December 26, 2009

The new Christmas

A day before the Gaza carnage anniversary, thousands of marches, meetings and actions are being prepared across the globe, to commemorate the dead and horrors of Israeli atrocities, and make a repeat less likely. Below is a partial list of international actions; if you know of others, please send me details!

International Campaign in Support of the Gaza Freedom March

Thousands of Unison Actions Assembled around the World

A massive mobilization between December 27, 2009 and January 1, 2010 with candlelight vigils, concerts, marches, demonstrations, art installations and movie screenings will assemble all over the world to send a clear message to world leaders: end the siege on Gaza.
To tackle the blockade against Gaza, grassroots activists are moving quickly and acting in unison for an absolutley crucial time. Dec. 27 will mark one year since the Israeli attack and invasion of the Gaza Strip. Although the Israeli tanks have left, the complete closure of the borders continues.
In order to unite the public to influence public leaders behind the Gaza Freedom March goals, solidarity action organizers harnessed the power of the internet to coordinate a global week of actions. There will be actions at many places around the world: France, United Kingdom, Turkey, Ireland, Germany, Spain, United States, Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Jordan, Canada, Israel/Palestine, Poland, Denmark, and Greece.

On December 31, 2009, more than 1,400 citizens from across the world will travel to Cairo to join the Gaza Freedom March. This historic non-violent action has been organized by The International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza. Its objective is to draw international attention to the siege and blockade of Gaza which are illegal under international law.

According to the United Nations, the most recent invasion left 1,400 Palestinian civilians dead, thousands injured and hundreds of thousands homeless, many of whom still live in tents. Many more are living in the ruins of their houses or with relatives. It is now one year later, and no progress has been made. In fact the situation is more dire than ever. Hospitals lack many medicines and supplies to provide even routine medical care. Building materials so desperately needed after the last winter’s invasion by Israel are not permitted into Gaza.

Israel’s blockade of Gaza is a flagrant violation of international law that has led to mass suffering. The U.S., Egypt and the rest of the international community are complicit. The law is clear. The conscience of humankind is shocked. Yet, the siege of Gaza continues.

For more information about the Gaza Freedom March global actions visit:
http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/solidarity

For full list of actions: Gaza Freedom March December 2009

Egypt urged to allow Gaza aids: Al Jazeera online

George Galloway MP speaking of the delay
George Galloway MP speaking of the delay

British politician George Galloway has appealed to Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, to allow a humanitarian aid convoy to cross to Gaza through the Red Sea port of Nuweiba.
The Viva Palestina convoy, containing some 210 vehicles and 500 people, is currently stranded in Jordan with Cairo refusing to allow it passage to Gaza through Nuweiba.
Galloway made the appeal through Al Jazeera: “Please Mr President Hosni Mubarak, allow us to pass through Nuweiba. We are here only four hours away from Gaza.
“Otherwise, we should go all the way through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. All fingers should point now against Israel not Egypt. This is not what we want.”
But Hossam Zaki, an Egyptian port official, insisted that there would be “no entry from Nuweiba”, saying “entry can only be through El-Arish”.
El-Arish is a port on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, while Nuweiba is on the Red Sea.
The Egyptian decision means the convoy would have to travel hundreds of kilometres by ferry around the Sinai peninsula and through the Suez Canal.
The lorries are laden with European, Turkish and Arab aid – both food and medical supplies.
Egyptian condition
In a statement, the Egyptian foreign ministry said: “The Egyptian government welcomes the passage of the convoy into the Gaza Strip on December 27, on condition that it abides by the mechanisms in place for humanitarian aid convoys to the Palestinian people.
“This includes most importantly, the entry of convoys through the port of El-Arish”.
Gaza has been under a stifling Israeli siege since a Hamas election victory and its decision to push Fatah armed forces from the territory in June 2007.
The blockade has severely restricted essential supplies and placed Gazans in a dire situation, made worse by Israel’s military assault last winter that reduced much of the territory to ruins.
According to the latest UN report on the situation in Gaza, the ongoing Israeli blockade has triggered a “protracted human dignity crisis” with negative humanitarian consequences.
“At the heart of this crisis is the degradation in the living conditions of the population, caused by the erosion of livelihoods and the gradual decline in the state of infrastructure, and the quality of vital services in the areas of health, water and sanitation, and education,” adds the report.

Israel’s illegal extra-judicial killing squads continue murdering Palestinians daily, as an integral part of the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) activities. Such actions hardly raise an eyebrow in Israel, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’… Will they ever be made to pay for there unending war-crimes?

