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Gaza March Puts Spotlight on Civilian Suffering
UNITED NATIONS - More than 50,000 people are expected to take to the streets of Gaza on Dec. 31 for a mass march designed to send a message to the United States, a key supporter of Israel's army, that the situation in Gaza violates international human rights laws.
Israel is imposing "collective punishment on the people of Gaza," says CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin. (Credit:Bomoon Lee/IPS)
The idea behind the "Gaza
Freedom March" comes from CODEPINK, a women's peace group committed to
drawing attention to the humanitarian crisis in the occupied
Palestinian territories, among other campaigns.
Organisers say the main catalyst for the mobilisation was the
Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations and written by
renowned South African jurist Richard Goldstone.
The 575-page report, released in September, detailed gross
human rights violations and war crimes committed by both Israel and
Hamas in Gaza during the Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 18, 2009 conflict.
However, it was particularly critical of Israel, calling the
military campaign "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to
punish, humiliate, and terrorise a civilian population, radically
diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for
itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and
vulnerability."
It also described Israel's longstanding economic blockade of
Gaza a form of "collective punishment" against the population and cited
a number of attacks on civilian targets during the operation for which
there was "no justifiable military objective".
"I think we have to recognise that the importance of the Gaza
Freedom March as a way of drawing attention to the blockade is
crucial," said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center
for Constitutional Rights, at a news conference to announce the march
last week.
"But what really changed here is the world's understanding of
what's really happening in the occupied territories in the West Bank,
and Gaza, and in East Jerusalem," he said.
The three-mile march from Gaza to the Erez Crossing in Israel
intends to bring together 51,350 people from 43 nations, of whom 50,000
are Palestinians. Each participant has signed a code of conduct
committing to non-violence during the march.
Ratner said he plans to attend with his family, who he said
want to show solidarity as Jewish Americans with the people of Gaza.
"I want to break the blockade, I want to see the damage done by the
weapons from my tax dollars, and I want it understood: Israel does not
kill in my name. I want to follow words with action, and that's why me
and my family are going to Gaza," he said.
Currently, the U.S. gives about three billion dollars per year in military aid to Israel, he added.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and also a Jewish
American, has visited Washington numerous times to lobby for a
reduction in aid. She hopes the march will influence the way the
international community had responded to the attacks on Palestinian
civilians.
"I think it's a recognition that Israel can no longer hide
under the idea that it somehow is exceptional, that it can create and
engage in gross violations of internationally recognised human rights,
and do so with impunity. It can't continue to impose collective
punishment on the people of Gaza. It can't deliberately attack
civilians," said Benjamin.
"The fact that so many people around the world are coming
really gives heart and inspiration to the people in Gaza that shows
that they have not been forgotten," she said.
Benjamin said that the participants come from diverse
backgrounds, including civil society activists, students, university
professors, members of trade unions, business people, people from
refugee communities, women's organisations and journalists, among many
others.
"We [even] have people in their seventies and eighties. Quite
a large portion of the people are of Jewish decent. One is an 85
year-old Holocaust survivor," said Benjamin.
Benjamin equated the situation in Gaza to historical struggles for human rights throughout the past century.
"We are doing this in the spirit of Martin Luther King, of
Mohandas Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela, of non-violent resistance
worldwide," she said.
Abdeen Jabara, a member of the Steering Committee for the Gaza
Freedom March, also compared the struggles of African Americans for
civil rights during the 1950s to Palestinians today, emphasising the
importance of non-violent, peaceful resistance.
"For centuries, black people in America suffered from segregation, but
it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was peaceful and
determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's
founding," said Jabar. "We fervently hope that this effort in some
small way could break the siege, [and] will register in DC, and the
other capitals of the world."
The Goldstone report has been affirmed by both the U.N. Human Rights Council and the General Assembly.
However, Israel dismissed it as biased, and U.S. Ambassador to
the U.N. Alejandro Wolff also rejected the report as "deeply flawed"
and "unbalanced".
The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly last month to condemn the report, as well.
