Israel’s Open-Fire Policy: shooting the donkey (as an old woman hides behind it)
Resisting the Zionist Gun – Part 1: Letaemat 07/05/2009
Resisting the Zionist Gun – Part 2: Letaemat 09/05/2009
Harvest in the Automated Kill Zone, Part 1 – Khoza’a 21/05/2009
Harvest in the Automated Kill Zone, Part 2 – Khoza’a 24/05/2009
Eva Bartlett | In Gaza
23 July 2009
The young farm worker wasn’t oblivious to the danger: working in the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone” is no task for the faint-hearted. But, like so many, he either needed the paid labour, or his family depends on the land.
The farmers had returned two days after their land was again ravaged by Israeli military bulldozers and tanks: 2 and 4 of each respectively. The war machines ate up the land, finished off a house they’d not quite destroyed the last time, and tore up a water source, the farmers’ well.
The day after the incursion, Yousef, one of the farmers, had dared to peek at the well, doing so furtively although it is on their land. The Israeli army incursion into Abassan Jeddida, just east of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, had ended the same afternoon it started –July 21st –but the farmers knew all too well that Israeli military jeeps, hummers, tanks and military bulldozers lay just 400 metres away over the Green Line border, and that the Israeli soldiers running the machines are generous with their gunshots.
Yousef’s land lies near that of land where Anwar al-Buraim (27) [**note: al-Buraim is also found transliterated as al-Ibrim] was martyred on January 27th, shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he worked the land. It’s the same land where his cousin Mohammed al-Buraim (20) was shot in the ankle weeks later, also targeted by Israeli soldiers as he worked. The cousins were farm labourers, working to support large, impoverished families living in the region.
From his assessment of the well, Yousef gathered that the reason he couldn’t water his crops was that the motor had been destroyed. The following day, accompanied by ISM human rights workers, two of the farmers set to repairing the razed electrical lines and motor.
As the morning quickly heated up, farmers in nearby fields worked hurriedly to harvest parsley, wanting to finish before the intense heat as well as before any intense Israeli army shooting.
Plump hot chilli peppers and fresh parsley evidence how recent the incursion was: just two days without water, the plants are surviving. Much more and they will begin to wither, like life in the “buffer zone”.
27 dunums (1 dunum=1000 square metres) of chillis and 10 dunums of parsely depend on the destroyed water source.For Palestinians in Gaza, these are two of the most vital ingredients.
The farmers returned unsuccessful, but undefeated: if they can find and afford the parts to repair the motor to the well’s pump, they can re-gain their source of water. But in encaged Gaza, under a full siege which allows less than 40 items into the Strip, finding replacement parts could prove difficult, expensive, and could mean waiting for items to come through the tunnels.
He knows his farming life is hard, dangerous, filled with impossible obstacles…but does the young farm worker know how easy it could be, without the collective punishment of the Israeli army’s indiscriminate shooting at civilians in and beyond the Israeli-imposed‘300m buffer zone’, the burning of cropland, and the destruction of such infrastructure as wells, irrigation piping, greenhouses, farming equipment and tractors? Yes, he knows, he remembers, he longs for those days again. The good days when a chilli ripened under the sun, and was watered and harvested without haste.
Josie Ensor | The Daily Star
24 July 2009
A Lebanese human rights worker with the Free Gaza Movement made a plea on Thursday for Lebanon to show solidarity over the issue of the Palestinian right of return and play a more active role in breaking the siege. Natalie Abou Shakra, who returned Wednesday from the Gaza Strip after an eight-month humanitarian mission, said it was Lebanon’s duty to help ease the situation in the Palestinian territories.
The plea comes a week after President Michel Sleiman told Russian Mideast envoy Alexander Saltanov that any attempt to achieve peace in the Middle East must include the Palestinian right of return.
Shakra, the only Lebanese activist currently on the ground, said the resettlement of Palestinians from countries offering refuge is one of the most important issues that Lebanon should support.
“A Lebanese initiative is also needed to break the siege,” Shakra told The Daily Star. “The last one was not a total failure and I think it should be followed up – and more creative and daring ways should be thought of.”
Shakra defied Israeli orders for Lebanese citizens not to enter Gaza and was able to get in with the Free Gaza movement’s SS Dignity boat on the December 20 last year. She has since been working with Free Gaza Movement (FGM) and International Solidarity Movement to bring medical and food assistance into the Gaza Strip.
