The Israeli prison guards are denying the right for Mairead to access her medicine. Continue to email and call Mark Regev and Shlomo Dror and express your outrage over the treatment of the FreeGaza21 while they are imprisoned. The women have no access to their luggage or their clothing.
Mairead is fasting, not just for her friends incarcerated along with her, but for the 11,000 Palestinians also thrown into jail, many without benefit of trial.
Adie Mormech, one of over 21 human rights workers and crew taken prisoner on Tuesday 30th June when their boat was forcibly boarded by the Israeli navy, has spoken by mobile phone from his prison cell at Givon jail, Ramle, near Tel Aviv.
Amongst the other prisoners from the Free Gaza Movement boat, Spirit of Humanity, are Nobel Peace prize winner, Mairead Maguire, and former US Congresswoman, Cythnia McKinney. A message from McKinney on 2nd July condemned Israel for its “illegal” action in “dismantl[ing] our navigation equipment” and confiscating both the ship and its cargo of medical aid, childrens’ toys and olive trees.
McKinney went on to say that “State Department and White House officials have not effected our release or taken a strong public stance to condemn the illegal actions of the Israeli Navy of enforcing a blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians of Gaza, a blockade that has been condemned by President Obama.”
The Free Gaza campaign succeeded in entering Gaza by sea on several occasions in 2008, carrying humanitarian aid, medical personnel, journalists and human rights workers. However, later attempts have been met with aggression by the Israeli navy, with one boat, the Dignity, having to seek refuge and repairs in Lebanon after being rammed three times by an Israeli warship.
In a brief interview with Andy Bowman of Manchester’s Mule newspaper (http//www.themule.info), Mr Mormech gave the following account:
How are you being treated?
It’s bad, but the conditions are OK for me, I’ve not been beaten up, they’re a bit nasty sometimes and when they boarded the boat we had our faces slammed against the floor. It was bad for the older women like Mairead.
The four other UK nationals are in the cell with me. There’s 14 of us in the 7 by 7 meter cell which includes the toilet and shower, so very crowded. It’s very hot and there’s only a tiny window. We get awakened at 6 in the morning for an inspection and have to stand to attention, and then they repeat that at 9 am, and we are only allowed out of the cells for a few hours each day. They keep giving us forms to sign but they are in Hebrew so we don’t. Although I’m able to cope here, other people are less comfortable than me in the situation. If we’re here for a long time – like some of the other people in here have been – then it will be tough.
Have you had access to a lawyer yet?
We have, and at the moment we’re discussing what to do about our deportation. They’ve taken our personal items – laptops, cameras, phones and many other valuables, and we want to find out where these are. They obviously want to deport us as quickly as possible, but some of us are thinking about fighting the deportation. Firstly on the basis that if we get deported we won’t be allowed into the occupied West Bank or Israel for another 10 years, but also, because we didn’t intend to come here to Israel – we intended to go to Gaza, and went directly from international waters into Palestinian waters. There is nothing legal about what Israel has done to us grabbing us like this. We’re considering fighting the deportation on the grounds that we shouldn’t accept and legitimize this barbaric military blockade of Gaza.
If you challenge the deportation could you remain in prison for a while longer?
Yes we could – there’s some people that need to get home, but some will challenge. And for those it will be a few more weeks in prison at least, we expect.
And you?
I’m veering towards challenging it on the basis that it’s a scar on my name to accept that I shouldn’t have been here, but in fact I have every right to go to Gaza just as everyone else does. That’s the whole point of these voyages and that’s the principle we want to stick to.
Have they told you what has happened to the cargo of the boat?
No, we don’t know what they’re doing with it. We’ve been told a lot of lies so far about where we’re going and what’s happening to us, so we just don’t know. They’re already prepared to deprive the people of Gaza of a lot of aid anyway.
What is your message to people back in the UK?
This is not about us here in the cells, it’s about the denial of human rights to the people of Palestine, and in particular the inhumane blockade of Gaza. People must not forget about what is happening to Gaza. At the moment they are even being denied food and medical supplies. After the carnage of the 1500 people killed in January, we won’t forget and we’ll keep on going and keep fighting for the human rights of the people of Palestine.
This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies – and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.
At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation ‘Cast Lead’ [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.
During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16’s rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs – new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.
The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water … It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.
The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime … I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?
Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.
I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color & paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.
But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it’s incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream … like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better … The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.
