Gaza Freedom Marchers approved today a declaration aimed at accelerating the global campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli Apartheid.
Roughly 1400 activists from 43 countries converged in Cairo on their way to Gaza to join with Palestinians marching to break Israel’s illegal siege. They were prevented from entering Gaza by the Egyptian authorities.
As a result, the Freedom Marchers remained in Cairo. They staged a series of nonviolent actions aimed at pressuring the international community to end the siege as one step in the larger struggle to secure justice for Palestinians throughout historic Palestine.
This declaration arose from those actions:
End Israeli Apartheid
Cairo Declaration
January 1, 2010
We, international delegates meeting in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March 2009 in collective response to an initiative from the South African delegation, state:
In view of:
Israel’s ongoing collective punishment of Palestinians through the illegal occupation and siege of Gaza;
the illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the continued construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements;
the new Wall under construction by Egypt and the US which will tighten even further the siege of Gaza;
the contempt for Palestinian democracy shown by Israel, the US, Canada, the EU and others after the Palestinian elections of 2006;
the war crimes committed by Israel during the invasion of Gaza one year ago;
the continuing discrimination and repression faced by Palestinians within Israel;
and the continuing exile of millions of Palestinian refugees;
all of which oppressive acts are based ultimately on the Zionist ideology which underpins Israel;
in the knowledge that our own governments have given Israel direct economic, financial, military and diplomatic support and allowed it to behave with impunity;
and mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (2007)
We reaffirm our commitment to:
Palestinian Self-Determination
Ending the Occupation
Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine
The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees
We therefore reaffirm our commitment to the United Palestinian call of July 2005 for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to compel Israel to comply with international law.
To that end, we call for and wish to help initiate a global mass, democratic anti-apartheid movement to work in full consultation with Palestinian civil society to implement the Palestinian call for BDS.
Mindful of the many strong similarities between apartheid Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa, we propose:
An international speaking tour in the first 6 months of 2010 by Palestinian and South African trade unionists and civil society activists, to be joined by trade unionists and activists committed to this programme within the countries toured, to take mass education on BDS directly to the trade union membership and wider public internationally;
Participation in the Israeli Apartheid Week in March 2010;
A systematic unified approach to the boycott of Israeli products, involving consumers, workers and their unions in the retail, warehousing, and transportation sectors;
Developing the Academic, Cultural and Sports boycott;
Campaigns to encourage divestment of trade union and other pension funds from companies directly implicated in the Occupation and/or the Israeli military industries;
Legal actions targeting the external recruitment of soldiers to serve in the Israeli military, and the prosecution of Israeli government war criminals; coordination of Citizen’s Arrest Bureaux to identify, campaign and seek to prosecute Israeli war criminals; support for the Goldstone Report and the implementation of its recommendations;
Campaigns against charitable status of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
We appeal to organisations and individuals committed to this declaration to sign the declaration and work with us to make it a reality.
It was another eventful day here in Cairo at the inaugural Gaza Freedom March (GFM). On Tuesday night, organizers informed the 1,362-strong delegation that only 100 of them had been selected to travel to Gaza yesterday morning, Wednesday 30 December. After several hours of heated debate with organizers over whether this was an appropriate strategy, the meeting concluded without a consensus.
As of Tuesday night, only the South African, French, Canadian and Swedish delegations had decided to boycott the 100-person convoy. Although an incredibly tough decision to make, the groups adopted this principled stance because they felt that the offer was divisive and betrayed the very aim of the march — to break the siege imposed on Gaza.
These delegations refused to further legitimize and reinforce the Egyptian government’s policy of occasionally allowing small aid convoys into the besieged Gaza Strip. They view the Gaza Freedom March as a political, rather than humanitarian effort, designed to pressure the Egyptian government into opening the Rafah crossing permanently.
The groups saw the acceptance of this offer by organizers as a betrayal to the original mission statement, and a dangerous compromise with the Egyptian government, allowing it to only perpetuate its inhumane policy of closure at the Rafah border with Gaza.
