The only conceivable purpose for this gross violation of my bodily integrity was to humiliate and terrify me. But it had just the opposite effect. It made me more determined to speak out against abuses by the Israeli government and military.

Yet my own experience, unpleasant as it was, is nothing compared to the indignities and abuses heaped on Palestinians year after year.  Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is based not on equal rights and fair play, but on what Human Rights Watch has termed a “two-tier” legal system – in other words, apartheid, with one set of laws for Jews and a harsh, oppressive set of laws for Palestinians.

This, however, is the legal system and security state AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) will defend from May 22-24 at its annual conference.  And, despite this grim reality, members of Congress will converge to hail AIPAC and Israel.  The Palestinians’ lack of freedom is bound to be obscured at the AIPAC conference with its obsessive focus on security and shunting aside of anything to do with upholding fundamental Palestinian rights.

Several years ago near Der Beilut in the West Bank, I saw the Israeli police turn a water cannon on our nonviolent protest. As it happened, I recalled Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and wondered why an ostensibly democratic society responded to peaceable assembly by trying, literally, to drown out the voice of our protest.

In Mas’ha, also in the occupied West Bank, I joined a demonstration against the wall Israel has built, usually inside the West Bank and occasionally towering to 25 feet in height. I saw a red sign warning ominously of “mortal danger” to any who dared to cross in an area where it ran as a fence. I saw Israeli soldiers aiming at unarmed Israelis, Palestinians and international protesters. I also saw blood pouring out of Gil Na’amati, a young Israeli whose first public act after completing his mandatory military service was to protest against the wall. I saw shrapnel lodged in the leg of Anne Farina, one of my traveling companions from St. Louis. And I thought of Kent State and Jackson State, where National Guardsmen opened fire in 1970 on protesters against the Vietnam War.

So as AIPAC meets and members of Congress cheer, I hold these images of Israel in my mind and fear AIPAC’s ability to move US policy in dangerous directions. AIPAC does a disservice to the Palestinians, the Israelis and the American people. It helps to keep the Middle East in a perpetual state of war and this year will be no different from last year as it keeps up a steady drumbeat calling for war against Iran.

AIPAC pretends to speak for all Jews, but it certainly does not speak for me or other members of the Jewish community in this country who are committed to equal rights for all and are aware that American interventionism is likely to bring further disaster and chaos to the Middle East.

Israel, of course, would not be able to carry out its war crimes against civilians in Lebanon and Gaza without the United States – and our $3 billion in military aid – permitting it to do so. At 86 years old, I use every ounce of my energy to educate the American public about the need to stop supporting the abuses committed by the Israeli government and military against the Palestinian people. Sometimes there are people who try to shout me down and scream that I am a self-hating Jew, but most of the time the audience is receptive to hear from someone who survived the Holocaust and now works to free the Palestinians from Israeli oppression.

The vicious discrimination brought to bear against Palestinians in the occupied territories deserves no applause this week from members of Congress attending the AIPAC conference.  Instead, they should raise basic questions with Israeli officials about decades of inferior rights endured by Palestinians both inside Israel and the occupied territories. As for me, I will be across the road at an alternative convention called Move Over AIPAC. To sign up and join me, visit www.MoveOverAIPAC.org.

Hedy Epstein is a Holocaust survivor, who writes and travels extensively to speak about social justice causes and Middle Eastern affairs.

Take action by attending Move Over AIPAC, a gathering in Washington DC from May 21-24, 2011, to expose AIPAC and build the vision for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East! More information can be found at www.MoveOverAIPAC.org.

“For more than half a century, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has worked to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship.  From a small pro-Israel public affairs boutique in the 1950s, AIPAC has grown into a 100,000-member national grassroots movement described by The New York Times as “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel.”

That goal is one that we would ordinarily admire—American citizens bonding together to let their government know how they feel about issues that are important to them, as Americans.  The problem here is that AIPAC is a group of American citizens who have bonded together to influence the American government to work for the interests of a foreign government—Israel. 

Years ago, when Wolf Blitzer was an AIPAC employee and we appeared together on a panel discussion, he literally shouted at me that, as Americans, AIPAC members had the right to lobby Congress.  My response then was the same as it is now:  when lobbying is being done for a foreign government, as AIPAC does, it’s wrong.

