Several sources have confirmed that the two Freedom Waves to Gaza ships have been illegally boarded and commandeered by the Israeli military in international waters.  Organizers have been unable to communicate with the ships since soon after they were approached by Israeli warships.

The Freedom Waves to Gaza initiative is a non-violent, civil society movement striving to challenge the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Wednesday, the two civilian boats set sail from Fethiye, Turkey.  Together the Canadian Tahrir and the Irish Saoirse are carrying 27 people – including journalists and crew – from nine countries. They intend to bring a symbolic cargo of $30,000 worth of medicine to the Gaza Strip.

The organizers of Freedom Waves to Gaza said they kept the voyage secret until now due to sabotage attacks on a previous effort this past summer, Freedom Flotilla II.  At that time, the Greek government prohibited the departure from Greek ports of any ships, Greek or foreign, for Gaza. The Greek port authorities boarded the Tahrir and seized its licence. There have been strong indications that Greece’s actions may have resulted from international pressure, notably from Israel.

Freedom Waves aims to peacefully challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which violates international law and inflicts grave hardship on Palestinians. * [More on this below.]

Please click here to send an email to Canadian political leaders demanding safe passage for the boats, and the safe treatment of all members aboard.

And please forward this message to others.

* [MR:  Many detailed reports document the horrible impacts of the blockade.  Even so, I find this anguished account very compelling.  A refugee from Nazi Germany, Lilian Rosengarten is a Buddhist practitioner, poet, writer and pacifist.  Her article, contributed originally to the Palestine Chronicle, came to me via Australians for Palestine.

Lilian Rosengarten:

Gaza life exists in a cage, an open air prison that has been kept mostly isolated from the world. Its citrus trees have been uprooted.  Flowers are no longer exported.  Nor are vegetables, fruit or olives, formerly a thriving export business.

Since 2000, the Israeli army destroyed 114,000 olive trees.  The rest were destroyed during the 2008-9 war, much of it uprooted from white phosphorous and other chemicals.  Farming is now difficult and in some areas impossible.

Much of Gaza looks like a war zone, bullets holes visible on the sides of buildings.  Gaza is without proper sewage pumps, bombed as they are rebuilt.  Mediterranean waters are infested with raw sewage, while a 3 mile limit, closely watched by the Israeli navy collectively destroys a once flourishing fishing industry, the waters now stagnant from sewage and overfishing.

It is the grimmest of war stories, unimaginable horror where tunnels, miles of mazes function to alleviate the suffering as goods are brought in from Egypt.  Dangerous the tunnels for they are regularly bombed by rockets and missiles.   Continue reading →

The Canadian ship Tahrir and the Irish ship Saoirse have successfully reached international waters, marking the start of the Freedom Waves to Gaza campaign.  The boats are currently in the Mediterranean Sea, preparing to sail for Gaza within a matter of hours.

[MR: This past June, the Saoirse was attacked by saboteurs while still in port, preventing it from sailing to Gaza.  The Tahrir was blocked from sailing by the Greek government, apparently under intense pressure from Israel and the US.]

The Freedom Waves to Gaza initiative is a non-violent, civil society movement to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

“Flowing out of the Freedom Flotillas, the Freedom Waves to Gaza are now underway,” says Canadian Boat to Gaza organizer Ehab Lotayef from on board the Tahrir.  Also on board in this citizen-to-citizen initiative are delegates from Australia, the US, and Palestine.  “We are now in international waters and hope to reach the shores of Gaza in a matter of days.  Among the significant obstacles in our way are Israel’s military and the complicity of the Harper government, but we have the wind of public opinion at our back and in our sails, which strengthens our resolve and determination to challenge the illegal blockade of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.”

“The fact that we have reached international waters is another victory for the movement,” says Canadian Boat to Gaza organizer David Heap from on board the Tahrir.  “Despite economic blackmail, despite the outsourcing of the blockade to Greece, despite being forcibly boarded by the Greek Coast Guard, and despite Israel mobilizing a significant portion of its navy to stop us, we are now even closer to reaching Gaza, breaking the blockade, and occupying the occupation.”