There was also the fear that the Egyptian government would use this 100-person convoy as a public relations ploy, deflecting attention from the fact that the siege on Gaza is only tightening, as evidenced by recent reports of the construction of an underground steel wall, designed to block Gaza’s only lifeline to the outside world — its underground system of tunnels.
As the 100 delegates boarded their busses in downtown Cairo yesterday morning, 85-year-old Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor and participant in the march, arrived and made an unexpected announcement. Echoing the sentiments of the dissenting delegations, she also publicly rejected an offer to join the convoy. “This is one of the most difficult decisions I’ve made in my life. But 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the massacre in Gaza last year, and all 1,400 of us need to go” she said.
Shortly thereafter, local march organizers in the Gaza Strip also reversed their initial support for the convoy. In a letter addressed to the Gaza Freedom March steering committee and participants, Dr. Haider Eid and Omar Barghouti — two of the main organizers — called on supporters to “boycott the deal reached with the Egyptian government.”
“We are unambiguous in perceiving this compromise as too heavy, too divisive and too destructive to our future work and networking with various solidarity movements around the world,” they said.
After news of these two crucial statements spread, some of the 100 delegates got off the busses and decided against going to Gaza. Those present at the bus depot reported that Egyptian police began reloading these individuals’ luggage and attempting to force them back onto the busses.
Rumors circulated throughout the day that only 40 people ended up departing Cairo for Gaza. Late on Wednesday evening however, CODEPINK, one of the main organizers, reported that 87 persons had reached the Rafah crossing and were waiting to be processed.
Following these events, the Gaza Freedom March international steering committee also issued a press release on Wednesday officially rejecting Egypt’s proposal. “We flatly reject Egypt’s offer of a token gesture. We refuse to whitewash the siege of Gaza. Our group will continue working to get all 1,362 marchers into Gaza as one step towards the ultimate goal for the complete end of the siege and the liberation of Palestine” said Ziyaad Lunat, a member of the march’s steering committee.
However, there remained the awkward situation where the organizers had sent 87 delegates to Gaza, while hours later “rejecting” Egypt’s offer.
Separately on Wednesday, the South African delegation spearheaded a joint international effort to hammer out the beginnings of a universal anti-apartheid declaration aimed at reinvigorating the global Palestine solidarity movement.
The document, which is still under construction, aims to identify practical steps, including the endorsement of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which global civil society can utilize to pressure Israel to abide by international law and respect Palestinian human rights.
The document is undergoing tweaks, and once endorsed by Palestinian civil society, will be issued as a joint declaration by the various nations who were represented at the Gaza Freedom March.
Thursday, 31 December
This morning, Thursday 31 December, hundreds of Gaza Freedom March participants left their various protest sites across Cairo and converged outside the Egyptian Museum of National History, one of the city’s most visible and central landmarks.
To avoid the detention and harassment experienced at the hands of Egyptian security forces over the last few days, delegates travelled clandestinely to the venue in small groups and pretended to be tourists. Despite these efforts, a hotel housing a large contingent of the march participants was barricaded early this morning by Egyptian police. Nobody was allowed to leave for several hours, causing many to miss the protest.
Outside the Egyptian National Museum, the hundreds of small groups waited for a secret signal and instantly swarmed together, forming one large group, and began marching down the road. This tactic had to be adopted because any large gathering of people before the march would have been broken up by police.
After marching for approximately 20 meters, hundreds of Egyptian riot police rushed toward the crowd and encircled them. In an effort to peacefully hold their ground, marchers sat on the ground. In what was a surprisingly heavy-handed response to foreigners, the police began pulling, beating and kicking protestors to get them out of the road.
While rows of riot police shoved the group from behind, police at the front and sides pushed back, causing panic and hundreds of individuals to fall to the ground. Several women were punched, kicked and dragged out of the road, while many elderly persons were pinned beneath others who had fallen on top of them. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries beyond a few bloody noses and people who had sustained cuts and bruises.