According to statistics compiled in 2008 by the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), there are
1,059,584 refugees in living in impoverished conditions in Gaza. The
blockade has created a situation where often even basic supplies of
medicine and food cannot pass through Israeli checkpoints.
The hope of CODEPINK is that the Gaza Freedom March will create
vibrations throughout the world, and especially in the U.S., to stop
these gross human rights violations from occurring and to end its aid
to Israel once and for all.
"Israel has no place to hide," said Jabara.
- Posted in
24 Comments so far
Show Allits easy to babble on about the isreali and palestinian problem, so good luck CODEPINK sorry i won't be there.
Spoken like a true desk jockey.
Right on, GreenMike! With a few million more people like you, things might happen! I am with you one hundred percent. Go in peace, friend, and best of luck!
(I am originally from NE Ohio and still know many people who live there and were witness to the 2004 vote fraud, so I know you speak the truth about that, too.)
Codepink supports no war. They are one of the true courageous groups in America that stands for peace.
In Carter's "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid", the President laid out succinctly and clearly the history and solutions to the conflict in Palestine, and those solutions have already been proposed in over 30 UN resolutions and various Arab agreements. However, there is no one on the Hill to support Carter.
B'Tselem's web site(www.btselem.org, under Statistics) demonstrates the disproportionality of the conflict showing that Israel, in last years Gaza invasion, killed more than 1400 Palestinians while less than 15 Israelis died, all following the Israeli attack.
The Qassam rockets(rockets that have to be smuggled into Palestine for the only defense they have, must be hand made and are unguided missles) that the Palestinian used in the beginning of last years Gaza conflict caused no injuries and virtually no property damage. What Israel followed that attack with was pure genocide.
Who in the House or Senate gives voice to the Palestinians? Who will silence AIPAC and their threats of intimidation against anyone who may have the courage to give that voice volumn?
And the funny thing is that, out of those Israelis who did die, most of them were victims of friendly fire. How's that for a kicker?
GreenMike - I applaud you for the obviously dedicated work you have done in caring for the sick and the injured, in trying to change a corrupt democratic process, and, hopefully, to change two absolutely corrupt parties, just about all of whose members are living high on the hog with their corporate monies and allegiances that almost guarantee them re-election.
But rereading what you've written, I do think you need to step back some. Medea Benjamin, as many of us, wholeheartedly supported the candidacy of Barack Obama. Yes, I had questions when he spoke about having to go after Osama Bin Laden, when it was, and certainly is now, quite clear and verifiable that Osama Bin Laden died some time in the middle of December, 2001, from his long-term fatal kidney disease, in a hospital.
You sound like you don't know that 9-11 was an inside job. Time to get yourself up to date.
I also had questions about Obama's insistence that continuing to fight in Afghanistan was a necessity.
But most of all, when the brutal assault by Israel on Gaza not only began, but continues to this day, and so many Gazans were killed, wounded terribly, their homes destroyed, life- support facilities destroyed, and then they were and are being starved and do not have access to clean water, I was appalled that Obama never mentioned it throughout his campaign.
The attack on Gaza was arranged during the summer of 2008 between Bush and Ehud Olmert and/or Bibi Netanyahu.
Israel's soldiers have acted like brutes which they are trained to do, as are the Israeli elementary school and higher-grade children trained, much like the Hitler Youth, to chant hatefully against the Palestinian beasts with the message that they must be killed/exterminated.
What Medea Benjamin is doing along with her dedicated Code Pink friends and cohorts is a wonderful action. Will it even be on our television sets whose stations are controlled by The House of Rothschild and allied pro-zionist corporations?
Yes, our whole political system is just about gone, and our economy is just about finished also, and that means we are just a shell of a nation now. [Read the the history of The House of Rothschild, and you'll find the Rothschild's very actively controlling our Federal Reserve, our non-governmental, private consortium of international banks. Many countries, including ours, have been controlled by the Rothschilds for a very long time.]
Bitterness is not a quality that sells well, and I certainly pick that up in you, GreenMike, and that takes away from the wonderful work you have done.
There are many people in this country who have had to struggle to get where they are, and they too came from poverty and various dysfunctions in their family [to put it mildly].
I have experienced a lot of hardship in my life, which wasn't supposed to be. However, I have still managed to do many positive things, including political activism, but also, just like everybody, I've won some and I've lost some.
Many, many years ago I was feeling bitter because what was supposed to be turned out to have been spun on a lot of lies and family dysfunction. It takes years to sort it all out sometimes. But the choice at that time was, I knew, that to choose to feel bitter was going to poison me and whatever I wanted to do in the future. I gave up bitterness, and always turn to a count of the blessings I have known and the blessings that I have.
Count your blessings, GreenMike. You win some; you lose some.
But please don't trash someone else's major efforts to bring the world's attention to the terrible, unjust, dangerous plight of the Gazans in Palestine/Israel.
We all hoped things would change after the Bush/Cheney nightmare. The nightmare continues and gets worse.
The March in Gaza is a small drop in this ocean of horror, but every drop counts. Medea Benjamin is doing a wonderful thing. Support that, despite disagreements you might have with her on other things.
Support the good of it, and the Code Pink women who organized it and the marchers who are putting themselves on the line for a struggling people.
May you find peace inside yourself, GreenMike. Don't let any bitterness about anything contaminate your obvious compassion for those you have served and serve in your nursing.
If your heart is in the right place and you tell the truth and do not compromise your own integrity, it seems to me that is the strongest political position you can take and the one that will win hearts and minds no matter what party you belong to and whose slate you run on.
And if you don't ever win political office, perhaps you are meant to do something else. I think you would agree that there is much to do in this world to try to make it better ... and actually save it from total destruction -- by humans or from natural outcomes to our stupidity, insanities, and unawareness.
peace, cm
Good for these ladies. They're doing a commendable job of bringing hope to the poor Palestinians. Let's hope all the activitists can get thru. That puppet Mubarak - who should be castrated for his deeds - has decided not to allow anyone to cross into Gaza. My e-mail to his embassy is in their inbox. I hope they get a bad rash in their armpits when they read it!
GreenMike, I have worked for and support most of what and whom you have, Cynthia McKinney included, and I have done a good share of caring for people too in very difficult circumstances.
You just didn't get what I was saying and that is too bad because that is what is crucial.
Bitterness and Anger and Defensiveness are what comes through, GreenMike, loud and clear. I wouldn't want a person representing me in political office who can't get over whatever it is and someone who condemns everything about someone even if they are doing something very good.
You sound more like Idi Amin [sp.] than a balanced human being.
You sound like you HATE Medea Benjamin. What gives?
Don't bother to answer with another tirade of all you've done and that she supported Obama and the Democratic Party. So did a lot of people. Should we condemn them all and all the people who vote Republican. The whole system is kaput and that's the truth and so is the nation as a Republic with a democratic process. It's over.
Take it easy, GreenMike, and take time to work on yourself. Bitterness and Anger and an Enemies list don't cut it.
I tell the truth too based on a tremendous amount of research.
No nation is in charge anymore. International money is in charge and has been for a very long time.
The U.S. of A. is being pushed to the scrap heap of history.
Read some of my other posts, usually with a lot of factual information, to try to help people to wake up out of their apathy and their ignorance. Many people on this site are well-informed, but too many are stuck in the MYTHs of the Grand Old Flag. And since the 1960's they've been seriously and deliberately conditioned by Boob Tube programming with networks influenced or owned or operated by The House of Rothschild and its allied pro-zionist corporations and foundations and other BIG MONEY. Also Right-Wing Religionists own particular satellite networks and programming.
Should I hate the people of this country or try to inform and encourage? And if someone is wrong on certain choices, do I then condemn them when they make a right one because in the past they made some choices I don't consider right?
We have enough EGOTISTS in politics, people who can't get over themselves. Maybe that's why your candidacy was discouraged or blocked or whatever.
That's the way I'm reading you, and it's not a positive read. And that's the truth.
/cm
crucial issue: avoiding "divide and conquer" strategies all around, especially when no one is perfect.
For Cee Miracles and Green Mike...
Sounds like there are many common threads between the two of you. I don't understand the vitriol. Truly. what is to argue?
I didn't support obama. Thought he was very transparant. Always said he believed in american exceptionalism. I was depressed when he won. I knew he would move everyone to the right. And people would be too politically correct to complain. I find him uneloquent as opposed to so many who think he is an orator.
He is not. And he accepted a peace prize and preached to the committee about the importance of war. The man's ego and lack of insight knows no bounds. He will no doubt be responsible if dominatrix, Sarah Palin, is on the ticket in 2012. I don't even think he is naive. I believe we are seeing his agenda unfold. that is that.
To think otherwise is to believe he is not a politician. Why would so many believe he is different. Can we take a logical guess?
Thank goodness he blew it even sooner than i had expected. Couldn't even throw one crumb to his base. Now.....
Medea Benjamin. I have spent time with her. She is personally speaking. Less than sensitive or warm. Egomaniacal. Many, many have left Code Pink because they couldn't stand working with her. I could tell stories. From my own experience and form other's. And she is shockingly rude to the people she is supposedly trying to help. You would be amazed.
Enough said on this. She got 'pied' a couple of years ago. By bakers without boarders. She is the one who wrote about the event. Said a creme pie with a sheeir aluminim pie placte truamatized her for life.
She needs to give it up......
I don't understand the vitriol either, readytotransform.
Reread the posts.
This little piece from GreenMike says it:
"Oh and for the record, with the whole Gaza thing. I supported Cynthia McKinney.
"You may have heard of her.
"I know that folks like you would LOVE it if folks like me stopped running for office ..." [Huh? Who are "folks like me"? ... and that's the whole tone.]
"Because when we run, we expose not just the pro-war, corporate corrupted two party system, we expose those who attempt to provide political cover for it too." ...
[Most out-front activists and also the underground activists are trying to do exactly that.]
Do you see any worth, readytotransform, in what Medea Benjamin and Code Pink have done in organizing the march/gathering to support the Gazans and make some waves if that's possible, since the news media likely will not cover it. Even though her personality may be turning you and others off, isn't there still a worth in what she and her cohorts are trying to do?
GreenMike evidently doesn't because she supported Obama.
So did Oprah, for gosh sakes. Should no one watch her show anymore because Obama turned out to be and continues to be a total horror?
I really don't know where the man, GreenMike, is coming from and with my last statement, I wrote him off as a troll and maybe a little bit of a paranoid nutcase with a sense of his own importance because he seems to see himself as the only "Revolutionary for Truth" in existence.
On Medea Benjamin's persona of "Less than sensitive or warm," I'd have to meet her or see her in action. The photograph of her on the article, to my eyes, shows a very strained, somewhat worn-out woman with a lot of pain in her face. She's bitten off a lot and a lot is on her plate to pull off in a rather dangerous situation. And since she is Jewish and obviously not aligned with the policies of the Israeli government and according to polls, not aligned with the opinions of Israelis in general, I would imagine that could create some inner conflict and trepidation. But I could be wrong on that certainly, and she may just be stressed from all she's doing. She is confronting power, truth to power, and GreenMike might consider that himself since that is what he's saying about himself as a courageous "Revolutionary for Truth."
How many of of us here have to announce that we are courageously trying to speak truth to power, uncover the facts and lay them out there, and encourage each other to do what we can to change things? Isn't that why most of us are here in this obviously uphill climb?
We are in the most perilous time of our history and human history. That's what drives me. Human suffering is beyond the pale now and there's more to come, and it's coming to a neighborhood near you ... to borrow from the ad people. That's what counts, both inside our borders and across the world. And that's what drives me too ... because it is so unnecessary and so wrong.
Keep on keepin' on in transforming. Those of us who know that transformation of consciousness and the actions to go with that are what's required to recreate the world of violence to one of peace are in the minority still. And the odds are not with us at this moment.
That's enough for anyone's plate to eat from everyday. A stressful, crazy-making time.
peace, cm
Impeaching? Sure, the whole previous carload of the GWBush Gang, and Obama, yes. And if they all could be tried at The Hague and also the Israeli Zionist leaders, it would be a cleansing indeed.
However, both the U.S. and Israel, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, respectively, on May 6, 2002, renounced and nullified the signatures of their predecessors that were affixed on the last day for signing, December 31, 2000, of a highly refined legal baby called The Rome Statute, which became part of the Genocide Convention.
[Wonder what these two dollies had in mind? We have since found out. ... Guantanomo and Gaza, just for starts.]
The Rome Statute could have hauled many individuals we have come to know through their deeds into The Hague for Crimes Against Humanity under The Rome Statute. But now neither Israel nor the United States recognizes The Rome Statute or the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, except when other people are tried there.
Despite the intense efforts by George W. Bush to have other nations nullify their signatures, The Rome Statute officially came into force as an adjunct to the Genocide Convention on July 1, 2002, with the mandatory 60-nation ratifications by the deadline of April 26, 2002. Nobody had budged for George W.
As an aside, it took 40 years for the U.S. to ratify the Genocide Convention which was approved by the United Nations International General Assembly in 1948. Ronald Reagan signed it three years after an embarrassing incident in Germany to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of V-E Day, 1945. When Reagan returned to The States, signing the Genocide Convention was again a live issue. After three years of wrangling among Senators, Reagan signed a weakened, toothless version of the Geneva Convention on November 25, 1988.
++++++++++++
So you want to talk outrage? I lived the years of WWII and before. And with JFK's assassination, I've watched my own nation begin its descent down the tubes, and most people have not wanted to hear that at all, especially during the Reagan years and even more especially in these last ten years as the slide down the hill has accelerated.
Gaza? Because I know names and have seen faces and have corresponded, and have written my ass off to friends and family and websites and did a lot of things one is supposed to do to help change things, but it gets worse instead, my own appetite disappeared some time in March of this year. And as each new horror is revealed, I hear myself saying, "God, I can't stomach this" or "What a kick in the belly" or "This is hard to swallow."
The Gazans are starving and have been for a long time.
Obama plays basketball and golf, and Bibi reminds us of "The Holocaust" and why everyone else is to blame. And the Gazans continue to starve and be denied humanitarian aid and food. And Obama plays basketball and golf and scoops up a Nobel Peace Prize and disses a Norwegian King and thumbs his nose at real remedies at a Climate Convention, and Bibi reminds us why the Gazans must be punished because Hamas shot off some crummy rockets that didn't kill anybody, and the Gazans shouldn't have voted for them and they should kick them out of Gaza. Sure.
Insanities!!!
As blow after blow has been delivered around this world to goodness, and hope, and honor, and fairness and justice and rationality and just common sense, I have grieved for what was once my country, and I grieve for all of those who are suffering so terribly because of what my country does and doesn't do and for its support of people who are murderously equivalent to those who are and have been at the helm of my government.
I assure you, my angry young friend, I have been paying attention and likely acting on that for a longer time than you have. Grief, outrage, righteous anger ... I've got those feelings and I'm sure many, many, many people on this Board have those feelings too.
And the reason I'm sure is because they say so.
You do not have a corner on the market of outrage or speaking the truth.
This is the last I shall write in response to your seeing yourself so separate from many of us, and somehow special.
Certainly Righteous Anger is a prime mover, as it should be, but don't assume that all those who do not agree with you are wrong in their assessments.
The point is that it is stupid to create dissension and diviseness because someone didn't agree with you a year ago or maybe now. I repeat ... what Medea Benjamin and her Code Pink cohorts are doing is a wonderful attempt to wake up people to the plight of the Gazans and the injustice of it. If you can't see that, then your heart is blind. If you can see that, then you might want to send mental good wishes for the safety of all the people who have marched and gathered on the borders of Gaza/Israel and Egypt.
peace, cm
Goodbye, Trolling GreenMike. I never revealed what party I belong to.
/cm
No wonder our health-care system is a shambles. We have RNs who spend hours writing and posting self-aggrandizing drivel on CD in an apparent attempt to deflect discussion from the relevant issues surrounding the ongoing atrocities being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians. Doesn't someone need a blood pressure check or something?