I always believed that, as much as I admire the country from which my parents emigrated, Lebanon, I would never put its interests above those of the United States.  But that’s what is done by AIPAC whose mantra is that Israel is America’s best ally in the Middle East and therefore needs uncritical support.  Let us examine that claim.

During the 1967 Middle East war, our greatest ally, Israel, did its level best to destroy a U.S. Navy ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, a lightly armed intelligence ship ordered by the Navy to sail off the coast of Israel and Egypt to monitor communications during the fighting.  That was a simple enough assignment, but the outcome was a bit more complicated.  Despite clear markings on the Liberty, and a huge American flag flying from its stern, the Israeli military undertook a sustained and vicious attack on the ship and its crew, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 170 more. After receiving distress calls from the Liberty, the U.S. Naval command in the Mediterranean dispatched two fighter jets to come the ship’s rescue.  However, when Lyndon Johnson learned that the attack on the Liberty came from the Israelis, he ordered that the jets be recalled.

The ship didn’t sink, in spite of the attempt by the Israelis to scuttle it, and it limped back to a port in Spain, where the crew was ordered to speak to no one, especially the press, about what had happened.  Those able bodied members of the crew were bitter then and remain bitter today about the way the U.S. government abandoned them to the tender mercies of the Israeli military, their bitterness stemming not only from the malicious attack on the ship and its crew, but also from the indifference of their government, which chose Israel’s welfare over theirs.  AIPAC has done its best to prevent any investigation of the incident by Congress, mostly by threatening retribution against any committee that would dare to hold hearings on the affair.   (See James Scott’s book, Attack on the Liberty.  Scott’s father was a young ensign on board the Liberty at the time of the attack).  

When Jonathan Pollard was caught selling tons of U.S. secrets to the Israeli government, AIPAC once again stepped in to demonstrate its power, by continuing its call for Pollard’s release from the life sentence he received for his spying.

More recently, two of AIPAC’s employees, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman were caught obtaining government secrets on Iran from Larry Franklin, a Defense Department employee.  Interestingly, although Franklin pleaded guilty to the charges of espionage, the charges against Rosen and Weissman were dropped on grounds of lack of evidence—a strange lack of symmetry, reflecting AIPAC’s death grip throughout the U.S. government.

In an ongoing lobbying effort, Israel and its supporters, principally AIPAC, have tried mightily to get the United States to invade Iran, by tying Israel’s perceived threat by Iran to US’ interests, including the development of Iran’s nuclear capacity.  As well, George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq—a war we did not need–was heavily influenced by Israel’s supporters, many of them in the Bush Administration, as a way to eliminate one of Israel’s sworn enemies.

In all, the United States can do without AIPAC, even though Israel most likely cannot.  Should AIPAC somehow disappear, which is unlikely, U.S. Middle East policy would be more directed toward America’s interests rather than toward Israel’s.

James Abourezk is a former U.S. Senator who practices law in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  He is the author of Advise and Dissent, a memoir of his life in South Dakota and in the U.S. Senate.  He can be reached at georgepatton45@gmail.com.

Take action by attending Move Over AIPAC, a gathering in Washington DC from May 21-24, 2011, to expose AIPAC and build the vision for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East! More information can be found at www.MoveOverAIPAC.org.

I do not believe in war at all; although I am as capable of anger as anyone. To me war is something to be outgrown, recognized as immature, wasteful and so destructive to life that human beings should shun it as they shun Swine Flu, or HIV/AIDS or as they once shunned Bubonic Plague. If our species survives, and it may well not, it will be because we learn not to fight to kill each other, though some of us may continue to fight as an expression of our not yet controllable nature. It is painful to feel the war machine continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan and in all the other parts of the globe not covered by our media. It isn’t that I thought one man, a new president, could stop it overnight or in one year – it has been acceptable behavior for millennia – but it was my hope that there would be, out of Washington, an entirely new and different approach to what is essentially the failure of human beings to listen to each other; to teach and guide and share with one another. To see the best, even in “the enemy.” And where no “best” is discernable, to understand how what might have been good has become horribly twisted or destroyed. To think of small children who have no alternative, often, to growing up imprisoned in poisonous ideologies; there they stand in our missile sights, “terrorists” who never really had a chance.