Ehad Lotayef adds, “The Palestinians living in Gaza want solidarity not charity, and have made it clear to the world that their primary demand is for freedom.  While humanitarian aid is helpful, Gazans are still prisoners with no freedom of movement.  Israel’s illegal blockade prevents not only imports into Gaza, but exports as well.  And the blockade prevents Palestinians from moving freely between Gaza and the West Bank, in violation of fundamental human rights.”

Restrictions at the eleventh hour by port authorities have meant that only one third of the assembled delegates and media have been allowed to embark.  Bios of the delegates on board are available here.

Despite this latest challenge, the Tahrir and Saoirse will soon be at full speed ahead toward Gaza.  Various media outlets will be reporting on developments aboard the Tahrir, including Democracy Now and Al Jazeera.

“While the Tahrir will be delivering much-needed medicines, our primary aim remains to help free Palestinians from the open-air prison known as Gaza,” says Heap.  “There’s a song from the civil rights movement with the chorus of ‘we who believe in freedom cannot rest.’  And we will keep challenging the illegal blockade until Gaza and the rest of Palestine are free.”

Track the progress of the Freedom Waves to Gaza boats here.

Video coverage from Democracy Now, onboard the Tahrir, here.

A call to action in support of Freedom Waves to Gaza here.

An urgent message from Bil’in village leader Mohammed Khatib:

We need your help.

On Friday, October 21st, during the weekly demonstration in our village of Bil’in, Israeli soldiers arrested Ashraf Abu Rahmah yet again.

On any Friday morning, no demonstration begins without Ashraf Abu Rahmah walking at its front, holding the Palestinian flag.  Usually, he is the last to walk home.  That is, if he is not injured or arrested.

This week, demonstrators marched as usual to demand the dismantling of the Wall, but Ashraf was not among us.  One day before, on Thursday, October 27th, a military judge decided to extend Ashraf’s arrest indefinitely, for the duration of the legal proceedings against him, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to his innocence of any charges.

The judge ordered the extension of Ashraf’s arrest despite extensive evidence brought by the defense to prove the charges false.  The court was presented with two affidavits from a B’Tselem employee and a lawyer who were both present at the scene.  The depositions stated that Ashraf did not at any stage partake in stone-throwing.  Footage supporting the affidavits was also filed, showing Ashraf’s arrest.  The video depicts him walking peacefully towards the jeeps holding a flag, and the soldiers initially ignoring him.

His lawyers have already submitted an appeal.  It will be heard on Thursday.  [MR: That’s tomorrow, November 3, but in the strong likelihood that the military court upholds the original judge’s decision, as it nearly always does, Ashraf will still be held unjustly in prison.]

Now, we need your help to stop Ashraf’s persecution.  Please take action to demand that Israel release him.

Sincerely,
Mohammed Khatib.

[MR:  Mohammed, a village leader in Bil’in, has also suffered imprisonment on trumped up charges, though currently he’s free – as free as it’s possible to be free in a besieged village.  He is featured in the concluding chapter of Our Way to Fight, and in earlier posts on this blog.

Arbitrary arrests like these are common, and escalating, across the West Bank.  Why does the Israeli regime want leaders of the Palestinian non-violent resistance movement in jail?  A military state is very comfortable with violence – they always have much, much bigger guns –  but military leaders actually admit they don’t have a clue how to deal with non-violent resistance.  Their goal is to remove the leadership and infuriate the Palestinians, especially the young men, until they see no option but to meet violence with violence.  Mohammed Khatib puts it beautifully in Our Way to Fight:

“It’s our right as Palestinians to resist the occupation, but we must choose the method that we think will have the most benefit.  Why engage your opponent in a fight that you know you will lose?  Instead you compete in a way that you think you can win, and show what we have as Palestinians.  We don’t have an army, or tanks, or nuclear weapons like Israel.  What we have is our rights and our own power.  How can we show this power?  By using non-violence.  What we are doing is difficult, it’s more dangerous than to shoot a gun and then run away.  If you tie yourself to a tree, you wait for the army to come, maybe to shoot you, to kill you.  You also have to learn how to control yourself, because when you react to violence with violence, you are out of control, and in that field your opponent will always win.”