After approximately 15 minutes of this, police managed to corral the entire group into an area just off the road, where the protest continued peacefully for the rest of the day. Although unable to march, the group held a loud and emotional protest in support of those besieged in the Gaza Strip.
The crowd sang, chanted, hung flags and banners from trees and called on the Egyptian government to end its complicity in the siege imposed on the people of Gaza. Representatives of each of the dozens of countries present gave short but moving speeches, demonstrating the truly international show of solidarity for the people of Gaza in this march.
Haroon Wadee, an organizer of the South African delegation, highlighted the similarities between the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the current struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom and liberation. He recalled the famous quote of former South African President Nelson Mandela who said that “South Africa is not free until Palestine is free.”
While it was deeply disappointing for the nearly 1,400 delegates who came from 43 countries that they could not physically be in Gaza today, this was a momentous and historic gathering of justice-loving people from every corner of the globe, united by their common desire to see Gaza free. On the eve of a new year, the crowd vowed to do everything in their power to make 2010 the year that the siege of Gaza is finally and forever broken.
Sayed Dhansay is a South African human rights activist and independent freelance writer. He volunteered for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2006 and is an organizer of the South African delegation for the Gaza Freedom March. He blogs at http://sayeddhansay.wordpress.com.
Palestinian, Israeli and foreign protesters run from tear gas fired by Israeli troops during a demonstration on Highway 443 in 2008. (AP)
This highway has told the whole story. They pave a road, expropriate Palestinian land and the High Court of Justice approves the expropriation, in its words, “provided that it is done for the sake of the local population.”
Afterwards they prevent the “local population” from using the road, and finally they build a wall with drawings of creeks and meadows so we don’t see and don’t know that we are driving on an apartheid road, that we are traveling on the axis of evil.
Apartheid? What are you talking about? It’s just a freeway to the capital, because that’s how we like it best. Going (quickly) along with the occupation and feeling like there is none. That way the highway has fulfilled another secret national wish – that they get out of our faces.
How many of the masses of travelers on this high road to the capital have looked to their left and right? How many of them have noticed the 12 roads blocked by iron roadblocks and piles of garbage? (Is there another country that blocks roads with garbage?) And what about the 22 confined and concealed villages alongside the road? How many people have asked themselves how it is possible that a road that was paved in the heart of the Land of Palestine has no Palestinians traveling on it? How many have noticed the sign that leads to the “Ofer [army] camp”, another whitewashed name for a detention facility or the hundreds of prisoners detained there, some without trial?
How many have observed the inhabitants trudging over the rocky ground to get to the neighboring village? It’s 28 kilometers of distilled apartheid: the Jews on top on the freeway becoming of the lords of the land. Palestinians down below, going on foot to the Al-Tira village girls’ school, for example, through a dark, moldy tunnel.
I, too, have deliberated more than once whether to take Highway 1 with all of its traffic jams or 443 with all of its injustices. In my transgressions, sometimes I have opted for the injustices. It’s like shooting and crying. First you kill and then you are struck with grief over what you have done. I have driven and cried.
The High Court of Justice has again proven how essential it is. Too late and too little, and strangely imposing a delay of five months in the implementation of its ruling. It is not a beacon of justice with regard to everything related to the occupation, but it is at least a small flashlight shining a faint beam: beware, apartheid.
Justices Dorit Beinisch and Uzi Vogelman should be commended. They have reminded us what had been forgotten. There are judges in Jerusalem, and periodically they even come out against the injustice of the occupation. See you in another five months. By then maybe the state will find a range of rationales and excuses not to enforce the ruling. Palestinian cars on Highway 443? You’re making me (and the army) laugh.
I’m banned from Sheikh Jarrah and occupied East Jerusalem so I spent the last two days in Hebron and recently arrived in Nablus.
Hebron is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the place where Isaac and Ishmael buried their father, Abraham, signaling a reconciliating between the two feuding brothers. Unfortunately there is no such reconciliation in Hebron today.