Shakra drew on the relationship between Lebanon’s struggles and Gaza’s own, saying that there was a lot of commonality yet support was lacking.
She added that, as an Arab country with a history of struggle with Israeli occupation, Lebanon had a duty to help besieged Gazans – 80 percent of whom are currently dependent on food assistance.
“As activists, we need to deal with people who support civil resistance, culturally. It is easier to deal with people, like the Lebanese, who we don’t have to explain the ABCs to, as they already have that political discourse in them,” Shakra added.
She said that living through Israeli occupation during her childhood in the south of Lebanon gave her an appreciation of the plight of Palestinians. “Living there we had to endure a lot and as a result we hold a lot in common with the Palestinian people – we have a common enemy.”
On Tuesday, fellow Gaza aid worker FGM’s chief Gaza coordinator Caoimhe Butterly, gave a talk in Beirut to create greater awareness of the current situation in the Gaza Strip.
Butterly has organized several boats to be sent to Gaza carrying medical and food aid and urged on Tuesday that Lebanon join the efforts. “We want more activists from the Arab world on the boats, we don’t want it to be West-centric. We want the Lebanese to come on these boats,” Butterly, an Irish national, said during the talk in Hamra’s T’Marbouta.
Butterly said in Tuesday’s talk that the situation in Gaza today is hermetic: “There are an estimated 4,000 aid items banned from entering Gaza at present; from cancer treatment medicines, to anesthetic, to footballs. And Israel won’t give out a list because it could be used by humanitarian groups.
“We had to try to negotiate pasta onto the list for three weeks – they said while rice was an essential, pasta was not. Shampoo is allowed in, but shampoo with conditioner is banned.” Butterly said that such decision on the list were deliberately calculated by the Israeli authorities: “That is the most terrifying thing – the seige is deliberately created to bring an entire people to their knees.”
The Free Gaza Movement has successfully made five aid deliveries by boat to the Gaza Strip since August of last year, defying a blockade that was imposed by Israel due to Hamas rocket attacks.
However, Butterly says that Israeli forces have intercepted many more. “The last four boats have been stopped, including the one from Lebanon earlier this year. We believe that there was a decision to block these voyages.
“We want to bring in cement and steel; building materials but they’re being blocked, which cripples any ability to reconstruct the 12,000 homes that have been destroyed,” Butterly added.
In December of last year, she was on a Free Gaza Movement boat that was intercepted by Israeli ships as it headed to Gaza with medical supplies.
Sleiman ordered that the boat be rescued and it was welcomed at the port city of Tyre. “We received wonderful hospitality from the Lebanese and it was a great sign of support, but it shouldn’t stop there – the country needs to be much more active in its support for the cause,” Butterly said.
The organization is now planning to send convoys and passenger boats into Gazan waters to create greater international pressure. “We anticipate Israeli security trying to board the boats, but we will withstand as long as we can – we will try for five days.”
Butterly said that the idea was to have these initiatives happening on a more regular basis so that the situation in Gaza is not forgotten.
ISM Gaza | Farming Under Fire
23 July 2009
Thursday 23rd July 2009 at 8am – Farmers from Abassan Jeddida (East of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip)and human rights workers from the International Solidarity movement will be repairing a damaged water well in Palestinian farmland. On Tuesday 21st July, four Israeli tanks and two bulldozers made an incursion into the area, and caused extensive damage. With international accompaniment, the farmer managed to assess the damage to the well on Wednesday.
21 July 2009
As the dust settled on the destroyed homes, schools and lives in the aftermath of Israel’s assault on Gaza earlier this year, mainstream human rights groups from Amnesty International to Physicians for Human Rights/Israel issued reports condemning Israel’s attack and alleging that the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The staff of CODEPINK Women for Peace re-opened a discussion of what we could do about Israel’s flagrant flouting of international law and the brutality of the ongoing blockade of Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the home demolitions in East Jerusalem. We decided to revisit the idea of a boycott against Israeli products—a boycott that was having more difficulty gaining traction here in the United States than in Europe. But the best way to end an occupation is to make it unprofitable, and one of the best peaceful ways to make something unprofitable is to organize a boycott.