IDF kills 3 Palestinians linked to murder of settler: Ha’aretz

Six Palestinians were killed early Saturday in fighting with Israel, shattering a long period of relative calm in the territories.
In pre-dawn raids in the West Bank city of Nablus, Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed three Palestinian operatives belonging to the Fatah-linked Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
The men were known by Israeli authorities to be involved in a shooting attack in a West Bank settlement Thursday which killed Rabbi Meir Hai.
Also on Saturday, Israel killed three Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
An IDF spokeswoman said three Palestinians were killed in an air strike and ground fire on suspicion they were trying to infiltrate from Gaza.
A Hamas security source said the three shot in Gaza were apparently civilians collecting scrap metal in an industrial zone near the Israeli border.
The Nablus operation ended an extended lull during which the IDF refrained from any activities in the heart of Palestinian towns in the West Bank.
IDF troops entered the casbah of Nablus as well as the Ras al-Ayin region.
One of the dead Palestinians has been identified as Anan Subeh, 33, of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The other two Palestinians were who were killed are Raed a-Sarkaji, 38, and Raghsan Abu Sharah, whose brother was regarded as a top commander with the organization.
During the operation, a-Sarkaji’s wife was wounded and transferred to hospital for medical care.
Palestinian security sources report that IDF troops encircled the Nablus casbah at around 4:00 A.M. on Saturday. Then, the IDF surrounded one of the homes in the area before proceeding to forcibly enter. The Palestinians had refused Israeli soldiers’ calls to surrender.
Israeli defense officials said that the Palestinians were implicated in various terrorist actions in recent years, and that the IDF moved against them after they had refused to cease their activities as part of the pardon agreement.
One of the Palestinians was said to have maintained contact with terrorist operatives abroad, including those belonging to Hezbollah.
The IDF operation is considered unusual given the calm that has taken hold in the West Bank over the course of the last two years.
The raid occurred less than two days after an Israeli from the West Bank settlement Shavei Shomron was killed in a shooting attack near his home.
Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have claimed responsibility for the attack, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported.
An aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the Israeli actions on Saturday, accusing Jerusalem of escalating the violence.
Nabil Abu Rudaineh, the aide, told Reuters after the killing of three militants of Abbas’s own Fatah movement and three Gaza men “this grave Israeli escalation shows Israel is not interested in peace and is trying to explode the situation.”
“Israel is torpedoing international and American efforts to restart peace talks,” which stalled a year ago, Rudaineh said. Israel has insisted it was ready to resume negotiations immediately.

Israel Kills Six in West Bank: New York Times

Published: December 26, 2009
NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli soldiers shot and killed six Palestinians in two separate incidents on Saturday in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence in months.
Three of those who were killed belonged to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, and his top aide accused Israel of inflaming tensions and seeking to torpedo U.S.-backed efforts to renew stalled peace talks.
The violence came a day before the anniversary of a three-week Gaza war that killed some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Peace talks have been frozen since.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said soldiers shot and killed three Palestinians suspected of trying to infiltrate from Hamas-ruled coastal Gaza, and three West Bank militants accused of killing a Jewish settler in a roadside shooting on Thursday.
A Hamas security source said the three shot in Gaza at daybreak were apparently civilians collecting scrap metal in an industrial zone near the Israeli border.
In the West Bank, Palestinian medics and witnesses said soldiers surrounded the homes of three members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group of Abbas’s Fatah group, and then killed all three.
The shootings infuriated Palestinian leaders.
“This grave Israeli escalation shows Israel is not interested in peace and is trying to explode the situation,” Nabil Abu Rdainah, a top aide to Abbas, told Reuters.
“Israel is torpedoing international and American efforts to restart peace talks,” Rdainah said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops had launched a “pinpointed raid to capture the perpetrators of the shooting attack and during the operation three who were involved in carrying out that attack were killed.”
At least one of the militants was armed during the raid and four rifles and ammunition were found at the scene, the spokeswoman said.
The settler had been the first Israeli killed in a Palestinian attack in about eight months in the West Bank, territory Israel captured in a 1967 war and which Palestinians seek for a state.
Sources in Fatah said those who were killed in the West Bank raid belonged to their group. At least one had been on an Israeli wanted list, the sources said.
Abbas has demanded a halt to Jewish settlement building before peace talks delayed since a Gaza war in January may resume, and has rejected a temporary building freeze announced last month by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as insufficient.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Abed Qusini and Hassan Titi in Nablus and Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah; Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Richard Williams)

Israeli troops kill Palestinians: Al Jazeera online

Special forces of the Israeli Army killed three Palestinians in the West bank [EPA]
Israeli soldiers have killed six Palestinians in two separate incidents.
Three of the deaths occurred when Palestinians trying to cross the security barrier from the Gaza Strip into Israel were shot on Saturday, news agencies reported citing a Palestinian medical source.
Palestinian medics and sources said the other three Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers during a West Bank raid.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed that soldiers shot and killed three Palestinians suspected of trying to infiltrate from Gaza, which is governed by Hamas.
However, a Hamas security source said the three were apparently civilians collecting scrap metal in an industrial zone near the Israeli border.