Hebron is unlike any place I’ve ever seen before. The old city reminds me of the old city in Jerusalem, except not as crowded. But there are military check-points and Israeli Occupation Forces everywhere, including in watch-towers all across the city. When we were walking through the city, settlers openly carried automatic weapons and assault rifles.
I asked one of them if I could take their picture.
“No,” he said. “It’s forbidden on the Sabbath.”
“It’s forbidden to get your picture taken on the Sabbath, but it’s okay to walk around with an automatic weapon?” I asked him. He snorted and turned around, ignoring me.
Hebron is also the only city I’ve visited so far where beggars are openly walking the streets, asking for money. Street hustlers are also much more aggressive here than in Jerusalem. A few hundred Israeli Jewish settlers live amongst thousands of Palestinians in Hebron, and the tension is palpable. A thick layer of netting seperates the Israeli apartments from the Arab markets below them because the settlers throw stones and trash at the Palestinians from their windows.
Later on, we met up with our contact, a woman named Leila who runs a Women’s Collective that sells homemade tapestries, kufiyyas, purses, coin wallets, and other items. She invited us into her our home and told us a little bit about the situation in Hebron over a delicious Arab dinner.
“The situation in Hebron is very bad, very dangerous,” she said. “There is no work, and the settlers and the Army threaten us and attack us everyday.”
On Saturdays, a settler “tour” goes into the old city through a military checkpoint to visit the holy sites important to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. They are guarded by a phalanx of soldiers and private security, but sometimes the overzealous ones use the day as an opportunity to take potshots at the Palestinian merchants, overturning their stands, stealing from their stores, insulting them, spitting on them, and sometimes worse.
We spent most of the day and night patrolling the streets of the old city, but it was quiet. We talked with the young men on the streets, drank tea inside their houses with their families, and generally just had a relaxing time.
The choice of civil resistance in challenging the Israeli occupation is considered by some as a form of “surrender.” In an interview [in Arabic] on Al Aqsa, Palestinian activists Mazen Qumsiyeh and comrade Haidar Eid answer these questions.
Eid was asked about the meaning of civil resistance of which he spoke about the numerous terms coined to non-violent resistance, civil resistance, non-violent struggle and therefore multiple definitions to each term. There is, he says, the Gandhian non-violent struggle, Satyagraha, which is to depend totally on people power and the strength of economic boycott of the occupier’s products. “What happened in South Africa was that this concept was further developed to include multiple and different forms of struggle, of which complete one another. And there was an emphasis in the later part of Apartheid, during the eighties, on Boycott [in all its forms].” Eid emphasized that the four pillars of struggle in South Africa should be taken as a model to learn from in the Palestinian struggle.
In the Palestinian context, the word “peace” has come to have a negative connotation, and Eid explains that this is due to the “industry of peace” processes that the Palestinians had to face constantly, and particularly from 1993 till now, where peace as a process was not linked to the attainment of justice for the Palestinian people, and the right of return of the refugees with reparation of the decades of suffering, estrangement, refugeehood and exile. “When we speak of peace, we will speak only of peace that leads to the implementation of Palestinian people’s legitimate rights.” What the settler colonial policies and direct military occupation of the WB and GS since 1967 require, says Eid, is an amalgam of the different forms of struggle. And, as such, the Palestinian call for Boycott, which brings together and is a common ground to all Palestinian national and Islamic factions, was initiated and appeals to the official and unofficial international community to boycott Israel. As a result of this initiative, the BNC [BDS National Committee] was formed in 2005 of which held the participation of all Palestinian national and Islamic factions.
“I believe that we in Gaza, unlike the WB, have not invested much in other forms of resistance. I don’t believe that armed struggle, of which I do not oppose and believe to go hand-in-hand with other forms of resistance, is enough taking into consideration the absurd imbalance of power between the Israeli state and the Palestinian national and Islamic resistance-there is a need to turn to people power as well.” Eid mentioned that if a minority involve themselves in armed resistance, then the majority of the people “from farmers, academics and intellectuals” need engage more in civil resistance against occupation.
