December 29, 2009

The behaviour of the Egyptian government, while not surprising, is most infuriating indeed. That they will so carefully protect the Israeli occupation against their Arab brothers and sisters, and in the interests of the US, is a message of sorts to the Egyptian people. One certainly hopes they will pick it up and act. While throughout last week the western media was full of detailed reports about event in Iran, and especially in Tehran, there was nothing whatsoever about events in Cairo and Aqqaba. That is infuriating indeed. We should all complain to the news outlets in our own countries, which is the least we can do!

Just arrived from Cairo: Special dispatch

Gaza’s border must be opened NOW: The Electronic Intifada

Pam Rasmussen, 29 December 2009

This time is clearly different.

I have traveled to Gaza twice this year, in groups ranging from 40 to 60 persons, and although there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved in “greasing the wheels” with the Egyptian authorities, we pretty much sailed in. CODEPINK (the group that organized both of my previous trips) developed a well-earned reputation for being able to pull just the right levers to open the doors to the isolated enclave of Gaza — even more so than George Galloway’s Viva Palestina convoy, which is typically allowed in for only 24 to 48 hours (versus our four days).

But too many months have gone by with no change in the crippling isolation of Gaza imposed by Israel and Egypt, and it was time to risk our privileged access to take our efforts to break the siege up a notch. Our numbers had to be massive enough to threaten the jailers’ growing complacence and broad enough to send the message that this is a global movement that won’t stop until the Palestinian people are given the freedom and justice they deserve. Thus, this time CODEPINK allied with a number of other organizations around the world, and the number of participants quickly ballooned to more than 1,300 from 43 countries. Likewise, while we have collected or purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of school supplies, winter clothing and electronic devices (such as computers — currently only available via the tunnels and thus too expensive for the average Palestinian in Gaza), our message is also unapologetically political: the borders must be opened, to everyone, all the time. NOW.

To read the whole article and see the photos, use link above.

Gaza Freedom March Video

NOAM CHOMSKY: “Gaza: One Year Later”

On December 27, 2008, Israel began one of the bloodiest attacks on Gaza Since 1948. The three week assault killed some 1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. One year later, little to no rebuilding has taken place and the siege in Gaza continues.

Speaking in Watertown, Massachusetts on December 6, 2009, linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky delivered a talk entitled “Gaza: One Year Later.”

Thanks to Robbie Leppzer for filming this event.

To watch this video

Egypt controversial Gaza policy: Al Jazeera online

The Egyptian foreign ministry says the Viva Palestina aid convoy to the Gaza Strip must go through the Mediterranean port of Al Arish.
The decision delays the arrival of much needed goods, while criticism continues over its closed border with the territory.
The Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt is the only crossing point into Gaza not subject to Israel’s blockade.
In the past Egypt has helped Palestinians in need to cross the border from Palestine.
However, during Israel’s offensive on the strip at the end of 2008, it would only allow medical supplies in and casualties of war out.
The debate surrounding Cairo’s policy is continuing, as Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh reports.

Email just receieved from Gaza Freedom March people in Cairo

There are actually a number of people on hunger strike. Yesterday before they go the go ahead for moving back to Syria and sailing from there for al Arish there were 30 VP on hunger strike. Not sure how many are on huger strike here but it is more than just wonderful Hedi !

What is worrying me is that we have had hell thrown at us here in Cairo. God only knows what state VP are in … We have been subject to LOCKDOWNS (this is our term) everywhere. In hotels, in bus stations, outside Embassies. I cannot quyite work out how the lid has been kept on things …

Yesterday I was in a group of French people outside the Embassy on the pavement and could not get out of a tiny patch of the pavement. Around 200 of us. We had two toilets! It was hell. As soon as the riot police changed shift an American group came in (were allowed in because of their passports) and I followed them out mingling in … Just to get out … Once out I ran up the road with others making my overweight body move like lightening and then it was straight into a taxi and away … I went bak to day to give support and things were more relaxed … You could move in and out of the camp for toilet use. This has been hell. I went to meet some Left Wing Egyptian journalists two nights ago at the lawyers syndicate (a kind of coffee garden) byt the courts and there were more riot cops than I have ever seen surrounding the place. Inside were about 30 journalist and lawyers and there were line after line of riot cops separating us foreigners from these people … It was like Korea !!!

So if things are not getting out it is not because nothing is happening here. The Egyptian authorities have controlled our movement 24 hours a day … We cannot meet and we have to do everything like theives in the night ! At one point all the boats on the Nile were stopped because they thought we were meeting on several boats !!!

It has been hell … But I tell you this everyone here is solid … We are more for Palestine than ever …

Weekly Protest March from the Mashbir plaza to Sheikh Jarrah – 25-12-09

Following the stone throwing and violence on Friday night, on Saturday settlers attacked the families in Sheikh Jarrah again.
About 50 settlers entered the neighborhood during the day and threw stones at Palestinians. 2 children were injured and sent to the hospital, and several adults were lightly injured. The police that were summoned to the area detained several settlers. As a continuation of the persecution of internationals in the neighborhood, the police also detained an international activist for no reason.

The Israeli activist who was arrested during the demonstration yesterday spent the night in arrest. He will be brought before a judge today at the Magistrate Court in Jerusalem. A solidarity vigil outside the court this evening has already been organized.

As the violence is becoming more severe we could use reinforcements for day and night shifts. We will be happy if you sign up for a shift- Maya 0547423044 or mayou22@gmail.com

Egypt blocks US activists’ march: Al Jazeera online

Gaza Freedom Marchers are campaigning against the siege raised on the Palestinian territory [AFP]
Egyptian security forces have attempted to prevent dozens of US activists from reaching their embassy in Cairo.
Hoping to ask the American ambassador for help in reaching the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, some 41 American citizens instead found themselves surrounded by riot police.
All those rounded up were members of the Gaza Freedom Marchers organisation, a group planning to travel to Gaza to protest an Egyptian and Israeli blockade of the besieged territory.
However, one activist, Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada website, told Al Jazeera that the US embassy did eventually allow US citizens to enter their embassy in groups of ten.
“We met with a political rep. in the embassy, Greg Legrefo, and talked about the dire situation in Gaza and international complicity for more than hour …. but the bottom line is the US supports the siege of Gaza.
“The US Army Corps of Engineers is even providing technical assistance to build an underground wall [to stop the Gaza tunnel networks from operating].”
Demonstration
An impromptu demonstration, reported on the Twitter micro-blogging service, began as soon as police prevented the groups progess on a side street near the embassy, keeping them there for hours.
“We believe the US Embassy asked Egyptian State Security to act against its own citizens and prevent them from entering the Embassy,” Gael Murphy, one of the activists, said.
“We are outraged as US citizens about being detained simply for trying to get to our embassy,” she said.
US embassy spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment.
Organisers of the Gaza Freedom March say 1,300 people from around the world came to Egypt to try to enter Gaza to deliver aid and to participate in a peaceful march protesting the closure of the Gaza Strip’s borders.

Since the activists were told last month that they would not be able to march on Gaza, they have staged a series of small protests around Cairo.
US citizen Hedy Epstein, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, on Monday said she would go on hunger strike to protest Egypt’s refusal to allow the march to proceed.

The BBC has today discovered that something is amiss in Cairo, after many of us have written to them, as listeners, viewers but also as owners of the BBC, a public service broadcaster which we all pay for:

Gaza marchers on hunger strike in Egypt: BBC

Protesters trying to march into Gaza a year after an Israeli offensive are on hunger strike after Egypt blocked them from crossing the border.
Hundreds of people in Cairo have been prevented from getting close to the border with Gaza.
A group who got as far as the Sinai port of El Arish have been detained by the Egyptian police.
A separate convoy of vans delivering medical supplies is stuck in the Jordanian port town of Aqqaba.
At least 38 people of various nationalities were picked up by Egyptian security services in El Arish and held in their hotel rooms, AFP news agency reported.
‘Whatever it takes’
In Cairo hundreds of activists are camped outside the United Nations mission in Cairo trying to get them to pressure the Egyptians to let them cross the border with the Gaza Strip.
The marchers have gone on hunger strike and want the UN to help them
“I’ve never done this before, I don’t know how my body will react, but I’ll do whatever it takes,” 85-year-old Hedy Epstein told AFP.
The American activist is a Holocaust survivor, the agency reported.
Meanwhile a convoy of vans carrying supplies which travelled all the way from London to Jordan has been told by Egyptian officials it must go all the way back to Syria to get into Egypt.
The “Viva Palestina” convoy, led by British MP George Galloway, has been blocked from getting on a ferry from Aqaba to the Egyptian town of Nuweiba where it planned to continue by road to the Rafah border crossing.
But now the convoy faces a potentially budget-draining journey back through Jordan to the Syrian port of Latakia, followed by several ferries to El Arish.
‘Sensitive situation’
Earlier in December, Egypt rejected a request to allow activists to march across the border into the Gaza Strip to mark the anniversary of last year’s conflict.
The Egyptian foreign ministry said the march could not be allowed because of the “sensitive situation” in Gaza.
Over 1,000 activists from 42 countries had signed up to join “the Gaza freedom march” to mark the anniversary of the Israeli military incursion into Gaza last year.
Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed in the 22-day conflict that ended in January, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166.
Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed.
Gaza is under a tight Israeli and Egyptian blockade, tightened since Hamas took over the strip in 2007.
Most medicines are allowed into the territory, but their transfer can be slowed by Israeli and Palestinian bureaucracy, and the entry of medical equipment and other supplies is limited.
The World Health Organization says that at the end of November 2009, 125 of 480 essential drugs were at “zero level”, meaning there was less than one month’s stock left.
Israel says the military operation was – and the continuing blockade is – targeted at Hamas, not Gaza’s civilians.
The Islamist movement has controlled Gaza since June 2007, and has launched thousands of rockets and mortars into Israel in recent years.

The Guardian has found it necessary and acceptable to publish a Palestinian writing on the Gaza situation, only if balanced by an Israeli racist war-monger. Read both below, and also my letter to the Guardian, which I will be most surprised if they publish:

The terrorists’ power has been blunted: The Guardian

But a year after Operation Cast Lead, communities close to the Gaza strip are not naive enough to think the calm is assured

