NGO News
Palestine
Gush Shalom reports:
"GAZA: LIFT THE BLOCKADE" - The Relief Convoy on its way
Jeff Halper and Uri Avnery
The initiative for the large action that took place today (26.1.08) started when the well-know psychiatrist, Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj, the human-rights activist from Gaza, met in the Gush Shalom office with a small group of Israeli peace activists, in order to tell them about the desperate situation in the strip. It was decided on the spot to organize in Israel a relief convoy for the Gaza Strip people, and to fight by all political and juridical means for the right to get it in. It was agreed that two parallel protest rallies would be held simultaneously on the two sides of the wall.
26 Israeli peace groups joined the initiative, under the single slogan: "Gaza: Lift the siege!" Many activists from different organizations worked day and night. Gush Shalom prepared a special poster and started a fund-raising campaign among its sympathizers. Hundreds of checks came pouring in from Israel and a dozen other countries, enabling the Gush to carry alone the full costs of the supplies. Many added words of thanks for the opportunity given them to express their opinion this way and join the struggle.
Warm thanks to all of them!
In consultation with Dr. al-Sarraj it was decided to buy not only five tons of essential foodstuffs - flour, sugar, rice, oil, salt, beans and lentils - but also water distillers. "The water in the Gaza Strip is undrinkable," al-Sarraj reported, "therefore there is an urgent need for distillers."
The weather forecasts promised rain and thunderstorms all over the country. In spite of this, old and young peace activists came to the starting points in six towns. As requested by the organizers, hundreds of families came in their private cars. Together with the people who came by bus, their number reached about two thousand.
"In the night we were woken up by strong thunderbolts. It started to rain cats and dogs, and we were very worried: who is going to get up early on Shabbat morning in such stormy weather in order to participate in an open-air protest rally and carry sacks of food?" recounted one of the organizers.
Ya'akov Manor had the idea to ask the demonstrators to bring private relief parcels and to add personal letters "from family to family". The response was beyond all expectations. Families brought not only food and mineral water, but also blankets, warm clothing and many other useful articles, even electrical stoves. The parcels were fastened to the tops of the cars or put in the baggage holds of the buses. They added up to two tons.
When the demonstrators assembled in the towns - Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth and others - a slight rain was falling. But all who hoped for a brightening up were soon disappointed: during the drive to the Erez border crossing, a very heavy rain started to pour down, making it almost impossible to see the road, and slowed down the huge convoy towards the Gaza strip extremely difficult.
About half of the protesters were Jewish, the other half Arab. The rally was conducted the same way: Side by side with the Jewish speakers - Uri Avnery, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Professor Jeff Halper and former minister Shulamit Aloni (who was ill and sent a written speech, read by Teddy Katz), speeches were made by advocate Fatmeh al-Ajou, and MKs Issam Makhoul and Jamal Zahalka.
At the height of the rally, the moderator, Huloud al-Badawi, called Dr. Sarraj by cellular phone. He was participating at the parallel rally in Gaza and his words were conveyed by loudspeaker. They amounted to a stirring call to the Israeli peace camp to support the Palestinians in their struggle against the blockade.
A sensation was caused by a young woman from Sderot, Shir Shusdig, who called out: "For seven years I am suffering from the Qassams in Kibbutz Zikim and Sderot. I know that the people on the other side are also suffering very much. That's why I am here!"
Jeff Halper mentioned that demonstrations of solidarity with the people of Gaza were taking place in dozens of cities around the world. Advocate Fatmeh al-Ajou pointed out that the Attorney General had asserted in a Supreme Court hearing that the blockade on Gaza was similar to the boycott against the former apartheid regime in South Africa. "This is absurd when it comes from a government which is building apartheid roads all over the West Bank!"
Miraculously, the rain stopped just before the rally, and started again a few minutes after it was finished.
Since the Israeli army has not allowed the relief supplies into the Gaza strip, they were stored in a neighboring kibbutz. If the military will not permit their transfer to Gaza in the next two days, we shall apply to the High Court of Justice and start a legal fight until we succeed.
Uri Avnery's speech at the rally: "Three days ago, a wall fell here – just as the Berlin Wall fell, just as the apartheid wall will fall, and just as all walls and fences will come down in this country. But the completely inhuman blockade that has been imposed on a million and a half residents of Gaza by our government and by our army, in our name – this blockade will continue in its full cruelty. As Israelis coming here from various political camps, we have come to bring basic supplies and to say to the Israeli public and to the whole world: We will not participate in crime! We are ashamed of the blockade!"
"Our hearts are with our Palestinian brothers who are at this moment demonstrating with us on the other side of the fence – don't lose faith that one day we will meet together in this place without fences, without walls, without violence, the sons of two peoples living next to each other in peace, in friendship, in partnership."
"Our hearts are with our brothers, the residents of Sderot – the threat of Qassams must stop! It won't stop by a policy of "an eye for an eye", or a hundred eyes for one eye, or a thousand eyes for one eye, because that only leaves us all blind. It will end when we speak to the other side – yes, yes, even with Hamas! And we'll together create a total and mutual ceasefire – without Qassams, without murderous incursions, without mortars, without extrajudicial assassinations, without closure, without starvation."