If Palestine is ever to be free, and Israel with it, it is people like these who will have built the foundations.   All the more reason to do what we can to help get justice for Ashraf Abu Rahmah.

More about him:

Ashraf is the brother of two Bil’in residents who were killed while participating in the village’s non-violent protests against the wall and the occupation.  His brother, Bassem, was shot dead during a peaceful protest on April 17th, 2009, when soldiers fired a high-velocity tear-gas projectile directly at him from a distance of about 40 meters, crushing his chest.  Ashraf’s sister, Jawaher, died of cardiac arrest caused by poisoning, from inhaling massive amounts of tear-gas on January 1st, 2011.

Ashraf himself has been the subject of gross military misconduct.  On July 7th, 2008 in the entrance to the West Bank village of Ni’lin, soldiers shot him in the foot at close range while he was bound and blindfolded.  The event was caught on tape, and caused international outrage.  Due to the concern raised by people around the world, the Israeli authorities were eventually pressured to indict the shooting soldier and the officer who ordered the shooting.  Both were convicted of gross military misconduct, a rare occurrence in the Israeli justice system.

Given this history and the lack of current evidence, Ashraf’s arrest and continued detention strongly suggest that Israeli authorities are unjustly persecuting him for past events.

Click here to stand up for freedom and justice for Ashraf Abu Rahmah.

We are meant to be mesmerized by the acts and pronouncements of the powerful, endlessly amplified by compliant media that assume the right – and ability – to occupy our minds.  One of their primary goals is to make us feel helpless.  Global warming, economic collapse, the Middle East – it’s all so complicated, so overwhelming, really, what can you do.  ‘What can you do’ erodes from being a practical question into a weary statement of defeat.

In fact none of these huge, apparently overwhelming forces are all that complicated.  All of them are created by human agency, and all of them are subject to change.  It’s a question of how we see them.

If we look at the world through one lens, we see it in a particular way.  Through another lens, it looks quite different.  The people who would control our perceptions, opinions and lives, do so first by controlling the lens through which we see the world and our place in it.

For a variety of reasons the extra-ordinary people I feature in Our Way to Fight came to realize they could no longer trust the lens that was provided to them.  Over time and through experience they learned to see the world around them through a new lens, with fresh eyes.  What they saw compelled them to act.

On the ground in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Chile, Iceland, Spain, Britain, in many US and Canadian cities and thousands of other places we’ll probably never hear about, people are shedding the lenses they inherited, to reclaim their own vision, and they are acting on what they see: immense power unjustly and dangerously concentrated in far too few hands, causing catastrophic harm to the earth and to the vast majority of its inhabitants.  Whatever comes of these many uprisings – those who horde power hardly ever share it without a fight – this is a stunning moment in the human story.   On the streets and in the squares, people are reclaiming ‘what can you do’ as a real question: What can you do?

Alice Walker, African–American writer, responded beautifully at a press conference in Athens, June 27, 2011.  Explaining her decision to participate in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, she said:  “We are freeing ourselves of the myths that have occupied us.”

Palestinians have been struggling for six decades to free themselves from military occupation and its dominant myth, that the occupier is so powerful and so ruthless that resistance is either futile or too dangerous to imagine.  The forces arrayed against the Palestinians are dangerous indeed: the most powerful military state in the Middle East, unconditionally backed by the most powerful military state on the planet and its servile junior partners (Canada, Britain, Australia, etc), and underlying these, our insatiable addiction to oil, and a deeply conditioned Christian hatred for Muslims/Arabs as old as the Crusades.

By this devastating combination of forces, Palestinians have been driven from their land, killed, tortured, imprisoned, betrayed by the world’s elites and their own self-anointed elites, isolated, brutalized and humiliated in nearly all the ways that human imagination at its worst can conceive.