Is there no way to reach our enemies other than by killing them? Do we “win” in this way? I cannot believe it. Rather I believe killing other human beings is not about winning, but about failure. Winning would be to begin to train our military to do what it also does wonderfully well: look after the inhabitants of the planet. It has been such a relief to see our soldiers stepping in to help earthquake victims in Haiti and elsewhere; to see their self-assurance and can-do spirit as they tackle the problems of crumbled buildings, trapped children, pain crazed persons who, having lost homes and possessions, have nowhere to go. This is when I have felt most proud of our military. And it has been easy to see that this is where our soldiers have felt most proud of themselves.

There is much anger at our president from the community of pacifists and anti-war activists to which I belong. There is so much disappointment and rage. I share some of this; what I mostly feel, however, is not anger or rage, but grief. Eisenhower was right to warn us about the burgeoning power of the Military Industrial Complex, as he termed it. That it was quite capable of taking over the country, and the president with it. That we are in the hands of a war machine that doesn’t really care who is elected to run the country; it’s aim is plunder, destruction, conquest and exploitation. Taking whatever its creators want by force. All in the name of “defense.” Looking in our own families we can see how we are connected to this machine: the jobs, the pensions, the chance to learn a trade or go to school. Many people’s fear is that if the military stopped its machinations around the globe millions of people would have no place, and no work.

And that is why what we must insist on, I believe, is transformation of the Military. Though what use can be found for our obsolete missiles and weapons of mass destruction I cannot, myself, imagine. But my faith is that someone can imagine this; that we can make something useful out of things like old fighter planes and bomb casings. The way the earth is shaking so many of us out of bed in the middle of the night with no shelter left to our names, perhaps we should put our architects and builders to the task of designing and creating housing out of them. Humans are very clever, as we know. No more clever humans exist – along with some who are abysmally not clever – than in the United States.

In these times it is easy to see why war is obsolete. Nature has taken it on herself to show us how destructive unanticipated and uncontrollable violence is. And that nothing humans can ever do on the battlefield is a match for her power. After an earthquake, especially after earthquakes like the recent ones in Haiti and Chile, how can humanity permit our governments to cause similar devastation, with our money, deliberately?

Recently I was in Cairo, attempting to cross into Gaza with the courageous women of CODE PINK. This organization had worked for nearly a year to collect about 2 million dollars worth of aid for the people of Gaza. They had also invited fourteen hundred people from around the world to join in a Freedom March inside Gaza, in protest of the imprisonment of 1.5 million Palestinians, in Gaza, by the Israeli government. The Egyptian government, apparently under the control of Israel and the United States, refused to permit us entry. Perhaps its leader feared losing the large amount of aid the U.S. gives Egypt every year.

In any case, on my third day in Cairo I found myself traveling with Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODE PINK, to pay a visit to the Red Crescent, similar to the Red Cross. We were escorted into the office of a large, kindly man who seemed to want to help us. Jodie Evans, wearing a lot of pink, had come armed with her cell phone and her computer. At each point of questioning from the kindly but cautious Egyptian, she used these tools to connect with her base of information. There was not a single question put to her that she did not, sitting there in all her glorious pink, answer politely, firmly and conclusively. She explained about the 1400 citizens from around the world who were outside, some camping in front of Embassies, some battling police in the Cairo streets. She talked about the 2 million dollars worth of aid. Milk and cheese and bread and beans. Water. Chocolate. School supplies. Medicine.

I had arrived in Cairo ill; speaking brought on a spell of coughing; I was sorry to be of so little help. However I did have one question:

“Have you ever been to Gaza?” I asked our host, when Jodie Evans took a moment to catch her breath.

“No,” he said. “But I hear it’s better than when you were there last year.”

More people dead? I wondered. Or did he mean more rubble cleared?

But then Jodie Evans was back on the case. To every question, she found an answer.

At last, the kindly man, someone’s uncle or father or brother or son, allowed the possibility of 65 people being allowed entry into Gaza. 65 out of 1400. Jodie Evans tried to increase the number, speaking again of the hardship many had suffered to be able to come so far. Maybe two buses? And what of the aid? There was now given to us a long list of all that could not be carried into Gaza. Milk was out, for starters. It was a liquid.

This haggling went on for some time. As people who had visited Gaza a year ago, both she and I would be denied entry this time.

And so forth.

