On Friday, March 28th the villagers of al-Masara will hold a non-violent demonstration to commemorate Land Day and voice their opposition to the annexation wall and settlement expansion. This will be the 60th demonstration held in the village since 2007.
Land Day falls on March 30 and marks the 1976 killings of Palestinian Israelis who were holding non-violent demonstrations against Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land. The Israeli army and Israeli police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing six. Since then, March 30 has been a celebration of Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation and continued land theft.
Israel’s most successful land theft tools are the annexation wall and the settlements. Al-Masara is highly affected by both, with much of the village’s land stolen by the wall and the settlement of Efrat very nearby. The villagers will be demonstrating against the wall as well as Israel’s recent approval for Efrat to build 54 new units on the confiscated land of al-Masara.
The people of al-Masara are inviting Palestinian, international, and Israeli activists to join them on Friday at 10:30 AM at the entrance to the village of al-Marasa, near Umm Salamona, in the Hebron district. The demonstrators will march to the wall and hold the demonstration there.
For more information, please contact Mahmoud Jawara at 0522591386 or 0599586004.
The ISM media office can also be contacted at 022 971 824.
Blake Murphy, an American activist from Bedford, MA, working in the West Bank, was beaten and arrested by Israeli army and police forces on Friday 14th March 2008. He has had to face a series of evidently false charges from the Israeli authorities due to his work supporting non-violent resistance to the occupation of Palestine. He was deported to the United States on Friday 21st March after a week in detention. While in custody, Blake has had many of his legal rights abused by the Israeli authorities.
Blake was arrested while attending the weekly demonstration in the village of Bi’lin, where the separation wall annexes much of the Palestinians’ land. Blake was singled out for arrest during the demonstration by the Israeli forces. He was violently assaulted and pepper sprayed before being taken away and subsequently arrested. Blake was then beaten and abused by the soldiers while handcuffed.
Upon arriving at the detention center, after being beaten and sprayed in the eyes with mace, Blake was interrogated while still recovering from the effects of the mace. The police only offered him water to rinse the mace from his eyes, which only makes the effects of the mace worse. There have been days when Blake has been given only bread as a meal.
Injuries inflicted by Israeli solders on Blake Murphy were severe enough that he was taken to the hospital. He appeared in court on the 15th of March, where the judge prolonged his detention until the 18th March. He was told that he would have to reappear in court on the 18th. Blake was woken up on the 18th at 5:00am and taken from the detention center to the court. He was held there for 8 hours, three hours past the time he was told he would appear, locked in a room with only 8 chairs and 15 other people. At the end of this long day, Blake was informed that a mistake had been made and there had never been an appearance scheduled for him on that day. While in custody, Blake has been denied a translator in court, been brought before a judge without his lawyer being informed, and also been made to appear for a trial that was cancelled without him being informed.
Blake Murphy had been working for the last 8 and a half months in the Palestinian Occupied Territories with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). For over 6 months he was working as the full-time media coordinator for the ISM and was therefore highly involved in supporting Palestinian non-violent resistance towards the occupation. It is for this reason that he was targeted by the Israeli authorities and has undergone such inhumane treatment.
TO: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, NY (sent by fax)
SUBJ: Cancel March 18 “Friends of IDF Fundraiser” over Israeli human rights violations
DATE: March 11, 2008
As thirteen organizations working for human rights, social justice, and peace, we demand that The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan rescind its agreement to host the March 18 fundraiser for “Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.” The Israeli military has been historically a flagrant violator of human rights and international law as demonstrated by last week’s attack on Gaza which killed over 100 Palestinians, the 2006 attack on Lebanon, and the 60-year assault on and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
We call on The Waldorf-Astoria to adhere to standards of corporate social responsibility that prohibit support for violators of laws and human rights. Among other activities, “Friends of the Israel Defense Forces” explains on its website that it helps to establish and renovate facilities on Israeli army bases. We are shocked that a respected institution like The Waldorf-Astoria would host a fundraiser benefiting a foreign armed group, especially one guilty of egregious human rights violations. We question if The Waldorf-Astoria would facilitate fundraising for armed groups from other foreign countries.
The human rights violations committed by the Israeli military over the past 60 years are severe. Last week the respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported that, “From 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the [Israeli] Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.” Furthermore, during last week’s fighting, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened Gaza’s people with “a bigger holocaust.”