West Bank killings
Describing the West Bank raid, Palestinian medics and witnesses said Israeli soldiers surrounded the homes of three members of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group loosely linked to Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and then killed all three.
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the raid, which took place two days after the same group was one of two to claim responsibility for the fatal shooting of an Israeli settler on Thursday on a West Bank road.
The Israeli was the first to get killed in a Palestinian attack in about eight months in the West Bank, territory Israel captured in a 1967 war and which Palestinians seek for a state.
Sources in Fatah said the three men targeted by the Israelis had been disarmed under security measures taken by Abbas’s police force.
At least one had previously been on an Israeli wanted list.
The violence came a day before the anniversary of a Gaza war that killed some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, and underscored rising tensions as US-sponsored peace talks have remained stalled for a year.

Six Palestinians killed in West Bank, Gaza attacks: BBC

Israeli troops have killed six Palestinians – three in the Gaza Strip and three in the West Bank.
The Israeli military said three Palestinians suspected of trying to infiltrate from Gaza were killed in an air strike near the Erez crossing.
Separately, Israeli forces said they killed three men in the West Bank city of Nablus who are suspected of shooting dead a Jewish settler two days ago.
It is the largest number of deaths in a day since the Gaza conflict a year ago.
Palestinian sources in Nablus say two of those killed were militants from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.
The faction was one of two groups which said they killed the settler, a father-of-seven – the first fatal shooting of an Israeli by militants in the occupied West Bank for eight months.
Eyewitnesses said the Israeli raid began in the early hours of the morning and lasted for several hours.
They said there had not been a raid like this in Nablus for about a year and a half, the BBC’s Bethany Bell reports from Jerusalem.
An Israeli army spokesman said a statement on the raid would be released soon.
The violence came a day before the anniversary of the Gaza war that killed some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

While the following article is thoughtful and timely, as well as surprisingly perceptive, it is interesting that it is published at a time of great tension in Gaza and around it, as the anniversary of the December 2008 carnage is approaching, and the large international group of protesters and activists are being prevented by the combines and coordinated actions of Israel and Egypt from reaching Gaza with food and solidarity…

How Gaza became a rich canvas for Palestinian art: The Independent

Art is flourishing in the carnage left behind by Israel’s military onslaught last year. Donald Macintyre reports.
Saturday, 26 December 2009
The prematurely ageing apartment block on the edge of Jabalya overlooks a forbidding stretch of wasteland. There is a lift shaft but no lift.
But if this is no surprise in a Gaza starved of building materials and spare parts, the interior of the spotless and stylishly furnished fourth-floor flat, where Maha El-Daya lives and works, certainly is. The walls are covered with her own (and her artist husband’s) paintings: haunting land and seascapes, a portrait of a child; the living room table on which coffee is served is covered with a dark red and black cloth she hand-stitched in the pattern of a chess board, the chairs scattered with cushions decorated with her own kaleidoscopic embroidery.

Ms El-Daya’s studio and home in the northern neighbourhood of al Saftawi betrays little sign of the turbulence and bloodshed of the three-week Israeli military onslaught on Gaza which began a year ago tomorrow. Nor does the painting she chose for the annual auction of Palestinian art organised this month in Jerusalem by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which sold for $900.
At first sight, it is an abstract against a vibrant blue background but, examined more closely, it is pregnant with traditional Palestinian motifs: the feathers seamstresses attach to a needle and thread instead of a knot; the bag containing Koranic verses once worn by women, the grain used in baking bread. The blue is the colour of the Mediterranean; the brown that of the desert land it laps against.
Ms El-Daya, 33, is one of a growing, younger generation of talented painters helping to bring Gaza – and indeed Palestinian – art to the well deserved attention of a wider public. If Gaza’s economy has ground to a standstill, its modern art appears to be flourishing. And remarkably, the majority of the richly varied works on display in the “Colours of Hope” exhibition at the Alhambra Palace this month make little or no overt reference to last winter’s war.