But here is what the feeling was: We were begging to be allowed to help desperate people, many of them slowly starving to death. Begging. I will not forget this feeling as long as I live; because it was not right. And yes, I longed to have a government behind me that would have made it unnecessary for us to beg; I yearned for a government whose leaders would go with us into Gaza. Shoulder to shoulder with us. Because until our leaders go with us to try to understand and right the wrongs our nations have caused, what chance as a planet do we have? And yet, ironically, this encounter, where we felt we had nothing officially supportive at our backs, is where I saw the Goddess in Jodie Evans. Even though this was begging, she never lost her dignity, her resolve, her commitment to the people of Gaza who are suffering. I witnessed something I never expected to experience that day: that to beg for the good of others is noble. I saw this nobility, very strong, in her. That moment was worth the trip.

When the disastrous earthquake hit Haiti, even Israel sent a shipment of aid. But why not send such a shipment to Gaza, where Israel has done the damage? Looking at a collapsed school in Port –au- Prince it seemed almost identical to the American School in Palestine in whose rubble, a year ago, I spent part of a morning. America sent aid, but why had it not helped the Haitians (over decades) as their capsized boats filled with impoverished people headed toward survival in the US, floundered and were drowned by the waves. Not to mention the atrocious colonial treatment of Haiti, for centuries.

I have said many times that my caring for Barack Obama and his family is unconditional; this is the only kind of caring that makes sense to me. Within that caring, held just as unshakably, is my disagreement with some of his choices. War cannot be stopped by killing more people; there has to be another way. What is it? Nuclear power is treacherous; is there no faith that Americans can consume less of everything, especially the rapaciously pursued “energy?”

And so on.

Talking some of this over with a friend, I asked her to make a list of all the good things Barack Obama has done in his first year. Within minutes she had a list of about a hundred things. This was a great relief, because sometimes the rhetoric against his leadership is so condemning it is as if he’s done nothing at all. What is the blindness and anger that causes this unfairness? How can it become more balanced? Not for Obama’s sake, he seems to be weathering his storms as well as one could, but for the sake of those of us who like to think of ourselves as people of ethics, fairness, balance. Some of us call ourselves “spiritual progressives.”

At the end of some of the more virulent blasts against Obama there is the threat of punishment: Wait until the next election! Can we learn to disagree with someone without instantly attempting to punish them? What is this but a stirring up of one’s inner war? War without a military, but violence just the same. And who do we have in mind as a replacement? With our luck we will find ourselves stuck with another Bush, or worse, though our dream might be Dennis Kucinich whose belief that the United States should have a Department of Peace is one with which most of us resonate. Anger makes us lose our ability to think clearly, to strategize, to plan. It is useless at this point in humanity’s distress. We are headed over a cliff of our own making; blaming anyone without at the same time blaming ourselves is a waste of the time we could at least spend dancing.

Can we learn to care about our leaders in ways that support their ability to move forward as we would wish them to? Is our only mode of behavior instant rage and blame if someone cannot deconstruct in one year what has taken five hundred years to build? Can we sit with ourselves and the truth of our crisis as humans long enough to see where we ourselves must lead and change?

Before traveling to Cairo I spent a few days in Dharamsala calling on the Spiritual and Political leaders of Tibet in Exile. These are people who obviously know a thing or two about life, about conflict, about inner discipline and care of the personal and the planetary soul. At a dinner with the political head of Tibet in Exile, Professor Rinpoche, along with six of his ministers, we found ourselves talking about what it feels like to be up against enemies who might be a billion times larger than you. Which is pretty much the case of China vs. Tibet. Talking together we soon realized that everyone in the room was working hard for the same things: feeding and clothing and teaching and healing our people and our communities. Finally, in the face of all attempts to stop us from doing what we feel we must, someone raised a glass to toast “the enemy.”

“Thank you,” I said, raising my glass in return: “They (our enemies) have their job and we have ours.”

That is also how I feel about every US administration I have ever known; none of them as morally intelligent and responsive to regular Americans as the one we have now, for all its limitations. They have their job, whatever it might be. But I have mine. Mine is to work for the world that I want, in the belief that it can only be just, fair, balanced and dedicated to peace, if I am.

Alice Walker is author of the children’s book: WHY WAR IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA.

We did it! Up until the moment we did, I didn’t quite believe we would, but we did!