“Can we imagine the Palesitnian people without Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish?” Eid asks. “What makes those Palestinians stand-out is their emphasis on the fact that the struggle against the Israeli occupation is an ideological struggle: we must defeat the Zionist mentality that this land is for the Jews, and that, we as Palestinians, should prove to the world that we posses the higher moral ground, that the Palestinian people in their resistance, whether armed or civil, will re-humanize the Israeli, unlike the latter whom strips the Palestinian off her humanity.”
Qumsiyeh, answering to “what is civil resistance,” mentioned that the Palestinian struggle has, since the British mandate till this date, involved resistance in all its forms: from civil to armed.
“Sumuud [endurance] by itself is resistance,” says Qumsiyeh. Simple acts as “getting married, going to school, reading a book” become acts of resistance. “When a student comes to my class at eight in the morning after passing numerous checkpoints- that is resistance,” Qumsiyeh notes.
Civil resistance is inclusive[at a time when exclusivity seems dominant]: from a woman, to a child to an elderly – all can resist. And that was what both academics and activists implied.
“We all need to look at Bil’in, ” says Qumsiyeh, “the demonstrations against the wall occurring all those years, unhesitatingly and consistently.” Not only in Bil’in does this civil resistance emerge but, more recently, in Gaza, says Eid, when the Palestinians in the Strip attempted to break the wall separating them from Egypt, twice, in forming a human chain from the beginning till the end of the Strip. Beit Sahour, the town of which Qumsiyeh is from, was exemplary in its civil resistance and civil disobedience, during the First Intifada, according to Eid. “When the Palestinians from Beit Sahour gave up their IDs to the military officer there,” this, Eid says was an example of civil resistance.
What about the use of bodies and human shield? Eid says that this is one of the most sublime forms of civil resistance, using the body in fighting off the bullets the bombs, in protection and defense of home and land.
A question arises of whether or not this kind of resistance creates a battle within the psyche of the occupier. This, Eid says, was something Mandela wrote about in his diaries and something which Said questioned a while before his death: “who possesses the higher moral ground: the colonized or the colonizer; the occupied or the occupier?” According to Eid, that as a civilian struggling for your moral and legal rights possesses the higher moral ground and, therefore, psychologically attacks the occupier. “This was what happened with the Nazi German, this was what happened with the White South African colonizer,” Eid says.
Eid mentions that “Israel is one of the societies of which domestic violence is most encountered” and “that there is a direct relation between domestic violence and suicide cases in the Israeli society and between the occupation in the WB, GS and 1948 lands.” He continues, “I think this is very important. For instance, there are many US soldiers who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan who commit suicide shortly after their return.” Thus the occupied possesses a moral and psychological power that should be invested against the occupation itself.
Eid re-emphasises that the obvious, huge imbalance of power in the Israeli-Palestinian case requires the moving away from negotiations that are but a waste of time:
“Israel has more than 450 nuclear heads, it has Apaches, it has F16s- it has the most strategic alliance with the USA. I mean, how can we as 10 millions Palestinian, more than half living in the Diaspora and in refugee camps living under horrendous conditions, fight that? People power.”
This inclusivity which brings together and encourages Israeli Jews against Israeli Apartheid and policies of colonization, with 1948 Palestinians, along with the farmer, the student, the fisherman, and all supporters of these universalistic rights share together this moral grounding, and can channel their suppression through civil resistance, through boycott – which is but the simplest of forms of resistance, and one of the most powerful simultaneously.
According to Eid, “if you hit the occupation in the core of its existence, through its strategic relations with the USA, through US boycott of Israel in all its faces […] if all the Islamic Palestinian factions, for instance, from Islamic Jihad, to Hamas, which all have a supportive stance from Islamic movements worldwide, promote BDS in their discourse, when every leader of an Islamic movement speaks and it was demanded to boycott US & Israeli products till the implementation of every basic Palestinian right-” then we can talk about the road to liberation.