As Human Rights Watch noted in a detailed 2005 report, “Promoting Impunity,” “The Israeli military has fostered a climate of impunity in its ranks by failing to thoroughly investigate whether soldiers have killed and injured Palestinian civilians unlawfully or failed to protect them from harm… Israeli forces have killed or seriously injured thousands of Palestinians who were not taking part in the hostilities. However, the Israeli authorities have investigated fewer than five percent of the fatal incidents to determine whether soldiers were responsible for using force unlawfully. The investigations they did conduct fell far short of international standards for independent and impartial inquiries.”
While we grieve for all the Israeli military’s recent Palestinian and Lebanese victims, we note with sadness that the Waldorf-Astoria event falls days after the fifth anniversary, on March 16th, of the army’s killing of US civilian Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli-army-operated Caterpillar bulldozer while blocking the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family in Gaza.
The March 18 fundraiser praising a military that has conducted a 41-year occupation also falls a few hours before the fifth anniversary of the attack and occupation of Iraq by the United States, Israel’s closest ally and provider of military aid. Israel and the US’ military occupations of Palestine and Iraq and their accompanying human rights abuses are not causes to celebrate. We must pressure these governments to end both military occupations.
The Israeli military also enforces a discriminatory, apartheid system. For example, in the West Bank the army is directly involved in the seizure of Palestinian land to build colonial settlements for Jews only as well as Israel’s wall, all in violation of international law. Palestinian communities which have conducted long nonviolent campaigns to prevent the seizure of their land like Bil’in, Budrus, Biddu, Beit Liqya, Al Zawiyya, Jayyous and Um Salomona, have suffered ten deaths and hundreds of injuries at the hands of the military. Since 1948, in violation of international laws guaranteeing refugee rights, Israel’s military has prevented the return of the over 800,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants, now numbering in the millions, who were driven from their homes by Jewish militias and the Israeli army.
In Lebanon, Human Rights watch reported in September, 2007 that “Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes… caused most of the approximately 900 civilian deaths in Lebanon during the July-August 2006 war.” A February, 2008 report by Human Rights Watch “found that Israel violated international humanitarian law in its indiscriminate and disproportionate cluster munition attacks on Lebanon.” Israel dropped “as many as 4.6 million submunitions across southern Lebanon… the vast majority over the final three days of the war when Israel knew a settlement was imminent… causing long-term and large-scale disruption of the largely agricultural economy,” and “about 200 civilian casualties since the war’s end.”
Finally, as many of our groups have recently affirmed, Israel’s ongoing use of U.S. weapons to enforce an illegal military occupation and to commit human rights abuses places it in violation of US law, specifically the Arms Export Control Act and Foreign Assistance Act.
Corporations have a responsibility to uphold human rights and international law. In light of the Israeli military’s longstanding and repeated failure to respect accepted laws and norms, we call on The Waldorf-Astoria to rescind its decision to host the March 18 fundraiser for “Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.”
Signed by,
Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (www.mideastjustice.org)
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee-New York (www.adcnewyork.org/)
Arab Muslim American Federation
Combatants for Peace (www.combatantsforpeace.org)
Jews Against the Occupation-NYC (www.jato.nyc.org)
Jewish Voice for Peace (www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org)
National Council of Arab-Americans – Metropolitan New York Chapter
Palestinian American Congress – New York
Rachel’s Words (www.rachelswords.org)
Troops Out Now Coalition (www.troopsoutnow.org)
United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace.org)
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (www.endtheoccupation.org)
Palestinian Youth Network (PYN), Paz Ahora, and ISM Spain
March 5, 2008
Breaking the Siege of Gaza, Taking to the Streets
After three and a half weeks of waiting at Rafah with much needed medicines for Gaza, on the evening of Wednesday, March 5, Saif Abu Keshek, General Coordinator of the Palestinian Youth Network (PYN) managed to enter the besieged Gaza Strip. Carrying 50,000 euros worth of medicines unavailable or in very short supply in Gaza, Saif has been at Rafah since February 12, 2008, waiting for permission to enter, each day told to wait a little longer. “I finally made it in,” said Saif, “but there are tons more aid for Gaza in dozens of trucks, still held up at the border.”
Last week’s Israeli military onslaught on Gaza, which killed over 120 Palestinians, many of them women and children, was met with deafening silence from government leaders and international agencies. This reality should not only sadden and enrage us, but also make us realize how important it is that civil society steps up to defend human rights in the face of organized impotence. Saif’s entry into Gaza shows that the siege can be broken, but it needs pressure and persistence and pressure, which governments and the United Nations are not willing to exert. Currently that is not happening, and as the situation worsens, foreign journalists are being told to leave the Strip.