Went to bed last night thinking, “Yeah, Starhawk, you’ve done this a hundred times, yawn, nerves of steel, sleep like a baby,” and of course I hardly slept at all, adrenaline racing, had to pee a hundred times. Got up this morning ahd rumors were flying around that the Egyptian security forces were blocking the hotels, so we got out quickly. Fortunately I had packed and organized my stuff the night before as that is the part of an action that is most stressful to me. Nothing makes me more crazy than needing to get out the door in a hurry and not being able to find some crucial piece of gear, and I nearly always can’t find some crucial piece of gear, due to that plague of Snatchers that follow me around, hiding my keys, lining their burrows with my socks and decorating them with my ATM cards.

Some of the Canadian delegation who are staying here were saying that police were outside—but that turned out not to be true. I was almost sorry, because Wendy had scouted alternative exits over the roofs of Cairo and what a story that would make! But I was happy enough just to get out and not be stuck inside all day. I can write novels another time.

Lisa had already left for a meeting at one of the hotels—turned out the security forces were blocking everyone into the Lotus, where the main Code Pink organizers were staying, but not the other hotels, including the one where the meeting was happening.

I decided to sit down below, however, and keep watch. Actually I didn’t see the need for going 9 flights up and probably having to walk back down all nine, and sitting in a smoky meeting where I wouldn’t be able to hear anything. There was a chair against the wall near the entrance so I sat down to wait. Actually, Cairo is a great place to people-watch and I had one of the most relaxing little bits of time I’d had here yet, watching the women in their various head=-carves and the men with liquid brown eyes that could have come off an old tomb painting. Eventually people from our march began to drift by, stopping to share news and rumors. One Policeman was watching the hotel, but I didn’t see any signs that groups of them were massing for a raid. But the rumors were flying—the action was on, it was off, the locations was changed, the time was changed..

Eventually Lisa and the women from the meeting came down. The plan was for shcok troops of women to be first out into the streets—for a couple of reasons. The first—the cops are less likely to brutalize women. Not entirely unlikely, but less. The second—to shift those old gender dynamics where the guys do the brave and dangerous things and the little women stay behind. The third—because these women are strong and smart and don’t run ego-dramas.

We began to filter around Tahrir Square. I was following Lisa who moves at a really fast pace. I am a slow walker but when I need to, I can keep up with her and she was in full-on battle mode and nothing was going to slow her down.

We all drifted into the area around the Museum where our plan called for us to gather unobtrusively and then flash-mob into the streets. I wasn’t sure this was going to work. Nobody was sure this was going to work—but it was the plan and at this point that was all we had. The police were out in force around the museum because we had organized this in classic nonviolent mode, openly and not secretly. That was a good thing, because communication has been so excruciatingly difficult when we are trying to simply tell each other something that adding security culture and secret codes on top of it would have made everything utterly incomprehensible to most of us, while the secret police would still have known what we were going to do. There they were…there we were. The clock was ticking—it was almost ten. An officer came towards Lisa, trying to move us further down the road. The traffic opened…and she took the space, running out into the traffic and unfurling a flag. We followed, and suddenly, from all over small groups of people were swarming and collecting and filling the road.

We began to march—for about ten yards. Then the cops surrounded us, and they were mad. They were pushing and shoving people, and I noticed a few run in and grab a guy who was filming with a video camera on a tripod. They had hold of him and were pulling on his camera and others were pulling on him so I ran over to do what I do—which is insert myself into the middle and sweetly get in the way. Between all of us we extricated him and his camera and now people were sitting down to hold the space. And there I was, sitting on the ground staring at the knees of a line of Egyptian riot cops. I had a little Talking Heads moment, you know the song, “And I asked myself…how did I get here?” Then the cops moved in and started grabbing people. They grabbed Michael from the media team and we grabbed him back and finally pulled him in toward us. He was holding his ribs..a woman grabbed my arm and we linked up.

Then I saw Lisa being grabbed by five big cops. They were pulling her away into the police lines and she was lying prone and being pulled by her wrists. I thought, “Goddess, they’re taking her away and there’s too many of them. There’s nothing I can do for her.” And then I thought, “Fuck that!” and leapt on top of her, grabbing her waist and lying over her legs. I can’t actually explain how I did that when usually it takes me ten minutes and a battle plan to get up, but adrenaline is a wonder drug.

