Rachel Corrie Foundation Peaceworks Conference

Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice
Peace Works Conference
Olympia, Washington, USA

April 20th, In Lecture: Arun Gandhi, Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi
April 21st, Putting Justice into Action: Exchanging Organizing Strategies and Addressing Issues of Identity and Oppression in Our Solidarity Work
April 21st, Jerry and Sis Levin (CPT) at United Churches
April 22-23, A Conference Cultivating a Just and Enduring Peace for the People of Palestine and Israel

History: After Rachel Corrie was killed in the Gaza Strip in 2003 while nonviolently protecting the home of a Palestinian pharmacist and accountant and their families from demolition, the Corrie family, with the devoted support of Olympia community members and supporters across the country, established the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, that continues the work Rachel began and hoped to accomplish. One of the Foundation’s dreams, Peace Works–an annual memorial lecture/conference addressing a significant justice and peace issue–will come to fruition in April 2006.

Rationale: The mission of Peace Works is to provide a continuing forum for exploring the meaning and practice of justice and peace as they affect the social, economic, political, environmental, and spiritual aspects of all people’s lives. The focus of the 2006 conference is the cultivation of a just and enduring peace for the people of Palestine and Israel. We were reminded recently by Jim Wallis (Sojourner’s Magazine) of how Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that “to change the nation, you had to change the wind… change how a nation thinks and feels and perceives the most important things…and then the politicians will follow.” Our conference working group hopes that through this first conference many can join in considering where things stand in Israel and Palestine and can strategize about how to further “change the wind”—in this country, and hopefully beyond. We anticipate that this will be a meaningful event locally, regionally, and nationally.

The Audience: We will engage those long familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian issue and, also, newcomers who are interested in learning, sharing, and stepping up their own efforts to work for enduring peace in the Middle East. We hope to draw both local and regional participants, as well as friends from around the country who will want to be part of this discussion and the inaugural Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice event.

Formats and Speakers: We are considering formats that include lectures, panels, and small group discussions with emphasis on action flowing from the work we do together. The voices of conference attendees will be as important as those of the thoughtful and powerful speakers who will participate:

• Arun Gandhi: the fifth grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, a social-political activist, and founder of the M.K.
Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence in Memphis, Tennessee.
• Dr. Mustafa Barghouti: Palestinian physician and prominent Palestinian leader. Dr. Barghouti recently ran
as an independent candidate in the Palestinian presidential elections.
• Diana Buttu: Canadian-Palestinian lawyer, peace activist, and advisor to the Palestinian Negotiation Team.
• Amira Hass: Israeli author and journalist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz who has lived in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
• Huwaida Arraf: Palestinian-American co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement.
• Lama Hourani: Gaza Branch Coordinator of one of the first Palestinian NGOs, the Palestinian Working Women Society for Development, which advocates for women’s rights as equal citizens.
• Liat Weingart: Co-Director of Jewish Voice for Peace in San Francisco.
• Dr. Sarah Roy: Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, author of The Gaza
Strip: The Political Economy of De-development.

How to Help:
This is an exciting but large undertaking for our foundation and community. To be successful, we need your help. Here are some things you can do to help:
• Join a planning committee: Program, Logistics, Tools (Publicity & Media), Gandhi Event, Interfaith Service, and Administrative/Finance & Fundraising.
• Become a sponsoring individual by making a tax deductible contribution to support the conference: Make check payable to the Rachel Corrie Foundation and designate “Peace Works” in the memo. Mail to Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, P.O. Box 12149, Olympia, WA, 98508 or use our convenient credit card option with Groundspring.
• Ask your organization to become a sponsoring organization providing financial and other support.
• Plan to attend one or all of the Peace Works events.

Information: For further details or to have a member of our committee speak with your group, contact Donna Schumann at 943-0965, 584-3103, or donnaschumann@comcast.net.

Visit our web site at http://www.rachelcorriefoundation.org.

Sir Gerald Kaufman MP: Israel “would be a rogue government” if Refuses to Prosecute Killer Soldiers

We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished

We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes

by Sir Gerald Kaufman MP

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0412-26.htm

In a marvellous book of essays, “The Slopes of Lebanon,” the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz advanced an audacious thesis. He contended that the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust – they included many members of my own family – must not be used as justification for the oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.