By Shai Hermesh

A year ago, Israeli forces entered Gaza in Operation Cast Lead. The purpose of the operation, regarded in Israel as a success, was to bring an end to eight years of brutal terrorism suffered by communities situated next to the Gaza Strip. These difficult years were marked by the firing of more than 8,000 Qassam rockets and thousands of mortar bombs. These missiles levelled the homes of residents in Sderot and the defenceless rural settlements around the Strip and took a bloody toll on their vulnerable citizens.
About 30 years ago, my wife and I established our home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a few kilometres from the Gaza Strip, and raised our five children. I know what it means to live in the “Gaza envelope” – the communities close to the Gaza Strip that are home to tens of thousands of Israelis. By any measure, the relative calm of the last 12 months does not provide time to heal the wounds of the residents. Some have lost loved ones, others their homes; and many are wounded, often with psychological trauma from which they might never fully recover.
Qassams often hit the ground before the warning sirens sound. When the sirens do work, there remain 15 seconds of grace before a bomb falls, and nobody knows where it will land.
Children born and raised under eight years of terror and uncertainty have learned to pronounce the words of the warning alarm before forming the words “father” and “mother”. They can count to 15 before learning to do so at kindergarten or school. This is a generation who will bear the scars of terrorism to the end. It is a generation for whom every knock on the door or backfiring of a passing car returns them briefly to their nightmares.
A year after the operation, the fields around the communities are today being ploughed in a picture of rural calm. Parents taking children to school do not radiate to the casual visitor a sense of threat. But we fear the calm we have enjoyed since Operation Cast Lead is deceptive. We feel as though we are at the foot of a volcano that could erupt again at any moment without warning.
When we read in the papers about repeated attempts by the terrorists to cross from Gaza into Israel, none of the 50,000 residents of the border region is naive enough to think that the current calm is assured. But for now we are satisfied to use this time to try to heal. The Israeli government, after eight years of pressure from the residents, is building more than 10,000 protected security rooms in anticipation of future attacks.
From the beginning it was clear that an Israeli military operation would arouse more feelings of hatred among the residents of Gaza. However, the feeling in Israel is that – despite the fact that this hatred is a huge political asset for Hamas – it was necessary to blunt the military power of the terrorists. We also knew with sorrow that innocent residents of Gaza might be hurt, but we felt there was no other choice for our government but to act in our defence. For Hamas, targeting Israeli civilians has become a legitimate means of striking at the soft underbelly of Israel. Israelis who live close to the Gaza Strip feel that the free world is indifferent and lazy in not bothering to distinguish between attacker and attacked. The same terrorists who targeted innocent Israelis used innocent Palestinians as human shields.
Instead of the world condemning Hamas for firing deadly rockets from backyards, homes, schools and mosques, the world condemned Israel for daring to attack the sources of fire.
Israeli papers have reported the economic improvements in Sderot and the surrounding rural settlements over the last year. Most of the population did not abandon their homes, and those who did have returned. The Sderot college, one of Israel’s largest, has expanded its numbers; but even here you will find things you don’t expect to see in a university campus. The classrooms are protected by thick walls, and sirens are ready to sound the alert. Scattered round the campus are signs instructing people what to do when they hear the alarm.
Unfortunately while we are trying to return to a normal life, on the other side of the border Hamas is rearming through tunnels and smuggling from the sea. Now they are experimenting with long-range missiles to spread our experience of living under threat to hundreds of thousands of citizens of Israel.

This is not humane. We need dignity: The Guardian

A year on from Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza blockade is preventing people from leading a minimally respectable civil life
Sami Abdel-Shafi
On my way to visit a friend in the Abed Rabbo district, north of the Gaza Strip, the taxi driver handed me a small pack of biscuits for change. There are nearly no copper coins left here so cab drivers barter a half Israeli shekel for biscuits brought in from the tunnels between the southern city of Rafah and Egypt’s northern Sinai. Some Gazans, who once earned a respectable living, resorted to melting coins and sold the copper for food supplies.
This was not the first time I was forced into arcane methods of barter. A few weeks ago I was told that oil filters for our British-made electricity generator could only be brought in through the tunnels. One alternative was to fit a refurbished car-engine filter to the generator.
We had wood-fired coffee next to the rubble of my friend’s family’s former homes – all levelled during Israel’s three-week war on Gaza that started one year ago. His only source of income, a taxi, was crushed by Israeli tanks during the assault. He agonises about how his children no longer respect him as their father. He is unable to provide them with the security of a house and an independent family life; they lost everything.
The family is spread around relatives’ homes. But the family’s old man just moved into a 60sq m house built from mud and brick, standing next to the rubble of his 400sq m three-story house for which he saved for a lifetime. It was one of the first the UN Relief and Works Agency built after having seemingly lost hope in any Israeli intention to allow construction materials into Gaza. My friend’s daughter earns the highest grades in her class and is eyeing a scholarship for one of the universities in Gaza when she leaves high school. But this young woman’s resilience and motivation will go nowhere as long as Gaza is blockaded.
Almost nothing has been more deceitful than casting Gaza as a humanitarian case. This is becoming exponentially more problematic a year after the war. Gaza urgently needs far more than merely those items judged by the Israeli military as adequate to satisfy Gaza’s humanitarian needs. This list of allowable items is tiny compared to people’s needs for a minimally respectable civil life.
Gaza is not treated humanely; the immediate concerns about the situation have clearly given way to long-term complacency, while failed politics has now become stagnant. The humanitarian classification conceals the urgent need to address this. Moreover, many in the international community have conveniently resorted to blaming Palestinians for their political divisions, as though they were unrelated to Israel’s policies – most notably Gaza’s closure after Israeli disengagement in 2005.
It seems evident that most officials in the US, UK and other powerful nations in Europe and the Middle East do not – or perhaps cannot – pressure Israel to reverse its policy of forcing Palestinians into eternal statelessness. How Palestinians are forced into degrading living standards in Gaza, and how they have no means to repel the ongoing demolition and confiscation of property and land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is abhorrent. How Palestinians are still divided despite the increased suffering of their people is no less abhorrent. However, no one should fool themselves into believing that their reconciliation would alter Israel’s policy.
The international community must surely adopt a new approach – where it would not be seen as acquiescent to Israel’s policies. If the current policy continues then, at least, let it not be at the expense of Palestinian self-respect. Palestinians are a dignified people, as competitive and civilised as any other people in the world. It is far too humiliating for Palestinians to endure not only being occupied but to be made beggars
For years it has been impossible not to suspect that Israel does not want peace. Of late, the US-backed state has consistently created impossible conditions for fair and equal negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and it continues to undermine moderate voices and drive people towards extremism in Gaza. The fact that Palestinians still genuinely want peace should not allow Israel to reject the simplest rules of civility. The US and the EU should come to Gaza; then they could draw their own conclusions on an Israeli policy they have backed and funded without ever witnessing its consequences on ordinary civilians’ lives. Surely then they could not fail to see that changing their policy is a moral imperative.

