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?
The New York Times has not yet discovered that something has taken place in Cairo and Jordan over the last week. This could not be the result of bias, could it? Well, one hopes they read the Guardian and find out… if you don’t believe this, check for yourself:
New York Times reports nothing at all about Gaza/Cairo/Viva Palestina
Egypt blocks travel of Gaza Freedom March activists: The Electronic Intifada
Report, 28 December 2009
Activist and Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein is amongst those prevented from traveling to Gaza by the Egyptian authorities. (Ali Abunimah) CAIRO (IRIN) – More than 1,000 persons from 42 countries who have vowed to travel from Cairo to the Gaza Strip on 31 December in a bid to highlight and break the Israeli economic blockade, will be prevented from carrying out their mission, according to the Egyptian authorities.
The protesters hope to bring aid to the 1.5 million residents of Gaza a year after Israel’s 23-day offensive ended on 18 January 2009.
“It’s a shame on Egypt to prevent these people from entering Gaza, which has been suffering this Israeli blockade for a long time now,” Diaaeddin Gad, a spokesman for the activists, told IRIN.
On 27 December, the marchers were prevented by police from floating 1,400 candles on the River Nile to commemorate the deaths of 1,400 Palestinian victims of the offensive.
Margaret Hawthorn, 62, who flew in from Massachusetts in the US to take part in the event, said she was stunned to discover she would not be allowed to show solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza. “It’s important that we come here to express support for the people of Gaza,” she told IRIN.
She was one of some 1,360 persons — including doctors, lawyers, diplomats, rabbis, imams, a women’s delegation, a Jewish contingent, a veterans group and Palestinians born overseas — due to take part in the event on 31 December organized by Gaza Freedom March, a coalition of activists of all faiths focusing on human rights.
Police also prevented the activists from staging a protest outside Egypt’s Bar Association in central Cairo.
“This is so contradictory,” said Nikos Progonlis, a Greek man who came to Cairo with his wife for the march. “Egypt declares its support to the people of Gaza on the one hand, but asks us not to march for Gaza on the other. I really can’t understand that.” He said friends of his who wanted to come to Cairo via the Egyptian city of al-Arish had been arrested earlier in the day.
Other activists said many people had been denied Egyptian visas.
Steel barrier
Tensions between Gaza activists and the Egyptian authorities are already high because of a recent Egyptian decision to build an underground steel barrier along its part of the border with the Strip — designed to prevent the smuggling of arms and goods through underground tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit defended the barrier, calling it a “national security issue,” and others have publicly condemned the Gaza activists.
“Some of these convoys contain radical people from several countries who can cause trouble if they are let in,” Sherif Hafez, an Egyptian political analyst and specialist on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, told IRIN. “These people want to spoil Egypt-Israeli relations.”
“Egypt is just taking its orders from Israel,” activists’ spokesman Gad said. “It would never have prevented us from entering Gaza and would never have built this barrier if Israel had not wanted that.”
A report in August 2009 by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) detailed the humanitarian effects of the blockade, which has been in place since 2007.
This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
From a tent to a mud house in Gaza: The Electronic Intifada
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 29 December 2009
Majid al-Athamna, 70, stands next to his new home in Gaza’s Izbet Abed Rabbo neighborhood of Jabaliya. Since the Israeli attack one year ago, which destroyed his family’s three-story building, he and his family lived in a tent.
The al-Athamna family’s new home is made of mud. It is part of an effort by UNRWA — the UN agency for Palestine refugees — to cope with the fact that due to the ongoing Israeli blockade only 41 trucks of building supplies have been allowed in to Gaza during the entire past year. This negligible quantity cannot begin to make a dent in the massive need to rebuild thousands of homes, schools, public buildings and basic infrastructure targeted by Israeli bombing.
Estimates put the number of Palestinians in Gaza still displaced at around 40,000. Many live in tent camps erected by the UN, while others are staying with relatives or friends.
UNRWA plans to build more houses like the one the 10-member al-Athamna family now occupies, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. According to UNRWA officials, the mud houses cost around $18,000 each to build, using locally-made mud bricks as well as salvaged bricks from destroyed homes. Cement and iron — normally used in building in Gaza, but now in desperately short supply due to the siege — are not required.
Majid al-Athamna is relieved that his family now has a home, but said “we are still overwhelmed by this desperate situation.” He expressed his anger at what Israel did to his and so many other families. “Those who destroy homes of helpless civilians can never be called democratic,” he said.
Al-Athamna’s daughter Suha sat preparing maftoul, a traditional Palestinian version of couscous, in the new home’s kitchen. “Thank God, this house is so much better than the tent. I do look forward to living in peace and security, and I hope the Israelis will not attack us again.”
Um Raed al-Athamna, Majid’s wife, spoke about how her high blood pressure and diabetes had worsened while living in the tent. “Now at least we have walls to protect us from the heat and cold,” she said.
The al-Athamna home is the first UNRWA-sponsored mud house in Gaza. The Hamas government has also initiated small-scale reconstruction mostly focused on rebuilding government buildings bombed by Israel.
The Minister of Housing and Construction in the Hamas government, Yousif al-Mansi, told The Electronic Intifada that mud brick houses are somewhat expensive and inefficient because the technique does not allow buildings to be very tall. In the crowded Gaza Strip, there is a need for higher-density buildings.
In March 2008, donors including the United States, European countries and some Arab states pledged $4 billion dollars for reconstruction in Gaza, but this aid has yet to flow into Gaza because of the Israeli siege.
For the al-Athamna family at least, their new home means no more nights in a tent, even if, as Um Raed said, they are still refugees: “We Palestinians have not been living normally as others in this world. Enough of us being pushed from one refuge to another!”
Portuguese activists fight state water company deal with Israel’s Mekorot: The Electronic Intifada
Adri Nieuwhof, 28 December 2009
In October, EPAL, Portugal’s state water company, announced a deal with Mekorot, Israel’s state water company. An intern who responded to the news by informing colleagues of Mekorot’s role in Israel’s discriminatory water policies and assistance in its violation of international law was immediately sacked. News of the firing has inspired Palestine solidarity activists to campaign to end the deal. Similarly, the EPAL workers’ committee has denounced management’s decision.
EPAL’s actions have also drawn the attention of the influential Portuguese newspaper Diario de Noticias. In an article published on 20 November, EPAL’s public relations director Jose Zenha admitted that the intern would only have been warned for using the internal communication system for circulating information if her message would have favorable for the company.
Following the intern’s dismissal, the Portuguese Solidarity Committee on Palestine (PSCP) has jumped into action by sending a letter to EPAL on Mekorot’s actions in Palestine, calling on the company to end the deal. EPAL replied, stating that it did not want to get involved in politics.
Meanwhile, PSCP has formed a coalition to fight the contract, including the local chapter of Amnesty International, anti-war groups and the Portuguese Campaign Against the Privatization of Water. On 27 November, the coalition dispatched a letter to EPAL stating that the collaboration between the company and Mekorot is not only contrary to international and European law, but also to EPAL’s social responsibility policies. The coalition has also requested a meeting with EPAL’s Zenha to discuss the matter, which Zenha refused. He only stated that EPAL intends “to strictly adhere to Portuguese, European and international law in all its activities.”
The PSCP has been actively reaching out to government ministers and members of parliament. Since EPAL is a subsidiary of the state water company Agua de Portugal, the PSCP asked Dulce Passaro, the Minister of Environment, for clarification on the deal. The PSCP’s request received spontaneous support from three political parties and coalition activists also met with concerned parliamentarians who were supportive of their efforts to end the Mekorot deal. Parliamentarians and the coalition are currently awaiting clarification from Minister Passaro.
On 18 December, the coalition also obtained support from the Sindicato Nacional des Trabalhadores da Administracao Local (STAL), the trade union of workers in local government. In a letter to Prime Minister Jose Socrates and Passaro, STAL explained that the EPAL-Mekorot contract is “not a purely commercial agreement.” Citing international reports, STAL asserted that Israeli water policy as implemented by Mekorot is contributing to systematic violations of international law and prevents the Palestinian people’s access to sufficient water by force and through imposition of various discriminatory practices. STAL expressed its support for the campaign to end the deal stating that it is “an agreement that is immoral and should end immediately” and demanded that the government take the necessary steps to terminate that agreement.
Building on these efforts over the past two months, the Portuguese coalition began raising international support for its campaign, including the publication of an international call for action to oppose the Portuguese water deal with Mekorot. Among the organizations in support of the call is Amnesty International, whose central office responded by sending a protest letter to EPAL.
Adri Nieuwhof is an independent consultant based in Switzerland.
The Israelis are now in the advanced stages of preparing the Third Intifada, so that no one can put any pressure on them. Not that there was any pressure being put on them that I have noticed…
Shin Bet chief: Third intifada unlikely in near future: Ha’aretz
The probability that Israel will fall victim to a wave of Palestinian terrorism in the near future on the scale of an intifada remains low, the head of the Shin Bet security service told lawmakers in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
In an appearance before the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee, Yuval Diskin said Hamas is clamping down on rocket attacks against Israel though it continues to amass a stockpile of anti-aircraft missiles and rockets that can reach the country’s major population centers.
Diskin said the Islamist organization, which ousted rival Fatah in a June 2007 coup in the Gaza Strip, continues to dig tunnels underneath the Gaza-Egypt border.
“Hamas will decide when to employ terrorism against Israel,” Diskin said.
The Shin Bet chief also told members of Knesset that at this stage, the probability that a third intifada would erupt is low.
According to Diskin, a wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians would only come about in response to provocative events, like vandalism or damage to a mosque; the appointment of jailed Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti to a senior position in the Palestinian Authority; or the absence of a diplomatic process.
Diskin noted that there was a significant expansion of activities by jihadist Islamic organizations in the Gaza Strip.
The Shin Bet chief said Israel’s decision to freeze construction in West Bank settlements falls short of meeting Palestinian preconditions for renewing peace negotiations.
“From the Palestinian point of view, the government decision [to freeze settlements] does not represent a basis for jumpstarting the diplomatic process,” Diskin said. “In order for there to be a basis, there also has to be a statement about Jerusalem.”
“Today there is a complete lack of trust between the Palestinian Authority on one hand and the U.S. and Israel on the other,” the Shin Bet chief said. “Abu Mazen is still adhering to negotiations and he is looking for a way to save face, but there has yet to materialize a way for him to do that.”
“From Abu Mazen’s point of view, the precondition is the resumption of diplomatic negotiations from the point at which they broke off during talks with [former prime minister Ehud] Olmert, but he wants the same terms which he presented, namely the same understandings he reached with the previous prime minister. From his standpoint, this is the key condition on this matter.”
Diskin said on Monday that closing the Shalit deal will be a great achievement for Hamas but it will not bring down Abbas.
Speaking to Israeli ambassadors gathered at the Foreign Ministry, Diskin said the Shin Bet security service does not believe a third intifada is about to break out in the territories at this stage.
“The Shalit deal would be a slap in the face for Abbas and a great public opinion achievement for Hamas,” Diskin said. He was answering Dorit Shavit, the Foreign Ministry’s Deputy Director General for Latin America, who asked how the Shalit deal would effect Abbas’ status.
“But on the other hand, Abbas realizes this is going to happen and is preparing himself for it. In any case, it won’t topple him,” he said.
Diskin did not refer to the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit, but hinted at his position on releasing the former Fatah secretary in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti. “Barghouti was the spirit behind the second intifada, not Arafat as people tend to think,” he said. “The problem is that the intifada spun out of his control.”
Diskin spoke about the present situation in the Palestinian Authority and the shaky relations between Hamas and Fatah. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are more divided today than ever before, he said.
“Abbas is weak but there is no substitute for him at this stage,” he said. “Abbas painted himself into a corner because he thought the Americans would bring him everything he wanted on a silver platter, and if there’s no one to extract him from that corner he may really resign,” he said.
Diskin mentioned three possible heirs for Abbas. The first is Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa), who received a harsh blow in Fatah’s primary election and is not very popular today. The second is Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who, not being a Fatah man, would find it difficult to succeed Abbas. The third is a senior Fatah official in Tunis, Muhammad “Abu Maher” Ghneim, a former opponent of Abbas who has since grown closer to him. “He is seen as not involved in any corruption,” Diskin noted.
