Organizers of the Gaza Freedom March, which is set to bring 1350 internationals to Egypt and Gaza at the end of the month, have tried repeatedly to meet with Israeli authorities about their plans and been rebuffed, says Medea Benjamin, a leader of the event sponsor, Code Pink.
"We’ve contacted the Israelis through rabbis and generals and people in intelligence we happen to know," she said. "We’ve approached members of the Knesset we met at J Street and a former head of intelligence. Barbara Boxer’s foreign policy person we’ve hounded to call the Israeli Embassy. Dennis Kucinich has called the Israelis for us." Benjamin has called friends inside Israel and of course called the Embassy herself. "They’ve never wanted to meet with us. Though we know that at all levels they’ve heard of us."
Why do the organizers want to meet with the Israelis? "Our burning message is, ‘Don’t shoot us,’" Benjamin explained, speaking Thursday at the Global Policy Forum in New York after a press conference across the street at the U.N.
[Benjamin, at left, in Gaza last June, meeting with Health Minister Basem Naim, a Hamas official. Norman Finkelstein is between them.]
Set for Dec. 31, the march is to proceed three miles inside Gaza to the northern, Erez crossing into Israel. The organizers expect 50,000 Palestinians to join the demonstration, which will demand that Israel and Egypt and the U.S. lift the blockade of the strip. Benjamin says that the marchers will be careful not to test the buffer zone at the border, but respect the barriers set up one kilometer away.
The march will be led by Palestinian children and adults who were left disabled by the Israeli onslaught. "We’re not going to breach that [barrier]. We don’t want anyone hurt," Benjamin said.
Why won’t the Israelis meet with the marchers? Hey, the Israelis won’t even meet with J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby that has kept its mouth wide shut about Gaza, Benjamin pointed out. Why would they meet with an anti-war group?
Benjamin is optimistic that the group will get into Gaza. The day I met her, she got a call from the Egyptian Foreign ministry asking that an official’s niece who lives in the U.S. be included in the U.S. delegation. Code Pink had closed its list at the end of November, so as to submit it to the Egyptian authorities in a timely manner, but briefly reopened the list to include the woman, and added 25 other names.
As for those who may show up in Egypt next week just to be in that number as the internationals go marching in, Benjamin said that she can’t vouch for them, they’re on their own.
The Obama State Department has discouraged the march. "I had the most horrendous conversation," Benjamin related. "I called [the State Department] with the best intention, to tell them we’re going, and I had this horrible conversation with a Palestinian-American woman. All she could talk about was Hamas being violent. ‘Why are we going? We’re only going to give good publicity to Hamas. It will seem like you’re supporting Hamas when you should be criticizing Hamas for attacks on civilians and for being repressive… If Hamas would only renounce violence, there would be a peace process…’"
Benjamin went on, "It made me feel that what we’re doing is so important. If the people appointed by Obama to move the peace process forward won’t even talk to those who are running the government in Gaza, we won’t make any progress."
Good point. The official’s name is Sahar Khoury-Kincannon.
Benjamin explained to Khoury-Kincannon that the siege is empowering Hamas, by turning Gaza’s economy into a smugglers’ fair and not allowing students to study in western universities. "The whole [U.S.] policy is giving people inside Gaza no outlet but to be more conservative, more religious, and more anti-western."
Benjamin ended our conversation by reading from this appeal by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, the mother of a girl killed in a Palestinian suicide attack, who will be on the Israeli side of the border as the demonstrators approach:
“The appeal to march for Gaza even as the killing of innocents continues, reminds us of the appeal by the Jewish poet Bialik, more than a hundred years ago after a massacre of the Jews of Kishinev:
"Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind your way;
There with your own hand touch, and with the eyes in your head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead."
In its shameless indignation, only sixty years after Auschwitz, the State of the Jews confines people in ghettoes surrounded by walls and barbed wires, supervised by armed soldiers and their ferocious dogs, and the world looks on in silence.The blood of the children of Gaza will forever stain those who allow the killing in Gaza today. Israeli leaders and generals must know that they will not be exonerated. As the poet Bialik also wrote "Satan has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a small child.”
In Gaza, hundreds of children are already buried and thousands more are dying. Their muted voices are a testament to the crime, to our powerlessness, and to the world’s indifference.
During this march we must pierce the high heavens with the cry:
How much longer will this go on? “
So much not a surprise to see what Obama’s position is, even installing Palestinian quislings of his own.
Its a relief that they are not planning on attempting to cross the border.
Because that woulod make it completely, utterly and righteously necessary for Israel to shoot them? And that wouldn’t be “good for the Jews”?
Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to see what’s going on in the Warsaw Ghet– oh, I mean Gaza.
Here’s a proof — Israel doesn’t want peace. They only want to contain and eradicate the Palestinian people.
Here’s our proof that the two-state solution is dead. Israel will never honor Palestinian sovereignty. There will always be the threat that Israel will just cluster bomb anyone who gets in jet fighter range.