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/events/1201433012
http://tv.social.org.il/medini/stv-gaza-relief-convoy-26-1-08.htm [Video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yh0_f4O34o [London demo in support]
Click here to watch video from the convoy (sorry, Hebrew only, except for Jeff Halper’s speech, partially in the video)
__________
Jeff Halper at Erez
My name is Jeff Halper. I am the designated English speaker for today’s event. And it is important because today there are people standing in solidarity with us all across the world.... So it’s important that they get our messages and it’s important that we know that we're not just a thousand or two thousand people but we're tens of thousands of people all over the world crying out for justice for the Palestinian people.
Our message today, one of our messages today, and I take this from the women's movement, is that we refuse to be enemies. The Israeli government, the Israeli army, are not going to make us enemies with the Palestinian people. We should know who our real enemies are. Those real enemies are the Israeli political leaders that tell the Israeli people there is no political solution. It’s those that hold the people of Sderot hostage, and claim that they're blockading and bombing and killing because of Qassam rockets, when we know that the Palestinian government through Hamas has offered a cease fire for months with the Israeli people.
And so we're calling on all of you to support our boycott. We want to say to the Palestinian people as Israelis that we're proud of you for what you've done in breaking this blockade. We want to say to the Israeli public, don't believe Olmert and Barak and Netanyahu, there is a political solution and that is to end the occupation and to arrive at a just peace. And I want to say to the people of Sderot, rise up against those that are holding you hostage, and join us, and hold hands with your neighbors across Gaza, to show that the people, not the governments, the people can bring a just peace to this region.
At the gates of Gaza
Nurit Peled-Elhanan 26 January 2008
These words are dedicated to the heroes of Gaza who have proven once again that no fortified wall can imprison the free spirit of humanity and no form of violence can subdue life.
The appeal to go today to the gates of Gaza at the height of the pogrom being carried out by the thugs of the Occupation army against the residents of the Gaza Strip has terrible echoes of another appeal that was sent out into the air of the impassive world more than a hundred years ago.*
"Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; Into its courtyard wind your way; There with your own hand touch, and with the eyes of your head, Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay, The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead."
What can one think as one stands at the gates of Gaza?
Only this:
"There in the dismal corner, there in the shadowy nook, Multitudinous eyes will look"
What can we imagine today as we stand at the gates of Gaza, other than
"A babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother's cold and milkless breast;
And "how a dagger halved an infant's word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.
O, even now its eyes from me demand accounting,"
And what can we say to this infant, who demands from us accounting - we who stand helpless at the gates of Gaza? What will we explain to him and to all the hungry, sick children locked in that terrible ghetto, surrounded by wire fences, what can we say to the babies whose lives have been choked out of them in incubators before they began their lives because the State of the Jews shut off the flow of oxygen? What can we say to all the mothers who are searching for bread for their children in the streets of Gaza and what can we say to ourselves? Only this: sixty years after Auschwitz the State of the Jews is confining people in ghettoes and is killing them with hunger, asphyxiation and disease.
"Brief-weary and forespent, a dark Shekinah
Runs to each nook and cannot find its rest;
Wishes to weep, but weeping does not come;
Would roar; is dumb.
Its head beneath its wing, its wing outspread
Over the shadows of the martyr'd dead,
Its tears in dimness and in silence shed."
Because today, as we stand at the gates of Gaza, we have no voice, we have no words and we have no deeds. There is not a single Yanosh Korchak among us who will go in and protect the children from the fire. There are no Righteous Gentiles who will endanger their lives in order to save the victims of Gaza. We stand forlorn and contemptible in front of the gates of evil, in front of the fences of death, and obey the racist laws that have taken control over our lives, and all of us are helpless.
When Bialik wrote:
" Satan has not yet created Vengeance for the blood of a small child,"
It did not occur to him that the child would be a Palestinian child from Gaza and his slaughterers would be Jewish soldiers from the Land of
Israel.
And when he wrote:
Let the blood pierce
through the abyss! Let the blood seep
down into the depths of darkness, and
eat away there, in the dark, and breach
all the rotting foundations of the earth.
He did not imagine that those foundations would be the foundations of the Land of Israel. That the Jewish and Democratic State of Israel that uses the expression "blood on his hands" to justify its refusal to release freedom fighters and peace leaders would submerge us all in the blood of innocent babes up to our necks, up to our nostrils, so that every breath we take sends red bubbles of blood into the air of the Holy Land.
"And I, my heart is dead, no longer is there prayer
on my lips;
All strength is gone, and
hope is no more.
Until when,
How much longer,
Until when?"
* The poems "City of Slaughter" and "On Slaughter" were written by the Jewish poet Haim Nahman Bialik in tribute to the victims of the Kishinev Pogrom in 1903, Russia - trans.