Recent Israeli governments, led first by Ariel Sharon and now by Ehud Olmert, have launched a new twist on the argument refuted by Oz. They operate actively on the policy that the murder of 1,000 Israeli Jews by Palestinian terrorists allows the Israeli forces to do anything they think fit in what their government claims is national self-defense. Over the past few days they have killed 13 Palestinians, including a five-year-old girl.

Those of us who believe in a two-state solution, a secure Israel alongside a free and internationally recognised Palestine, are denounced as sympathisers with terrorism – or, in cases such as mine, self-hating Jews – if we attack the appalling suppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.

We point out that the evacuation of the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops last summer was not a move towards a two-state solution but simply self-defensive action. We point out that Olmert’s plans to base Israel’s permanent border by the year 2010 on the illegal Israeli wall is not a peace formula but an imposed settlement that the Palestinians will never accept. We point out that every withdrawal of funding from the Palestinians by the European Union and the US increases support for Hamas among the Palestinians. We point out that the road map for peace in the Middle East, of which our own government is a key initiator, is moribund. We are all but ignored.

But, when it comes to the murder of Britons by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, the self-serving apologia of Israeli atrocities by right-wing Israelis and their sympathisers loses all credibility.

New territory is opened by the verdict of the inquests in Britain that the British peace activist Tom Hurndall and the British film-maker James Miller were murdered by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. As Britons we have the right to require action by our own government when our own nationals are stated by legal authorities in our own country to be the victims of homicide by a foreign power. If the Speaker allows me when the Commons reconvenes next Tuesday after the Easter recess, I shall be asking my friend and colleague Jack Straw what action he proposes to take about the murder of Hurndall and Miller.

It seems to me that we have three choices. We can ask for these killers to be extradited for prosecution under war crimes legislation in this country. After all, even Colonel Gaddafi agreed eventually to the Libyan Lockerbie killers being put on trial. Alternatively, we can demand that these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes before an international court, as Slobodan Milosevic was. If the Israelis cooperate in neither of these courses, then we should impose sanctions on what would be a rogue government.

Those of us who have visited the Palestinian territories in recent months know that there is an element in the Israeli armed forces which is trigger-happy and well nigh out of control. Last November I led the first ever British Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to the Palestinian National Authority. Twice, during our period there, our group of three members of the Commons and two members of the Lords was held at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers, even when we had explained our mission.

I pointed out to my Parliamentary colleagues that we were being subjected to only transitory harassment, that we were going home on Friday, while for the Palestinians this was their life, much worse, and permanently. And of course brief annoyance for a British team of parliamentarians is less than a minute fraction of what happened to Hurndall and Miller. But it is a meaningful symptom.

Apologists for the Israeli government say that that country is a democracy. So what? The United States is a democracy, yet it almost routinely tortures prisoners held in violation of international law at Guantanamo Bay. A democratically-elected French Government suppressed the Algerians for years.

This current Israeli government, posing as moderate when it is extremist, is, like President Bush’s administration in Guantanamo, also in violation of international law. I look to my own British government to take action on behalf of its own murdered nationals and their families. They must ensure that the Israeli government is made to abide by international law and international decency.

Sir Gerald Kaufmanis Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton, and former Shadow Foreign Secretary, 1987-92.

UNRWA Director: “Counting down to a crisis in Gaza.”

From UNRWA

PDF Version of Press Release

Gaza – Another week of closure at Karni commercial crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip adds to the mounting woes facing Palestine refugees living in Gaza. This follows a weekend that saw the killing of 14 Palestinians, protests by refugee farmers who have yet to receive any compensation for bird flu and widespread public demonstrations protesting the cutting of donor funding.

John Ging, Director of UNRWA Operations in Gaza, warned that “if Karni remains closed, we are, once again, counting down to a food crisis.” 765,000 refugees depend on UNRWA’s food distribution of flour, oil, sugar and other basic items. Ging stated that “the clock is now ticking and distribution will have to be shut down entirely for the second time in less than a month if the crossing does not open immediately.”