Anotther couple of people piled onto me and her. The cops were really mad, but also confused. They kicked one guy and grabbed him really roughly to pull him off, but no sooner did they have him than someone else dove through five lines of police and launched himself onto the pile Every time they got rid of one person, someone else appeared. It was one of the most powerful moments of practical solidarity I’ve ever seen and I would have liked to savor it but almost immediately we were all being pushed, shoved, pummeled and pressed back onto the curb across the street. Our pile of people on the bottom half of Lisa got pushed one way—the top half of her went another and I lost her.

I ended up on the curb smack in front of the lines of cops trying to shove us back, along with a mass of people. I was happy there—holding ground when riot cops are shoving is one of the things I’m good at. Most of the cops looked a bit sheepish and ashamed of what they were doing, but one or two were triggered and angry and out of control. I saw one cop head butt a protester, others were beating and punching people with their nightsticks. They were pushing other people onto the curb and roughly forcing them through the lines into a crowd that was already so tight there was hardly room to move. I saw several of the women I’d trained and I just stayed there and grabbed them and pulled them through the lines of cops into our space. I felt a bit like a midwife, birthing them backwards, into the womb of our community now contained by a circle of cops on a wide stretch of sidewalk. Some of them were frightened, some were exhilarated. All looked happy to see me.

And then the tension eased. The cops formed their ring, we had our space, in the circle of Cairo’s largest, central square, and people were chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and singing “We Shall Overcome.” I looked over and found myself standing next to Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, singing, “We are not afraid, we are not afraid, we are not afraid today.”

Then I saw Lisa, safe and relatively unscathed although she had a hurt wrist and sore ribs. I gave her some homeopathic arnica and Bill Ayers gave her some chocolate. Carrying chocolate—that mark of an experienced activist!

We all felt great about the action. Against all odds, we had done what we set out to do—to say to the Egyptian authorities and the world, “if you won’t let us go to Gaza, we’ll simply start from here and walk.” If you want to stop us, you’ll have to physically stop us—we won’t comply with your orders. And if you physically stop us, then we will have brought Gaza to Cairo—we will dramatize for the eyes of the world the situation that the people of Gaza are in. This pen, this improvised prison in the central square is another annex to the huge, open-air prison that Gaza has become, where a million and a half people live in the most densely crowded conditions on earth, where the Israelis control the borders and decide who can get in and who can get out, rationing out the necessities of life, b;ocking the materials of reconstruction and the means of livelihood for the Gazan people.

So we held the space throughout the day, with songs and chants and drumbeats, with shared food and water and an improvised pee station. I even had a lovely nap in the sun, next to a beautiful French Algerian organizer with luminous green eyes.

And now the New Year has come, and I must sleep! May our new year be blessed with loving friends and strong comrades to strengthen us for all the work ahead the earth and for justice.

Gaza Freedom March
Fifth Letter—January 1, 2010

Hedy Epstein, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, has stolen our hearts. At four feet-ten, she is a giant. Her gentle smile lights up every room that she enters, and yet if you saw her on the street, you might not immediately sense her power. Unless you paid close attention, you would just see a sweet little old lady.

When she came to Cairo, Hedy decided to undertake a fast in support of the people of Gaza, a particularly apt form of protest given the inadequacy of both the supply and type of food the people there have access to. Malnutrition is endemic in Gaza, and children’s growth is stunted; people frequently go hungry.

Inspired by Hedy, thirty others joined her fast, beginning on December 28. Today, the fasters held a press conference on the steps of the building housing the Egyptian journalists’ union. Some of the thirty will continue to fast, others will stop now. They released this statement:

We are thirty activists from around the world, inspired by Hedy Epstein, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, who initiated a hunger strike in Cairo for the opening of the borders of Gaza to the outside world.

We recognize that the Palestinians of Gaza continue to hunger for food, shelter, and most of all for freedom.

We continue to hunger for justice for Gaza and all of Palestine. At this time, we announce that we will feast when Gaza feasts.

Until that time, each of us will choose the time to end her/his fast and again take food.

Our pleasure in that food will always be mixed with the pain of Palestinians.

We call on all people of conscience from around the world to renew their resolve for peace and justice in Palestine.