The Israeli ambassadors also visited the President’s Residence Monday and heard a lecture from President Shimon Peres.
“I heard there are people who say the Oslo agreement was bad,” Peres said, alluding sarcastically to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s calling the Olso Accords “a fantasy” and “an illusion.”
“I think the Oslo agreement was good,” Peres said.
Peres also blasted – indirectly – Lieberman’s policy to have the Foreign Ministry launch an aggressive public relations campaigning against anyone who criticizes Israel.
“The problem isn’t public relations,” he said. “The problem is the policy. Policy can be the best PR and if the peace talks are resumed all the public relations problems would be solved,” he said.
Egypt denies U.S. rights activists entry to Gaza: Ha’aretz
Egyptian security forces on Tuesday prevented dozens of American activists from reaching the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where they hoped to ask the ambassador to help them reach the Gaza Strip.
Riot police surrounded 41 U.S. citizens and one Egyptian trying to reach the coastal strip to protest Egypt and Israel’s blockade of the territory, preventing them from approaching the embassy.
The police stopped the activists on a side street near the embassy and kept them there for hours, before allowing them to see consular officials in groups of 10 at a time.
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“We have three people inside the embassy right now. We believe the U.S. embassy asked Egyptian state security to act against its own citizens and prevent them from entering the Embassy,” Gael Murphy, one of the activists, told the German Press Agency dpa.
“We are outraged as U.S. citizens about being detained simply for trying to get to our embassy,” she said.
U.S. embassy spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment.
Organizers 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.
U.S. 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.
While The Independent found it unnecessary to relate even with one word to the anniversary of the Gaza carnage, they published this on the same date…
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.
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.”
Gaza Freedom March Members Gain a Small Taste of the Palestinian Experience: The Huffington Post
Gaza Freedom March participants, numbering 1,360 people from 42 countries, have assembled in Cairo, Egypt, where they plan to break the Israeli imposed siege on Gaza by delivering humanitarian relief supplies, on December 31st. After passing through the Rafah border crossing which divides Egypt and Gaza, they aim to join 50,000 Palestinians in a march across the Gaza Strip, ending at the Erez border crossing which leads into Israel.
But, the Egyptian government has dispersed peaceable assemblies that the marchers organized, in Cairo, and detained activists in multiple locations. Egyptian authorities previously issued permits for public actions, but have now revoked all permits and refused permission for any members of the Gaza Freedom March to even approach the border between Egypt and Gaza. Yesterday, they broke up a gathering of people who were commemorating the 1,409 Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli military’s “Operation Cast Lead” assault that began last year, December 27th, and continued for 22 days.
“We’re saddened that the Egyptian authorities have blocked our participants’ freedom of movement and interfered with a peaceful commemoration of the dead,” said Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, one of the March’s organizers.
Benjamin added that the Gaza Freedom March participants are continuing to urge the Egyptian government to allow them to proceed to Gaza. They visited the Arab League asking for support, various foreign embassies and the Presidential Palace to deliver an appeal to President Mubarak. They are calling their supporters around the world to contact Egyptian embassies and urge them to free the marchers and allow them to proceed to Gaza.
Gaza Freedom March coordinators and participants are weighing alternative plans while continuing to call for assistance from various Embassies. Three hundred French delegation members have camped overnight at the French Embassy in Cairo and are still maintaining their presence despite being encircled by three rows of Egyptian riot police. The U.S. delegation has been unable to approach the U.S. Embassy, which was cordoned off and surrounded by police immediately after U.S. delegation members arrived in Cairo.
Hedy Epstein, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, from St. Louis, MO, has begun a hunger strike, in Cairo, and intends to continue her fast until the Egyptians decide to open the border.
“Despite the massive interferences, the marchers have not been deterred and will continue to advocate for the people of Gaza,” writes Josh Brollier, a member of the Free Gaza March and co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. “Though these setbacks have been frustrating to the delegates who came to show solidarity with Palestinians, they are just a small taste of the Palestinian experience and can scarcely compare to the daily hardships imposed on the people of Gaza by the devastating Israeli siege and illegal occupation.”