Returning from a visit this morning to an UNRWA primary school in Beit Lahia, where parents and teachers protested that the children are in very real danger from the daily Israeli shelling in close proximity to the school, Ging stated that “from a humanitarian perspective the outlook here in Gaza is bleak at the moment. We are once again facing imminent food shortages, insecurity is making delivery of humanitarian services difficult and we are very concerned about the public health risks from the outbreak of avian influenza. All of this is likely to add up to more refugees falling below the poverty line and becoming dependent on humanitarian assistance.” However, Ging warned that UNRWA does not yet have the money to meet today’s needs and is facing a bill of almost $900,000 in penalties for port and other charges arising from the Karni closure.

-Ends-

For more information please contact:

Jerusalem: Johan Eriksson
Office: 972-2-589-0249
Mobile: 972-59-428-056

Gaza: Adnan abu Hasna
Office: +972-8-677-7531
Mobile: +972-59-428-61

Jamal Hamad
Mobile: 972-599-416-877

Amnesty International Calls for Halt to Gaza Attacks

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
11 April 2006
Public Statement

Israel/Occupied Territories: Israel must halt attacks on Gaza residential areas – children killed

Amnesty International is calling on the Israeli army to end immediately its air bombardments and shelling of civilian residential areas in the Gaza Strip. At least two Palestinian children have been killed and tens of other civilian bystanders injured in recent days during the course of such attacks; at least 15 other Palestinians, most of them reported to be members of armed groups, were killed.

Hadeel Ghaban, a seven-year-old girl, was killed on 10 April 2006 when Israeli troops fired artillery shells at her home in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia. The child’s mother and a dozen of her siblings and other relatives, including several children, were injured in the attack. Three days earlier, a five-year-old boy, Bilal Abu al-‘Einein, was killed in an Israeli air strike as he was standing near a car with his 14-year-old brother and their father. The boys’ father and three other men were also killed and several other bystanders, including two children, were injured in the attack. The four men who were killed in the attack were reported to be members of a Palestinian armed group but not to have been involved in any armed confrontation at the time when they were targeted by the air strike.

Commenting on this 7 April attack, the Israeli army stated: “In a security forces activity tonight in the southern Gaza Strip, the IDF carried out an aerial attack against a vehicle carrying terrorists as it was leaving a training camp of the Popular Resistance Committees organization. Terrorists were using the camp for terror training and weapons training.” The statement failed to mention the killing of the five-year-old child.

Israeli army and Defense Ministry sources were reported by the Israeli media to have expressed regret over the killing of Hadeel Ghaban but to have vowed to continue intensive attacks on the Gaza Strip. On 11 April, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz was reported to have stated that “As long as it’s not quiet here [in Israel], it won’t be quiet there [in Gaza.]”

Expressions of regret by Israeli army and government officials for the killings of Palestinian children and other bystanders ring hollow as repeated attacks by Israeli troops on densely populated residential areas continue to claim the lives of Palestinians, including children, in situations where they pose no threats to the lives of Israelis.

Another example is the killing of three Palestinian children, 14-year-old Ahmed al-Sweifi and Ra’ed and Mahmud al-Batash, aged 11 and 17, in an Israeli air strike in the afternoon of 6 March in Gaza City. The children were walking in the street when an Israeli missile hit a passing car in which two members of a Palestinian armed group were travelling, killing the two passengers of the car and the three children.

More than 15 Palestinian children have been killed and dozens have been injured in Israeli army attacks throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the beginning of this year. They were among some 75 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in the past three months, during which scores of Palestinians, including children, have been injured. Many of those killed were members of Palestinian armed groups who were targeted while they were not involved in armed attacks or confrontations.

The Israeli authorities have long pursued a policy of extrajudicial executions as a substitute for arrest and prosecution of Palestinians involved in attacks against Israelis. Hundreds of bystanders have been killed in such attacks, in addition to the targets of the attacks. Since Israel redeployed its troops from inside the Gaza Strip in September 2005, Israeli forces have stepped up air strikes and artillery attacks against different areas of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli authorities contend that such attacks are in response to frequent mortar and rocket attacks by Palestinian armed groups launched from the Gaza Strip against Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza Strip. Although they have rarely caused Israeli fatalities or casualties, these Palestinian attacks are unlawful and should stop immediately.

Israeli forces, for their part, must put an immediate end to the frequent, disproportionate and excessive use of force against Palestinians. Such attacks continue to cause death and injury to Palestinian children and other bystanders, and constitute violations of international law.

But Israel must also be held to account for the deaths of innocent Palestinians

Justice for journalists
But Israel must also be held to account for the deaths of innocent Palestinians.
By Ewa Jasiewicz

From The Guardian

The verdicts of intentional killing and murder over the deaths of journalists Tom Hurndall and James Miller are small victories; but what about the unaddressed and unresolved killings of hundreds of Palestinian civilians?

Activists within the International Solidarity Movement have in the past relied upon the racism of the Israeli state to keep themselves untargeted. White faces were waved through checkpoints and white western activists were able to halt tanks temporarily, monitor house searches and arrests, and check on prisoners during refugee camp round-ups, visit families who had had their homes turned into military bases, and accompany and facilitate the movement of Palestinian ambulances. We could move amidst stone- and Molotov-throwing youths, as observers and hopefully as deterrents to the by turns indiscriminate and targeted shooting by Israeli soldiers.

Uncomfortable and possibly selfperpetuating as it was, white supremacy was our weapon, shielded with the myth of Israeli democracy on the one hand, and the professionalism and humanitarianism of the Israeli Defence Forces on the other. They wouldn’t kill a westerner, not a peace activist, not a journalist; the bad PR would be devastating.

Enter the Iraq war. With global media attention fixated on the heavily propagandised but never materialised shock and awe attack on Iraq and the unfolding nightmare of America’s first direct occupation of a Muslim country, Israel was once again pushing the limits of international law on two fronts. The first was the construction of the Separation Barrier, AKA the Apartheid Wall, accompanied by hundreds of home demolitions, land confiscations and the ghettoisation of entire villages; and the second was the alleged targeting of western activists, long regarded as an increasingly emboldened interference in the military operations of the Israeli army.

Within six weeks, three International Solidarity Movement activists were attacked. The death of Rachel Corrie, who was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket when she was bulldozed to death, was followed by the shooting in the head of Tom Hurndall, also easily identifiable in fluorescent orange.

And then there was Brian Avery, 24, who narrowly escaped death when Israeli soldiers fired a 50 calibre bullet into his face. He too was wearing a high-visibility vest, and was standing in the middle of a crossroads in Jenin town centre along with four other Western activists with their hands raised in the air. I was one of them, and I witnessed the armoured personnel carrier stop before us, slow down, undoubtedly see us, and open fire.

So far Brian’s case has not been granted a criminal investigation despite a Supreme Court challenge to the initial military investigation last February. So far he has had no compensation for his injuries.

Another case left in legal limbo is that of 13-year-old Baha al Bahesh, gunned down by an Israeli soldier in the West Bank city of Nablus in September 2002. If western citizenship can afford the victim media attention, then a white witness, or three in the case of Baha, can carry the same weight.

I was one of those witnesses. I wrote about it, and spoke about it on Israeli television, independent radio, BBC radio and to the international press; but his killer has yet to be brought to justice. There has been no public inquiry, no trial and no independent investigation.

The IDF military investigation found, six months after Baha’s death and burial, that the boy was in fact still alive. Why? Because allegedly no death certificate had been presented to the IDF. This was the final insult to a family devastated by their son’s death.

The judicial process afforded Tom Hurndall and James Miller’s families needs to be applied to the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces. The fact that the rule of international law does not appear to cover Palestinian lives means the Israeli army can act with impunity and unaccountability.

Racism has long been a driving force within the conflict in historical Palestine, both in terms of creating the conditions for the Nakba in the first place; to underpinning the way human lives are valued, represented, remembered and lost.

The rule of international law will be rendered meaningless if it is not applied equally. We should never lose sight of the fact that it is not just internationals who get killed in this ongoing, tragic struggle.