Haim Bresheeth’s letter to the Guardian

I was very surprised to learn that the Guardian (“The terrorists’ power has been blunted”, December 29, 2009) found it necessary to publish a piece, which I assume was commissioned, by the Israeli war-monger Shai Hermesh, well known in Israel for his calling for the kind of operation undertaken by Israel a year ago; immoral, illegal and brutal as it was, it has not, as he argued, ‘resolve the problem’. The problem, of course, is not the Qassam rockets, which in eight years have killed less people in Israel than die in a single weekend of road accidents. The problem is Israel’s continued, brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine. To read Mr. Hermesh, one gets the impression that what was faced by the Israelis around Gaza was worse than a combination of Auschwitz, the Blitz and Hiroshima, when in reality, the ones facing the Blitz are the Palestinians in Gaza, who had over one hundred dead (over 1400) for each Israeli killed (13, 4 of those killed by the IDF itself…). The idea of paralleling the two articles is also quite disturbing, I must admit. This equality of voice and stance is sickening. Would the Guardian think of giving a voice to a supporter of Apartheid beside a voice against it, in the 1980’s? Would it make sense, indeed, to give an equal voice to a Nazi propagandist, beside a Jew writing about Kristalnacht in 1938? To equate occupier and occupied, the powerful and the powerless, is unwise not only on moral grounds, but also on political ones.
I have a Dean at Sapir College, then controlled by Mr. Hermesh, until 2001, when I have left Israel because of its racist and aggressive policies, which I was always against, and could no longer stomach. Mr. Hermesh not only supported the illegal occupation, but was a consistent voice fanning the flames of conflict, and the fact you have chosen him to illuminate your readers on Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza, is highly questionable. While you are quite happy to give him a voice, you seem reluctant to afford the same right to those Jewish and Israeli voices of reason, arguing against Israeli atrocities, war crimes, and the continued illegal occupation. You may wish to review such a stance, if you wish to contribute to a lasting, just peace in the Middle East.

Prof. Haim Bresheeth

University of East London

The Guardian moderator has removed my letter and all the replies to it! I have now inserted it again… Comment is Free?

Continue reading December 29, 2009