My friend Keren, Jewish like Hedy, has talked about how personally difficult it is to work for justice in Palestine when your dearest community will not support you, even actively opposes you. Hedy, too, has struggled with this problem, Keren told me, when members of her own family rejected her. And yet, she takes this strong, brave action, risking her health and accepting shunning from loved ones in order to stand up for those who are oppressed.

On this final day of the Gaza Freedom March, I have reflected on the experience—did we accomplish anything? We have all been inspired–by individuals of conscience like Hedy, by the sense of international friendship and solidarity that has pervaded these days here, even by the observable impact of our practice of nonviolence on the young policemen. There has been media coverage of our multiple protests here, and so we have raised up the issue of Gaza around the world, although coverage in the mainstream media has been limited, especially in the U.S. We have made lasting connections with one another, and so a nascent international movement, initiated by the South African delegation, is forming to combat the apartheid system in Palestine, a system with many similarities to what once existed in South Africa.

Most people will leave Cairo either tomorrow or the next day, returning home to their various countries. A few of us are staying on, however, hoping that we can, in a few days, get into Gaza after all–not to participate in a march but rather to offer our service as volunteers. If we are successful and cross into Gaza, we know that we will be greeted with love by the people there. We received this e-mail yesterday, written a few days ago, from the youth of Gaza:

We are still waiting for everyone to cross and share his/her feelings with us, but even if Egypt keeps you out, your work in Egypt is critical. Egypt is one of the perpetrators of the blockade, and we so appreciate all the solidarity protests you have conducted at great personal risk throughout the great city of Cairo, at every important “nerve center.” You showed your support of Gaza and Palestine loud and clear, waking humanity up to the 1.5 million persons in Gaza who have been suffering for the past four years.

So please don’t stop fighting, no matter what happens. With your help, we will achieve peace and justice. We are marching for freedom together.

We are still waiting for the Gaza Freedom March to cross from Cairo and we are against the Egyptian government’s decision! Welcome to Gaza and to a Happy New Year without blockade, settlements and occupation!

As for me, I have never spent a more memorable New Year’s Eve than last night, when I went to the French Embassy where the 200-strong French delegation was still camped out. Marching on the sidewalk between rows of small tents, with a couple of hundred riot police standing guard at the curb, the French, wearing paper New Year’s Eve hats, chanted, “Ga-za, Ga-za, on n’oublie pas! Ga-za, Ga-za, on n’oublie pas!” Gaza, Gaza, you are not forgotten! And, “Gaza, bonne annee, oui! Gaza, bonne annee, oui!” Happy New Year, Gaza.

May 2010 be the year that the blockade ends and freedom comes to Gaza and all Palestine.

Jean Athey is a retired grandmother of six who lives in Brookeville, Maryland. She is the coordinator of Peace Action Montgomery, a local volunteer peace group in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Freedom dreamers in Gaza are awaiting the “candles of hope” outside

One year after the Gaza massacre, it gladdens our heart to see all these supporters from around the world who regard us as their brothers and sisters, giving us enough positive energy to be optimistic that all the world will eventually stand up and tell the world leaders to stop settlements in the West Bank and break the Gaza blockade.

Yet, after all this waiting and protests, hunger strikes and demonstrations, the Egyptian government has allowed only 100 persons to cross to Gaza. We as the youth of Gaza say this is NOT sufficient to break the blockade. Gaza doesn’t want to be dependent on “aid.” And we don’t want a few people who are allowed to enter only once in a while. The Gaza people want to break the blockade completely and forever. We have already started small; now we need to go even bigger.

We are still waiting for everyone to cross and share his/her feelings with us, but even if Egypt keeps you out, your work in Egypt is critical. Egypt is one of the perpetrators of the blockade, and we so appreciate all the solidarity protests you have conducted at great personal risk throughout the great city of Cairo, at every important “nerve center.” You showed your support of Gaza and Palestine loud and clear, waking humanity up to the 1.5 million persons in Gaza who have been suffering for the past four years.

So please don’t stop fighting, no matter what happens. With your help, we will achieve peace and justice. We are marching for freedom together.

We are still waiting Gaza Freedom March to cross from Cairo and We are against Egyptian Government decision! Welcome in Gaza with Happy new year without Blockade, Settlements and Occupation!

Majed Abusalama
Representative of Youth in Gaza
Community Activist and Peace Maker
Gaza strip, Palestine