While doing research on the Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement for Palestine, I came across the web site Who Profits, a project of the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace. On that site I found a list of Israeli and international companies that are directly involved in and profit from the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. It seemed strategically and morally important to select for our campaign a corporation whose practices were clearly in contravention to international law. Many of the corporations on the Who Profits list were either unfamiliar to me, discouragingly huge, or didn’t seem like obvious targets for a women’s peace group. But I saw one name that I recognized: Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories. In fact, I knew there was a plastic bottle of Ahava Eucalyptus Mineral Bath Salts sitting on the windowsill next to the tub in my bathroom.
If you take a look at Ahava’s web site, you can read about the company’s environmentally responsible practices: “Our manufacturing processes are non-polluting and environmentally conscious. No animals are involved in testing phases and all of our products are encased in recyclable tubes, bottles and jars.” Ahava’s spokeswoman is fresh-faced Sex & The City actress Kristin Davis, whose commitment to doing good is evidenced by her status as an Oxfam Goodwill Ambassador and her position on the advisory board of The Masai Wilderness Conservation Fund. On the Ahava site, Davis is quoted as saying, “My personal beliefs, which include treating both animals and the environment with respect, are equally important to AHAVA.”
If you navigate around the web site you will see pristine images of the Dead Sea, enticing products with beautifully designed labels, and a photo of a water lily leaf with the caption, “This leaf has nothing to hide.” But, unfortunately, Ahava does have something to hide—an ugly secret about its relationship to a brutal occupation. The Hebrew word “Ahava” means love, but there is nothing loving about what the company is doing in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Ahava is an Israeli profiteer exploiting the natural resources of occupied Palestine.
AHAVA Dead Sea Laboratories, an Israeli cosmetics company, has situated its main manufacturing plant and showroom at the Israeli Jewish settlement Mitzpe Shalem in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank near the shores of the Dead Sea. Mitzpe Shalem, built on occupied land in 1970, is an illegal settlement, as are all Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Ahava’s capture of Palestinian natural resources from the Dead Sea is, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, a patently illegal use by an occupying power of stolen resources for its own profit. To add insult to injury, Ahava’s labels claim that the country of origin of its products is “The Dead Sea, Israel”—this type of labeling has been decried by Oxfam, among other human rights groups, as blatantly misleading.
While we were working on putting together the new AHAVA boycott campaign we called STOLEN BEAUTY, CODEPINK led several delegations to Gaza, one of which never made it into the Strip because the Israeli government wouldn’t let them through the Erez crossing. Several CODEPINK activists decided to take a fact-finding mission to the Ahava plant in the West Bank, corroborating what we had read about the plant’s location and its practices. The women decided to seize the opportunity and—with the avid encouragement of the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian peace activists that they had met—they went to the Ahava store at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv to stage a protest action. Some put on bikinis, wrote on their bodies with mud NO AHAVA/NO LOVE, while others carried signs with slogans such as “There is no love in occupation.” They chanted, sang and made the Israeli evening news.
About a week later, we heard that Kristin Davis was going to be at Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue promoting Ahava products and signing autographs. Two of us went to the store to deliver a letter to Davis, requesting she stop letting Ahava use her beautiful face and good name to cover up their crimes. She was less than receptive, and we were escorted out of the store. A week later, the CODEPINK bikini brigade showed up at the “Tel Aviv Beach Party”—part of the Israeli government’s multi-million dollar “Re-brand Israel” campaign—in New York’s Central Park. The bikinis and our anti-occupation message made Fox News.
We recently sent letters to Ahava’s headquarters in Holon, Israel, as well as to Ahava USA and Kristen Davis, giving them notice of our boycott. We sent copies of these letters to Shamrock Holdings, the investment company of the Roy E. Disney family, which owns 19% of Ahava’s shares. On Monday of this week, CODEPINK women showed up in bikinis and mud at the Cosmoprof North America Trade Show in Las Vegas to let Ahava representatives know we were launching our STOLEN BEAUTY campaign.
We have sent letters to over 100 retailers requesting that they stop stocking Ahava products because Ahava helps finance the destruction of hope for a peaceful and just future for both Israelis and Palestinians. In August we’ll be outside a drugstore, department store or mall near you, exposing Ahava’s dirty secrets and showing that real beauty is more than skin deep. You can go to www.stolenbeauty.org to find out how to join our campaign. And you don’t have to wear a bikini to do it.