On the evening of Sunday, March 2, Palestinians young and old took to the streets of Ramallah banging loudly on pots and pans, blowing whistles, and screaming for people to wake up! Wake up we must. We must wake up and believe that we indeed have the power to effect change; then we must organize to show our representatives and decision-makers our strength.
Things that you can do:
U.S. citizens — President Bush’s FY2009 budget request to Congress includes $2.55 billion in military aid to Israel, a 9% increase over actual spending in FY2007. This increase in military aid is the first installment of a ten-year plan, signed by Israel and the United States in August 2007, to increase military aid to Israel by 25%, totaling $30 billion over the next decade. Organize delegations to go meet with your congressional representative. Send your congressperson a letter here:
Everyone – If the United Nations is not willing to hold Israel accountable for Palestinian lives, we can, by working on a grassroots level to isolate Israel. Please step up the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) Campaign. Work on getting your schools, unions, places of worship, etc. to condemn Israeli atrocities, boycott Israel, and divest from companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Latest statement from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU): http://www.cosatu.org.za/press/2008/mar/press1.htm
Below is an email sent from Saif on March 3, two days before entering Gaza, describing the scene on the border. You can contact Saif in Gaza at: +970-599-963-273.
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Escaping Death
March 3, 2008
The sound of ambulance sirens all over the place; wounded people here and there… This one is shouting and the other almost dying; and its red… everywhere is filled with blood. “Run fast,” I heard them shouting. “We need an ambulance, now, now, now… This guy is dying. Please help him, please bring a doctor, give him pain killers… Do anything, just help him.”
The medical response is much slower than his painful cries. The medical workers must check every one. They must decide who is more critical to move first, taking the risk that someone may die before being checked. Hundreds of people are waiting on the other side. Some people have been waiting for a month to go back to Egypt; Palestinians who entered to visit their families and now have no exit. Others, Egyptians who went to visit Gaza and are now stuck. But the most compelling are the Palestinian mothers and other family members who are watching the ambulances depart with their loved ones, praying that they will see them again, but not knowing. They cannot know. Maybe they will die along the way? Or perhaps they will receive the needed treatment but then get stuck in a detention center before being allowed to go back home. You can never know. In this place every thing is luck, or casualty.
I told them we have medicine to take to Gaza; this medicine is needed for urgent operations. They answered, “well, many wounded people are now in Egypt, why you don’t give your medicine to an Egyptian hospital?” Did they really open the border? Who is going to be with the wounded ones? They will see no family before going back to Gaza. Visits are very restricted, and you can talk to no one.
These people are escaping death, but to an unknown destiny. They hope to find some mercy away from the Israeli killing machine. They are in an ambulance taking them to a hospital, and they don’t know when they will return home, if they will. How painful it is to be wounded, almost dying, with no family around you, with no visitors. And how painful it is for any family not to be with their loved ones while they are being treated, or maybe living their last moments in this life. For some these last moments can be the only peaceful moments in their life, what an irony, you escape death to live your last moments dying away from your family.
The brutality of this occupation, that it is living in us, it is living everywhere, hunting us wherever we go. Perhaps some managed to escape death today, but death is still hunting the rest in Gaza.
Isn’t it time to reclaim the streets? Isn’t it the time to force change?
How many more must die before we realize that our silence is just part of the story; that one protest is not the answer; that the life of many
Palestinians depends on what the civil society may or may not do? Maybe it is time to get more radical. Maybe the Palestinians will help us to escape death, a different kind of death — the death of our humanity!
Kaoru Kishida, a Japanese activist shot near the eye by a rubber-coated steel bullet in Bil’in, has just been operated on in St. John’s Eye Hospital in Jerusalem. The doctors still don’t know if he will regain his eyesight.
Kishida was shot on January 25th, in a non-violent demonstration against the Annexation Wall in the village of Bil’in. When he was shot, three Israeli activists came to his help. While walking him away from the demonstration, they were all shot, one in the leg, one in the behind, and one near the eye. All of them have since recovered.
For more information, contact:
Kaoru Kishida, St. John’s Eye Hospital 02-5828325 (press 7 for English, extension 230 for the male ward)
Mieko Galiko 0546597415
