gabardine elastic-waist trousers, pastel-coloured windbreakers and sensible, rubber-soled shoes. Their fluffy white hair was indifferently cut; the skin on their unadorned faces was pale and papery. They wore small gold crosses on delicate neck chains. As soon as I had settled into my window seat, they introduced themselves.

“I am Greta,” said the woman seated in the aisle seat. “And this is Helga.” They shook my hand firmly, gazing at me with pale blue eyes. “We are Swedish.” Helga added, “But we speak Finnish between ourselves.”

They told me they were going on an organized tour of the holy sites with their church group. It was Helga’s fourth trip. “I love Israel! I love it so much!” she said. Greta was visiting for the first time. She turned pink with emotion as she described her excitement. “We are going to the places where Jesus walked,” she said, as she showed me the itinerary.

“You know,” said Greta. “We pray for Israel all the time. When the Swedish newspapers and television report bad things about Israel, it makes us angry! We write them letters and we complain.  We know that Israel belongs to the Jews; it says so in the Bible!”

The flight attendant began the pre-takeoff announcements. “She is speaking Hebrew!” Greta said reverently. “No,” I smiled. “That is Dutch.” Greta turned pinker.

In the row in front of us, three Israeli teenage boys with fashionable, spiky haircuts spoke idiomatic Hebrew, filled with Arabic and English slang, as they played with hand-held electronic games.

“Please tell your people,” Greta said, as she looked at me intensely, “That there are people in Europe who love them. We don’t want Israelis to think that those terrible Swedish reporters represent us. They don’t understand anything about God and the Bible. Tell the Israelis that we love them and we pray for them!”

As the airplane lifted off the tarmac, Helga squeezed her eyes shut and raised her open palms off the armrests in an expression of exultation.

Before turning back to an article in the International Herald Tribune about a religious war in the Israeli army, I said to Greta and Helga, “I hope you enjoy yourselves in Israel, and that it meets your expectations.”

“Oh it will!” they chorused. “It is the holy land.”

NOTE: Scroll down to the bottom to read the first comment; they appear “backwards” – I’m working on fixing that soon. Lisa

UPDATE: Comments are now enabled; my apologies to those who were frustrated in their attempts to leave a response to this post.

Last week I traveled to Oslo and participated in a media seminar that examined the coverage of Operation Cast Lead, the recently ended IDF military operation in Gaza. The ministry of defense’s refusal to allow the international media into Gaza during the war, despite a high court order, is not much discussed in Israel, but it is of great interest abroad. I have been invited to speak about the subject at yet another conference later this month, and I’m writing an article about it for the upcoming edition of the Columbia Journalism Review.

My post about the Oslo seminar will be up in a day or two. Meanwhile, I received a link to an animated video clip about the closure of Gaza that happens to be an apt introduction. Closed Zone has been picked up pretty quickly in the blogosphere, so you might already have seen it; in that case, check back on Sunday for something new.

The clip was created by Yoni Goodman, the man who did the animation for Waltz with Bashir – the critically acclaimed film, directed by Ari Folman, that was the favourite to bring home the Oscar for Israel at this year’s Academy Awards (we wuz robbed). Closed Zone was commissioned by Gisha, an Israeli NGO that works to protect Palestinian rights under international law.

Goodman started working on Closed Zone more than a month before the IDF entered Gaza; but the war affected his vision of the project, as he explains to Ynet:

“It began as something naïve and slowly explosions and a deeper, darker atmosphere were added. I couldn’t stand the growing incitement during that period and today. I think we must not forget that on the other side there are civilians who get hurt.”

For the past 18 months, Israel has imposed an almost-complete closure on Gaza. Only a lucky few can obtain permission to travel through Erez Crossing to travel abroad – usually for study or medical care, but sometimes because the individual is very well-connected, either in Israel or the West Bank. The Israeli navy prevents Gazan fisherman from traveling more than 4 kilometers from the shore; and the Egyptians open the Rafah border crossing only intermittently, for a couple of days here and there.

Since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the closure has been complete: the ministry of defense, which controls Erez, has decided that no one can leave via the crossing, except for urgent humanitarian reasons. That is why there were no Gazan journalists at the seminar in Oslo. Two were invited, but the Israeli ministry of defense turned down the Norwegian foreign ministry’s request to allow them to travel through Erez Crossing.  Phone calls and emails to the foreign ministry, the president’s office, the Peres Center for Peace and the ministry of defense, plus many personal contacts, turned out to be a waste of time. In the end, the panel called “eyewitnesses from Gaza” had no actual Gazans.

Gaza is not the poorest or the most crowded place on earth. Anyone who has visited the slums of Cairo, Mumbai or Delhi can tell you that. But it is certainly unique in being a big, open air prison. For some reason, the closure is not really discussed in Israel. As one journalist told me recently, Israel seems to have written Gaza off. The people have been dehumanized into a bunch of Hamas voters – i.e., terrorists or de facto terror supporters – rather than ordinary people who aspire to live, raise their children and have hope for the future, just like us. On the rare occasions when Palestinian suffering is discussed, someone immediately counters by decrying the suffering of the children of Sderot, or by placing the blame on Hamas. Many want Egypt to take responsibility for Palestinian movement abroad, via the border at Rafah. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Egypt has not demonstrated any interest in taking on that role.

So what does it feel like to be trapped inside a tiny strip of territory, with no way out? What about when you’re bombed from the air and the ground, and there’s no place to run or hide? Yoni Goodman gives us an idea in the following clip. When you’ve finished watching it, scroll down to watch “making of Closed Zone.”