Surfwise
Posted on December 12, 2008 @ 10:45 AM
How a doctor, surfer and family man broke all the rules in his search for a natural way of life, a path towards higher understanding, and peace among people of the sea.
Words: Nik Zanella
Photos: Surfwise/Magnolia Pictures
“I went into the water literally ready to pull my brains out, and I came back out of the water a warrior.” Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz
August 21st 2007, Erez, Israel. The Mediterranean’s most contentious beachbreak lies only a few miles west from the Erez Crossing Terminal. Inside the frontier’s fortress a palpable sense of fear is amplified by the 40°C heat of the southern Mediterranean summer. Qassam rocket bombings become the daily norm in this area since the victory of Hamas in the June ’07 elections forced authorities to shut the frontier between Israel and the Gaza Strip. But not to “Doc”!
Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz is now 86. He is one of the oldest surfers still catching waves at the point in San Onofre in California and he’s been doing it for decades. He left the Gaza Strip 33 years ago when the Suez crisis between Egypt and Israel forced him to move his surf school and his family from Tel Aviv back to California. His facial skin is wrinkled from six decades of saltwater and offshore winds, but under his white-haired chest pulses the heart of a young lion – a lion determined to leap over that fence, or at least to help the 14 boards he brought reach the Palestinian locals waiting on the other side.
The sparks that set off this unusual adventure in surf diplomacy were a couple of pictures that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in July 2007. They showed two surfers on the beach of Al Deira, together with their only battered board. The article explained how some Palestinians try to escape the poverty and violence of the area by riding the waves, with any board or floating device they can get hands on.
Doc was struck by this story. He was the first surfer to ride the waves along the Gaza Strip in the mid-1950s, looking for surf with a Hobie pintail under his arm, chased by army officials confusing his longboard for a rocket launcher. He spent months roaming these clean beachbreaks nearly alone, studying the Pentateuch and working towards the socialist utopia on Kibbutz farms. The surf school he opened in Tel Aviv in that same year triggered the birth of the Israeli surf community, the first to bloom in the enclosed basin of the Mediterranean. They still consider him a prophet down there and for good reason: thanks to his enthusiasm, surfing is today a hugely popular pastime along Israel’s shores with thousands of devotees, many of whom also serve as soldiers along those same troubled shores.
“So I told myself, we’ll go to Israel and get those Palestinians some boards,” remembers Doc in an interview given to the New York Times after his return to the US. His first step was to contact Mr Rashkova, the Israel representative of Surfers 4 Peace, an NGO founded by the Paskowitz family and Kelly Slater to help Palestinians and Israelis share waves on the basic philosophy that “people who surf together, can live together.”
The project required help from both sides of the Erez fence but it wasn’t long before,
bare-chested in exploration-style kaki shorts, Dorian faced the Israeli guards at Erez with two surfboards under his arms, asking them to authorize the meeting. The first answer was, a harsh, “Lo” (that’s ‘no’ in Ivrit), but the words he proffered afterwards made the miracle happen: “I came 12,500 miles from Hawaii to give away these boards. The guys who need them are standing 50 meters from here, and you’re trying to stop me? How can you do that to a fellow Jew?” He then hugged the guards and begged them … and the gates of Zion were opened.
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