Yet still they struggle, still they resist.  In Arabic it’s called sumud, steadfastness, holding your ground.  They put their lives on the line for the same simple, reasonable goal that drives us all:  the right and the means to live a liveable life.  It’s not much to ask.  And ever-increasing numbers of people outside Palestine are standing with them in their struggle.

The Our Way to Fight cover photo shows Sayat Um-Said, a Palestinian villager, at a Friday protest in al-Ma’asara.  Behind her is a line of barbed wire, and behind that a squad of Israeli soldiers.  Sayat Um-Said is in focus and in the foreground, the soldiers are not, which is exquisitely appropriate, a fine rebalancing of human priorities.

The photograph was taken by Nicolas Weinberg, a French Jewish photographer.  He and Sayat Um-Said both consented graciously to the use of the photo on the cover.  That combination – Palestinian villager, Jewish photographer – struck me as a perfect expression of Our Way to Fight.  It offers grounds for hope.  Both these people have found their own answers to the urgent question, What can you do?

So – what can you do?  Here’s one possibility:

“Welcome to Palestine 2012.”  This is a high profile initiative, not for everyone, but for some an ideal expression of hope, solidarity and determination.  It builds on a similar initiative that occurred in July 2011, when people from Europe and North America were invited by Palestinians to join them for a week of non-violent activities in the occupied West Bank. Continue reading →

Surely more than enough has already been said about the current Israel-Palestine prisoner exchange.  But then this pungent commentary arrived from Israeli writer Uri Avnery.

Avnery has been active in the trenches of war and peace for a long, long time.  Here he shares some new (to me), provocative thoughts on the prisoner exchange and some of its implications.  Uri Avnery:

THE MOST sensible – I almost wrote “the only sensible” – sentence uttered this week sprang from the lips of a 5-year old boy.

After the prisoner swap, one of those smart-aleck TV reporters asked him: “Why did we release 1027 Arabs for one Israeli soldier?”  He expected, of course, the usual answer: because one Israeli is worth a thousand Arabs.

The little boy replied: “Because we caught many of them and they caught only one.”

FOR MORE than a week, the whole of Israel was in a state of intoxication.  Gilad Shalit indeed ruled the country (Shalit means “ruler”).  His pictures were plastered all over the place like those of Comrade Kim in North Korea.

It was one of those rare moments, when Israelis could be proud of themselves.  Few countries, if any, would have been prepared to exchange 1027 prisoners for one.  In most places, including the USA, it would have been politically impossible for a leader to make such a decision.

In a way it is a continuation of the Jewish ghetto tradition. The “Redemption of Prisoners” is a sacred religious duty, born of the circumstances of a persecuted and scattered community.  If a Jew from Marseilles was captured by Muslim corsairs to be sold on the market of Alexandria, it was the duty of Jews in Cairo to pay the ransom and “redeem” him.

As the ancient saying goes: “All Israel are guarantors for each other”.

Israelis could (and did) look in the mirror and say “aren’t we wonderful?”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Oslo agreement, Gush Shalom, the peace movement to which I belong, proposed releasing all Palestinian prisoners at once.  They are prisoners-of-war, we said, and when the fighting ends, PoWs are sent home.  This would transmit a powerful human message of peace to every Palestinian town and village.  We organized a joint demonstration with the late Jerusalemite Arab leader, Feisal Husseini, in front of Jeneid prison near Nablus.  More than ten thousand Palestinians and Israelis took part.

But Israel has never recognized these Palestinians as prisoners-of-war. They are considered common criminals, only worse.

This week, the released prisoners were never referred to as “Palestinian fighters”, or “militants”‘ or just “Palestinians”.  Every single newspaper and TV program, from the elitist Haaretz to the most primitive tabloid, referred to them exclusively as “murderers”, or, for good measure, “vile murderers”.

One of the worst tyrannies on earth is the tyranny of words.  Once a word becomes entrenched, it directs thought and action.  As the Bible has it: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21).  Releasing a thousand enemy fighters is one thing, releasing a thousand vile murderers is something else.  Continue reading →