My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them “there is no UN in Israel.”
The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.
The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can’ were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.
It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.
We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the world.
What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?
Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?
Let’s change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.
I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I’ve met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.
Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June 30th.
A United Nations human rights investigator on Thursday called Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying relief aid for the Gaza Strip “unlawful” and said its blockade of the territory constituted a “continuing crime against humanity”.
Israeli authorities on Tuesday intercepted the vessel, which was also carrying 21 pro-Palestinian activists, and said it would not be permitted to enter Gaza coastal waters because of security risks in the area and its existing naval blockade.
Richard Falk, an American Jew and the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said the move was part of Israel’s “cruel blockade of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza” in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting any form of collective punishment against “an occupied people”.
Falk, who is an expert on international law, said Israel’s two-year blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza restricted vital supplies such as food, medicine and fuel to “bare subsistence levels”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a report this week that Israel was also halting entry to Gaza of building materials and spare parts needed to repair damage from its 22-day invasion late last December.
“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity,” Falk said in a statement released in Geneva.
Prior to leaving Cyprus, the ship was inspected by Cypriot authorities in response to Israeli demands to determine whether it carried any weapons, according to the UN investigator. “None were found and Israeli authorities were so informed.”
“Nonetheless, the 21 peace activists on the boat were arrested, held in captivity and have been charged with ‘illegal entry’ to Israel even though they had no intention of going to Israel,” Falk added.
Israel envoy calls remarks ‘biased’
Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Aharon Leshno-Yaar, rejected the remarks by Falk whom he said was “known for his bias against Israel and anti-Israel statements”.
Israel is allowing relief aid to reach Gaza in coordination with Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, Leshno-Yaar said.
“Clearly the purpose of that ship was to create a buzz and serve as a propaganda vehicle against Israel,” he told Reuters.
Activists from the U.S.-based Free Gaza movement said that Irish Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. congresswoman Cynthia McKinney were among those aboard.
Falk has had his own difficulties with Israeli authorities in trying to fulfill his independent mandate for the UN Human Rights Council.
Last December, he was detained and turned back from Israel, forcing him to abort a planned mission to Gaza — a deportation denounced by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
In a report last March, Falk said Israel’s year-end military assault on the densely population coastal strip of 1.5 million appeared to constitute a grave war crime.
London, 2 July, (ECESG) – The European campaign to end the siege on Gaza (ECESG) called today for international human rights organizations and lobbying groups to organize large protests in front of Israeli embassies across Europe in solidarity with activists of Free Gaza Movement. Activists onboard of the humanitarian boat were kidnapped by Israeli naval forces while they were sailing in a peaceful mission to end the siege.
The call aims at creating factual movements on the ground to release “the spirit of humanity” activists. Additionally, head of ECESG, Dr. Arafat Madi contacted EU officials and MPs to urge on moving to release the activists immediately.
British Baroness, Jenny Tonge, expressed her deep anger and concerns towards the Israeli doing. She said that, “I shall take up the matter with the Foreign office.”
Sinn Féin Justice Spokesperson Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD has described the Israeli government’s decision to board and hijack a peace boat on route to Gaza carrying medical aid as contemptible, adding; “The piracy of the Israeli Navy in boarding the boat in international waters and towing it towards Israel this is yet another astounding example of just how beyond reproach this administration believes it is.”
The boat was boarded by highly-profiled people like Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize and a former U.S. congressperson, Cynthia McKinney. The vessel was forcibly taken to one of the Israeli seaports under direct threats from naval boats.
Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize was taken against her will and isolated from the rest of the team. The Israeli army cared about neither her old age nor her position. Two activists were released only while the rest are in Israeli detention of Ramallah. The exemplary punishment against the activists is a small glimpse of what’s happening to 12 thousand Palestinians in Israeli jails.
ECESG is organizing a number of protests in various European countries to call on releasing the kidnapped peace activists.
Actions’ Timetable
Israeli Embassy in Roma, Italy
Location: Via Michele Mercati, 14
In front of the Israeli embassy
3rd of July 2009
12:30 pm
Embassy of Israel in Copenhagen, Denmark
Lundevangsvej 4
2900 Hellerup
12:30 pm
Israel Embassy, Sweden
Torstenssonsgatan 4
Stockholm
Sweden
12:30 pm
Embassy of Israel
Chancellery
Alpenstrasse 32
P.O.Box
3006 Bern
12:30 pm
Israeli Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands
