December Second Protests call for an End to the Siege of Gaza
04 December 2006
December Second Protests call for an End to the Siege of Gaza
Partners for Peace plays a Role
Responding to an urgent call for action initiated by a Coalition of Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli peace groups, people around the world rallied on December 2, 2006 to call for an end to the Israeli siege and US-led international boycott of the Gaza Strip.
Jerusalem Women Speak alumna Rela Mazali spoke at the rally in Tel Aviv and Partners for Peace board member Mark Braverman addressed a crowd in Washington DC.
Transcripts of both speeches are included here. After reading, please take action to end the siege by following the links at the bottom of the page.
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There is no Ceasefire
Address delivered in Tel Aviv by Jerusalem Women Speak alumna Rela Mazali at a demonstration to end the siege of Gaza.
December 2, 2006
Let’s be clear about this: Israel’s fire at Gaza has not ceased. There is no Israeli ceasefire in Gaza. There is no Israeli ceasefire even when Israel’s soldiers aren’t shooting a single bullet in Gaza.
There are food shortages in Gaza. Israel is denying Gaza food.
70% of the families in Gaza do not have enough food. The prices of food have risen, are rising. The price of flour is up by a third. Israel prohibits fishing off the Gaza coast, denying a source of protein that is central to many in Gaza. Food shortages kill. Denying food is fire.
There’s a shortage of potable water in Gaza. Israel obstructs the regular provision of water there, both for drinking and for hygiene. Water shortages kill. Denying water is fire.
There are medicine shortages in Gaza. Israel is denying Gaza medicines. A friend’s brother, a physician who works in a hospital, is now calling himself a photographer. He x-rays patients’ conditions but cannot offer them treatment. Mostly, medicine shortages take the lives of infants, of children, of elderly and sick people. Denying medicines is fire.
There are power shortages in Gaza. Israel denies Gaza electricity. Power shortages take the lives of kidney patients who do not get regular dialysis treatments, of patients who depend on respirators, of diabetics who depend on refrigerated insulin, of babies whose food rots. Denying electricity is fire.
There is no reasonable economy in Gaza. For nine months now Israel has denied the Palestinian Authority tax revenues amounting to half its annual budget. Israel is withholding the salaries of 165,000 employees in both Gaza and the West Bank, 60,000 of them from Gaza, representing 40% of the employed workforce there. In Gaza and the West Bank over one million and seventy thousand people now subsist without basic living conditions. For nine months both Israel and the world have also withheld additional funds from the Palestinian Authority. Agriculture, production and commerce are dying within the Authority and with them, people are dying too. Economic siege is fire.
There is no freedom of movement in Gaza. Denying free movement kills those in need of life-saving medical treatment; those who depend on work away from home; women who are forced to give birth without vital assistance and babies born to such women. More than ever today, unemployed workers are confined to their homes, to frustrating humiliation, to enraging helplessness. More than ever today women exposed to domestic violence are imprisoned within the danger zones of their families. Denying free movement is fire.
The siege of Gaza is fire in disguise. Its victims aren’t counted among Israel’s casualties. It creates a dominion of creeping, blind death; it doesn’t even pretend to distinguish combatants from civilians. But first of all it kills the helpless.
Let’s be clear about this: Israel has made Gaza a death compound.
True, the siege isn’t total. There is no hunger as such in Gaza, there’s food, but not enough. There is power in Gaza, some of the time, not enough.
There is medicine in Gaza, for some, not enough. There are exits and entries at the borders, sporadically, not enough.
Israel has created the semblance of a humanitarian siege; A weapon of mass destruction that is hiding in the details, reflected only through precise information and personal stories. But access to Gaza is difficult; communications are erratic. People there struggle to subsist day by day. How much can they invest in counting, recording, writing, in photography? The siege of Gaza is also a siege of freedom of information.
Therefore, for nine months now, the siege has been fairly successful at hiding this simple truth: The siege of Gaza is a crime; it is indiscriminate murder; it is a systematic execution of hostages; it intentionally sows arbitrary death.
And the pattern is clear: while the situation is worse right now in Gaza, Israel will extend it tomorrow to the West Bank behind the wall.
Both Gaza and the West Bank will go on igniting under fire, till they kindle Sderot again too. The bullet-less fire that Israel is shooting at the dispossessed of Gaza is fire that it is also shooting, by proxy, at the dispossessed of Sderot. The siege-fire of Gaza subtly exploits the photogenic suffering of Sderot to justify and conceal the fact Israel’s leaders are yet again choosing war.
The death siege of Gaza is designed to go on igniting the Palestinian community. It is designed to go on exploiting disenfranchised groups inside Israel. It is designed to present the false image of an Israel seeking peace and holding its fire. It is designed, first and foremost, to prevent true political process and a just peace while simultaneously absolving Israel of responsibility for war. The siege imposed in the name of Israel’s defense is designed to defend only Israel’s powerful, to defend the policies of force and appropriation that serve them so well.
I’m here to tell Olmert, Peretz, Halutz and every individual who serves the government’s armies: Your siege on Gaza is a crime. It is unconscionable-under any circumstances, for any reasons. It is a manifestly immoral act.
An ex-Chief of Staff, Moshe Yaalon, just recently evaded charges for war crimes in New Zealand. For now. The world is beginning-maybe slowly but still-to take action against Israel’s war criminals. And today, standing with us against the siege, against the prolonged oppression of the Palestinian people, are groups and individuals from one hundred cities and communities in Europe, in North America, in Asia, in Australia.
The crime of this siege is no less shameful or horrific than the crime that brought hundreds of thousands to the city square, twenty four years ago, bearing our shame. Then too, in Sabra and Shatilla, the act was disguised. Then too, there was blind killing of imprisoned helpless victims. Today we again bear our shame to this square and demand of you: Stop. Now. Unconditionally. Stop the crime immediately. Stop the siege.
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Peace does not come without Justice
Address delivered in Washington DC by Partners for Peace Board member Mark Braverman at a demonstration to stop the siege of Gaza.
December 2, 2006
Thank you for coming! My name is Mark Braverman. As we begin this rally it is important to realize that we are gathering here today as part of an international day of protest and solidarity. Groups like us in close to 100 cities across the world are gathering – but most important, this is a project that was conceived and organized in Israel, by a coalition of Israeli organizations devoted to justice for Palestine and a just Israeli society, in partnership with Palestinian activist and grassroots organizations. We thus stand here in solidarity with Jews of conscience in Israel, who cannot stand by and allow their government to perpetrate the crimes and human rights violations they are witnessing on their doorstep. We are here to express our solidarity with them and to call our government to account, but the heart of this protest beats in Tel Aviv.
This is very important to acknowledge, as we search for ways to maintain our faith and fortitude in the face of the continuing siege of Gaza and the intransigence of governments across the globe to bring this outrage to an end. There are Jews of conscience – and our number is growing. Today, you will hear a great deal of criticism leveled at Israel, and with great justification, and you will hear it from me as well. As Jews, we do this as part of our faithfulness to a cultural tradition of commitment to justice and human rights – we will not stand by and allow these crimes to be committed in our name.
Gaza is dying. Gaza has been called one big prison camp, but that is not correct. In prison, the people are fed. In prison, there is basic hygiene. In prison, people have adequate medical care. In prison, there are no assassinations and summary executions. In prison, bombs and fire do not fall from the sky, and huge machines do not push down the walls of your prison cell.
Gaza today resembles more the Warsaw Ghetto than an occupied territory under the administration of international relief agencies. Relief agencies that cannot get in or out to deliver basic supplies and monitor conditions, relief agencies where even the flow of funds is restricted because of international sanctions carried out as collective punishment of the Palestinian people for the results of free and fair elections.
Gaza is dying because of lies. The lie that Israel has “disengaged” from Gaza and that Gaza is now “free.” The lie that Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel has just made a “peace” offer to the Palestinian Authority. The lie promoted by the Anti Defamation League that Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who has been appointed by the UN to investigate the Beit Hanoun massacre, is “anti-Israel” biased, and thus incapable of conducting a fair investigation. Bishop Tutu! This is a man without credentials??? This is a man who will betray human rights???? What world, what alternate universe have we stumbled into?
