Category: Gaza

UN School of Etiquette: How to Conduct an “Appropriate” Blockade

Just as I arrived in Bil’in for the Friday weekly demonstration, word came that the UN Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry on the 31 May 2010 Flotilla Incident (a.k.a. “The Palmer Committee Report”) has named the blockade of the Gaza Strip “legal and appropriate”. Which is rather surprising, seeing as the blockade was defined by the UN as “illegal” as well as  “illegal and inhumane”, time and time again. (And again.)

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Outsourcing the Gaza blockade

Huwaida Arraf, chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement International Flotilla Committee, was great on this edition of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story discussing the global BDS movement and Greece’s role in aiding Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

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Gaza Flotilla: The Media Battle in Israel

Lia Tarachansky reports for The Real News Network:

Gaza mobilizes for Freedom Flotilla

by Joe Catron

Palestinian children in Gaza rally in support of the Freedom Flotilla (Photo: Noor Harazeen)

An international flotilla of nine ships and hundreds of crew and passengers is a huge undertaking, in Gaza as much as anywhere. Mahmoud Elmadhoun knows this better than most. A member of Gaza’s Higher Government Committee, as well as the Governmental Committee for Breaking the Siege and Receiving Delegations (GCBS), which is tasked with welcoming solidarity missions to Gaza, he just finished hosting the Miles of Smiles convoy of 55 European dentists. Now he could face one of the most daunting challenges in the GCBS’ history: Freedom Flotilla – Stay Human.

“The main issue is whether the Israelis will let the Flotilla come,” Elmadhoun told me last Monday in his office in the Foreign Ministry. Their reception in Gaza, he assured me, was not a question. “We are ready to receive those people. Don’t worry; within 24 hours’ notice of their departure from Athens, everything will be in place.”

He quickly rattled off the GCBS’ responsibilities in the Flotilla effort. “Our main tasks are logistical: hotels, transportation, security, and of course activities,” he said. “Wherever they want to go in Gaza, they will be welcomed.”

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An Open Letter to Senator Mark Kirk on the Gaza Flotilla

An Open Letter to Illinois Senator Mark Kirk
responding to his call for U.S. Special Forces to attack a flotilla of ships that will sail to Gaza

Senator Mark Kirk
524 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510

June 29th, 2011

Dear Senator Kirk,

We are Illinois residents writing to you from Athens, Greece. Just before leaving the United States, we wrote to inform your office about our intent to sail on “The Audacity of Hope,” as part of the US Boat to Gaza project.  In our letters, we explained why we were traveling to Gaza.  We told you of our previous experiences living among Palestinians who lack access to basic necessities, such as clean water, because of the blockade. Referring to Gaza as the world’s largest open-air prison, we mentioned how hard it has been for people to rebuild after previous lethal assaults, especially the Operation Cast Lead attack which ended, after 23 days, on January 18, 2009.  According to B’tselem, the foremost Israeli Human Rights Organization, Operation Cast Lead caused the deaths of 1,389 Palestinians in Gaza.  Of those, 344 were children. Of the 13 Israelis who were killed, four were soldiers killed by friendly fire.

Knowing that you and your staff care deeply about the consequences of unemployment, poor education and dangerously limited health care delivery, we pointed out related statistics affecting people in Gaza where 45% of the population is unemployed and hospital administrators are sounding the alarm because they are running out of crucial medicines.  Half of Gaza’s 1.6 million people are under age 18.

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CrossTalk on Gaza: Flotilla 2.0

Ali Abunimah and Chris Gunness on RT’s CrossTalk discussing the Freedom Flotilla’s mission to break the siege of Gaza.

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Criminalising Palestinian solidarity

(Gallo/Getty)

The Electronic Intifada’s Maureen Murphy writes today at Al Jazeera:

The United States government has criminalised the Palestinian people, and now it is increasingly treating US citizens who stand in solidarity with Palestine as criminals as well – including those courageously putting their lives on the line to break the siege on Gaza.

I am a Palestine solidarity activist in the US, and one of 23 US citizens who have been issued with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury as part of what the government has said is an investigation into violations of the laws banning material support to foreign “terrorist organisations”.

None of us have given money or weapons to any group on the State Department’s foreign terrorist organisation list. But what many of us have done is participate in or help organise educational trips to meet with Palestinians and Colombians resisting the US-funded military regimes they live under.”

Murphy goes on to discuss the process of criminalisation as well as the green light U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given to Israel to attack the Second Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Click here to read the piece in its entirety.

Of course the Flotilla is a political provocation

by Joe Catron

As the launch of the Freedom Flotilla – Stay Human approaches, increasing numbers of Zionist officials and commentators illuminate the depths of their moral and intellectual bankruptcy by arguing that it is a political – not humanitarian – project.

Ran Curiel, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, offers an example as good as any other. On May 10, he actually went to the trouble of calling a press conference in Strasbourg to offer this conclusion. “In our view, the flotilla is clearly a political provocation … since there’s no need for a flotilla to aid Gaza,” he said. “You can pass whatever you want to Gaza through normal channels.”

Curiel’s reasoning leaves much to be desired. Nobody seems entirely clear on what can enter Gaza through his “normal channels,” namely the Erez Crossing, and a large majority of its necessities continue to arrive at a high premium via tunnels from Egypt. And humanitarian opposition to the siege has always had more to do with its crippling effect on Gaza’s economy than its obstruction of aid. Due to the impossibility of legally importing most goods, or exporting nearly anything, unemployment now reaches 45%, and 300,000 people survive on a dollar a day.

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Don’t Look Away: The Siege of Gaza Must End

by Kathy Kelly

In late June 2011, I’m going to be a passenger on “The Audacity of Hope,” the USA boat in this summer’s international flotilla to break the illegal and deadly Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers, supporters and passengers aim to nonviolently end the brutal collective punishment imposed on Gazan residents since 2006 when the Israeli government began a stringent air, naval and land blockade of the Gaza Strip explicitly to punish Gaza’s residents for choosing the Hamas government in a democratic election.  Both the Hamas and the Israeli governments have indiscriminately killed civilians in repeated attacks, but the vast preponderance of these outrages over the length of the conflict have been inflicted by Israeli soldiers and settlers on unarmed Palestinians.  I was witness to one such attack when last in Gaza two years ago, under heavy Israeli bombardment in a civilian neighborhood in Rafah.

In January 2009, I lived with a family in Rafah during the final days of the “Operation Cast Lead” bombing.  We were a few streets down from an area where there was heavy bombing. Employing its ever-replenished stockpile of U.S. weapons, the Israeli government sought to destroy tunnels beneath the Egyptian border through which food, medicine, badly-needed building supplies, and possibly a few weapons as well were evading the internationally condemned blockade and entering Gaza.

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