In the case of Ms El -Daya, who has a daughter Salma, six, and a three-year-old son, Adam, this isn’t because she was unaffected by the war; quite the opposite. “I couldn’t draw anything,” she says. “I was living in a depression during and after the war. I was very afraid and very worried by the bombardment and the Israelis came very near to us.”
Her husband Ayman was stranded in Egypt, where he is studying for a Master’s degree in fine arts. The trade union headquarters near her flat was bombed. Twenty-two members of the extended El-Daya family were killed when an Israeli F16 fighter bombarded their four-storey family apartment block in one of the worst incidents of the war – later explained by the military as an “operational error”. Practical as well as multiply creative, and mindful that a prominent Hamas figure and potential target, Ismail Radwan, lives in her neighbourhood, Ms El-Daya painstakingly removed the glass from her windows on the first day of the bombing, replacing them as soon as the war was over. She says she could see the white phosphorus used in the bombing of nearby Atatra, adding “We saw the ball of fire, like an octopus”. But though her words testify to her painter’s eye, she had no inclination to commit it to canvas, seeing such immediate events as unsuitable for the lengthy task of constructing a work of art.

It was two months after the end of the war before Ms El-Daya picked up her brush again and, if her work had a theme (though she denies it is political), it was that of recovery. Her first post-war painting was of a fishing boat being repaired on the Gaza City beach. Repeatedly, her work returns to scenes of Gaza’s coast: boats, the sea, the decay of Gaza’s old port. One Palestinian expert has suggested that some of her beach scenes specifically evoke the siege of Gaza imposed in June 2007 after Hamas’s enforced takeover. This Ms El-Daya rejects, saying only that “everyone can do his own translation” of the work.
She does admit, however, to wanting to record scenes that are vanishing, or threatening to, in Gaza’s ever-changing landscape. “I want to tell the world that there was a harbour here.” Similarly with her pastoral pictures of the now bulldozed farmland of Beit Lahiya. “It’s not there any more,” she says. “People are trying to get it back now but it won’t be what it used to be.”
Ms El-Daya has much in common with her fellow painter Shareef Sarhan. The work of both has been shown and sold as far afield as Britain and the US. But while the paintings can travel – often thanks to diplomats – their creators, because of the closure, could not even get to this month’s show in Jerusalem. Both have difficulty in bringing in good quality paints from Israel and the West Bank. And both have jobs to help support their families – Ms El-Daya teaches children to draw in a programme run by the Palestinian Red Crescent and Mr Sarhan, also 33, is a photographer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
But Mr Sarhan’s painting – which fetched $800 at the UNDP auction – is unmistakeably of the war. Like Ms El-Daya, he did not paint during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead; instead he alarmed his wife and four children by photographing its impact both in the streets and, even more dangerously, from the sixth-floor roof of the family home in Gaza City’s Sabra district. Though he sold some photographs, others he posted for free on his website, attracting 40,000 hits in the process. It was only in the following weeks that he began to paint the series of war studies which culminated in the work for the UNDP auction. “Sometimes the artist looks to express the events he lives through immediately,” he says. “Sometimes it’s after a period.”
He argues that his paintings of the “aggression”, as he calls it, though informed by both his memory and the photographs he took from his roof, are essentially “from the imagination”. But Mr Sarhan is also not, by preference, a war painter. His entry at the 2008 UNDP auction, which sold for $1,100, was a cityscape with an environmental theme, buildings packed between two trees, in which he has painted – as he often does – the grey/brown urban housing of Gaza in startlingly bright colours.

Nor has he, Ms El-Daya or the other painters represented in this month’s show, resorted for financial reasons, as some others have, to political murals and the “martyr” portraits of those killed in conflict, frequently commissioned by the armed factions. “I’m not angry with them; I found a job but maybe they had no other option. But I won’t do it,” Mr Sarhan says.
The problem he has is finding the time to paint as much as he wants. Not only does he need to earn his living but he is also, as a founder member of the “Windows from Gaza for Contemporary Art” group, a tireless champion of younger artists, helping to arrange two to three exhibitions a month. There were “difficulties” at first in attracting a Gaza audience for shows including video and installation art as well as paintings. But now, he says, 150 to 200 will routinely attend an opening.
Mr Sarhan says Hamas officials have nether intervened against nor encouraged the contemporary art movement here. He also points out that the painting sold in last year’s UNDP auction by Ms El-Daya’s husband, Ayman Eisa, included the outline of a nude woman. Though painted here, it almost certainly could not be exhibited in socially conservative Gaza, Hamas or no Hamas. Accepting that there are “differences between artists and the government” he remains politically neutral. “I am not Fatah or Hamas,” he explains. “I am Shareef.”