Gaza is dying because of the lie perpetrated by Human Rights Watch, that women and men of Gaza, standing on the roofs of their own houses and in the streets of their own cities to prevent the murder of their countrymen and the destruction of their houses, do not have the right to nonviolent resistance to summary executions carried out by the Israeli government -targeted assassinations that have killed over 300 of their citizens in the past 6 months.
Here is the truth, reported this morning by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:
“One year after the signing of the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) on 15 November 2005 between the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the ability of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip to access either the West Bank or the outside world remains extremely limited and the flow of commercial trade is negligible. There has been no peaceful economic development as envisaged by the AMA but rather a deterioration in the humanitarian situation and an increase in violence overall. The economic impact of increased closure of Gaza’s crossing points has significantly contributed to the worsening of the economic situation over the last 12 months. In the Gaza Strip, unemployment levels have risen from 33.1% to 41.8% between 2005 and 2006 and already high poverty levels have gone up.”
Here is the truth:
- 57 Graves dug for Palestinians killed in Operation Autumn Cloud in Beit Hanoun
- Entire families living on 1000 calories a day, in the filth of overflowing toilets and with contaminated water that sickens children
- No salaries for over 160,000 government employees since March
- Garbage in the streets and less than 2 hours of electricity a day
And what happened in the home of the Shurafa family in nearby Beit Lahia? Four apartments for four brothers _ Khaled, Ibrahim, Nafez and Mohammed and their children, about 50 people in all. A fairly nice-looking apartment building. A missile or bomb fell on it from a plane in the middle of the night
Abed al-Jawad’s textile factory was on the outskirts of the Maghazi camp. Only the clothing labels can still be seen lying in the sand. Nothing else remains of the factory. It was all demolished and the debris removed. Dozens of sewing machines are no more; 70 people’s livelihoods have been crushed by IDF bulldozers.
I want to close by saying some things as a American Jew. Israel is destroying itself. My tradition is based on belief in a universal God who requires social justice. There is nothing Jewish about the actions of the State of Israel toward the Palestinian people. We are using Jewish history – indeed, the Holocaust itself — to justify the destruction of another people.
A common Israeli expression declares, “We have no choice!” — We have to defend ourselves!” But choices are being made, and it is time for Israel, and the Americans who support its brutal occupation of Palestine, to understand the consequences of these choices.
You cannot create your own security by destroying another people. You don’t defend yourself by stealing other people’s land and destroying their homes and their ability to feed their children.
As a Jew I call on my coreligionists here and in Israel, who are committed to the survival of Israel, to recognize that Israel’s expansionist course will continue to erode her security. The madness must stop.
But our protest is not only based on saying “these actions are crazy and will not work.” I call on my fellow Jews, along with my fellow Americans who believe that Israel’s survival is important, to stand against Israel’s actions, not because these actions “don’t work,” but because they are wrong.
If Israel’s survival requires Palestine’s destruction, this is not an Israel that I can live with. And for this I mourn – because the people of Israel do not deserve this. They deserve a government better than the one they have. They, like we here in America, deserve a government committed to Human Rights and to universal principles of Justice. They deserve a government that abides by international law. They deserve a government that does not require mothers and fathers to deliver their sons up to a military machine that kills their souls and warps their futures.
Today, here, all of us gathered together in solidarity with all peoples of the region who demand justice and peace, call upon the government of the United States to cease its unconditional, blind, tragic support of Israel’s military crimes and its illegal, expansionist policies in Palestine. Stop the killing. Stop the starvation. Stop the humiliation.
We call upon our government to call Israel to account, and to move quickly and forcefully toward a resolution of the conflict and a time of peace and justice for Palestine, peace and justice for Israel.
Peace does not come without Justice.
No peace without justice! No peace without justice! No peace without justice!
Thank you.