What’s the problem with crossing the border?
70000 people approaching the border does have the potential of bloodbath.
Non-violent civil disobedience easily turns from that.
It takes extreme personal and moral discipline of leadership to accomplish a mass civil disobedience. If one does not have that organized, it is better that more prudent goals are defined that have no possibility of intentional or accidental violence.
If an occupier intends not to harm, but then by accident does fire a single shot, or throws a single rock or molotov cocktail, and escalates, that CANNOT be named a success.
I greatly fear the prospects of the march frankly. 70,000 people can become a juggernaut, people in the back intentionally or accidentally pushing forward. You don’t remember the last few years of accidents at soccer games?
I’m not confident that Medea Benjamin is that attentive to managing that degree of event, or whomever.
Hopefully, they’ve thought about it. The decision to not intentionally approach the border directly, is an indication to me that they are attentive to some of the risks.
You’re a first class asshole, Witty. Characterizing a march of several thousand besieged, imprisoned people as “potential terrorists?” You’re already spreading the hasbara on thick, and you’ve been doing it for quite some time now every time the march comes up as a topic, describing what you fear the IDF’s response “has to be” to this.
You disgust me, Witty. You have no right to call yourself an American patriot with that attitude you have toward free speech and public demonstration, let alone a liberal. You’re merely Israel’s fifth column, working pro bono and making sure people like Joe Lieberman and Rahm Emmanuel hold the reigns while people like Barney Frank and Russ Feingold are browbeaten.
Chaos, he said nothing of the sort. When a group of thousands of people approach the border of a sovereign country, there are some possible issues which could arise. Do you know anything about borders, not sure if you’ve ever left the US, but there is a border crossing. Could you imagine 70,000 people from either Mexico or Canada crossing over the border in the US, not just crossing, but storming it? How do you think that would play out? Now consider the same in Israel?
Again, I get that you need to respond to EVERYONE of Witty’s post, its your job here, but quit lying and manipulating everything he says. You accuse him of lying, you my friend, make more shit up than anyone on this blog.
How come those rules don’t apply to Israelis, yonira? Is there a “kill zone” on the Israeli side of the border that Gazans enforce?
For that matter, Sderot is within a kilometer of Gaza’s border. Didn’t you just make a justification for the rocket attacks on Gaza? I mean, it is an encroachment on Gaza’s sovereign border, isn’t it, by the terms you laid out?
Anyone who goes within a kilometer of the border with Israel on the Gaza side is shot dead by the IDF
Its a relief that they are not planning on attempting to cross the border.
Hmm? How will they get in without crossing the border? I understand they want to join the Palestinian march, how could they without crossing the border.
Relief? Relief they won’t be shot while breaking down the separation barrier? Relief you won’t need to turn exculpatory somersaults?
link to lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com
Don’t discount what a Jewish Israeli mother of a child who was violently killed has to say just because of her ethnicity, google her and listen to what she actually has to say. She is an outspoken critic of the war for land taking place in Israel/Palestine, she is very critical of the leaders of Israel, and she considers herself a sister to those who are losing children on both sides. She lived through the worse thing that could happen to a mother and did not have an ethnic reaction to it as most people would. Give her the respect that is due her; she is fighting for the universal principle of justice, as I hope we all are.
It’s not about her. It’s about the overall picture being presented.
This is not an equal conflict.
Both sides suffer but one is suffering much more and has always suffered much more in this conflict.
THAT is my point.
It’s the selection of this woman, by a coward like Medea Benjamin – who waited all this time to do something w/ her NGO, out of fear of her own Jewishness.
That’s the ethnic component I am talking about. Not on part of the Israeli mother – who lost everything when her child was murdered. But on the part of the Jewish Liberal – a fake – who selected a particular person to symbolize a paradigm of parity in this conflict.
Where there is none.
That’s my point.
And it will never end. The truth is important – and that is, that these massacres by the Jewish State, this oppression, has been happening since the beginning.
Yeah, well, there’ve been massacres of Jewish children since the 1920′s too. I blame the Israeli/Zionist side more (far more), but innocents on both sides suffer and on an individual level it hurts just as much no matter what the statistics are. Hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian terrorism in the past couple of decades. That’s much less than the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli terrorism, but it’s still horrific and tragic and I think it is moving when someone who lost a child to murder still speaks out for justice for the other side. Most people probably would.
I understand the point you make–Palestinians need to be given front billing in their own liberation movement and people in this country need to understand that Israel bears most of the blame for the deaths. (Maybe you’d say all the blame. I would not.) But judging from the reactions of Phil and Ana, you made your point in a hateful way, and though I didn’t see the deleted post, it sounds like Phil did the right thing in deleting it.
Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest in us stems from the interest in the Jewish issue. The interest is in you, not in me. So we have the misfortune of having Israel as an enemy, because it enjoys unlimited support. And we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy, because the Jews are the center of attention. You’ve brought us defeat and renown.
–Mahmoud Darwish
It’s the selection of this woman, by a coward like Medea Benjamin – who waited all this time to do something w/ her NGO, out of fear of her own Jewishness.
Yup, that’s that damned wide-eyes-shut ingenuousness I’ve been complaining about (if ingenuousness is the word I want).
Like that post the other day, in which the kid ranted at his college professor with accusations of anti-Semitism, before his innate Jewish sense of justice caused him to seek the truth about Zionism and Israel.
I was just flabbergasted the kid got all the way to college and knew that little about the world! If he is that naive, why on earth should I trust anything he’s got to say? He could be just as unbalanced about anti-Zionism as he was about Zionism.
The illusion that there is some honorable ending for Jews in anti-Zionism has got to go. I really hate to think what will happen when Jews find out how little they have to gain from anti-Zionism. It’s like asking people to give you a medal because you are against child-molestation or rape.
i was the person who wrote phil this morning, astounded. even prior to Ana’a response. the post was so offensive. i am not jewish and i spend a good portion of every single day blogging or being an activist for human rights, specifically for justice and freedom for palestinians. for a few years now.
what person, who , where, how under any circumstances could have ever possibly have been impacted more by palestinian retribution as a result of this intenable situation than Nurit? a mother who has lost her child , who can forgive, against all odds…and work not to bring redemptions to the people of her childs assassin but freedom…and you express ‘false paradigm of parity’ because she is jewish?
yes, there will be an abundance of mothers who have lost their children (either dead or imprisoned or both) from gaza marching, but medea is organizing the march to them and solidarity from a mother from the other side, voices from the other side, voices from the outside world, from america and africas and europe and yes, from israel..this is not false parity it is solidarity. a humanist does not distinguish between the life of a child. nurit doesn’t. you will just have to accept there are jewish voices here screaming out for an end to this madness and we need every single voice we can get. as hideous as the reality is, the entire reason this has gone on so long is people don’t hear or value palestinian mother’s voices. that is why we have to speak in a voice people can hear, and keep speaking. i am not palestinian medea is not palestinian. neither is nurit or you i presume.
you don’t get it cliff. this is phils blog, he is jewish. it is his voice and it is a jewsih voice and there is nothing wrong with that. we do not have to strip ourselves of our ethnicity to be advocates for anyone.
medea is not a coward. she is one of the bravest people i have ever met and it was an honor traveling to palestine and israel with her.. so what if it took her a long time to deal with this issue. so what if it took me a long time, i’m here now aren’t i? do i have less responsibility than medea becasue i am not jewish? go write your own blog w/your myopic vision of how to elevate palestinian voices. becasue this is not just a palestinian issue anymore cliff and it is not just an israeli issue or just a jewish either it is a human issue being palyed out on the world stage and we need every voice. the last thing we need is ‘progressives’ spouting hurtful dismissive painful opinions when people are reaching out with all their heart to heal this situation just becasue they are jewish. that goes for medea and it goes for nurit and it goes for phil. everyone does what they can .
oh, your post and some of your criticism reek of antisemitism imho, and that is not a term i sling around like pizza dough.
just banned Cliff’s comment above because of a friend’s comment to me:
i would erase it at least, its embarrasing. i completely cringed when i read it. who criticizes the mother of a murdered child? what bigger pain is there to overcome in life? and then to be generous to the suffering of others? the woman is a saint.
Yes, she is a saint, and the march is being led by Palestinians, children, other walking wounded from the last turkey shoot. Benjamin has not been an ethical/moral saint–and has not been tested like the Jewish Israeli saint, but she’s right there now and a leader, constantly trying to open US regime eyes to the horror. Both women deserve respect–they are putting their lives on the line to send the message out to the world and the fear of getting shot is nothing to sneeze at, even if the sneeze is on the key pad.
If I may respectfully plead on Cliff’s behalf that he not be banned completely from the blog? He’s said some vicious things and he’s pretty rightfully upset — you wouldn’t believe how much restraint its taking me right now upon hearing the news of this — and while an atrocious comment like what he said (I didn’t see it but the responses have been telling) should be moderated, Cliff himself is an important voice on the blog and if he expresses any sort of regret about why his comment was so offensive by private correspondence, then it would probably be worth letting him return.
I say that in deference to the fact that I have never lobbied to have Witty banned, in spite of the fact that he has been caught repeatedly lying outright, and repeatedly attacks you by exploiting his personal connection to you. And then of course, there’s OhioJoes, who I’ve not insisted be banned in spite of his really rather offensive comments to me that are increasingly framed in homophobic hate speech.
I join the request to not ban Cliff; I never desired Witty be banned either. They both contribute much more actual thought than merely calling people vulgar names.
I’m glad to see that Phil does listen to someone on these matters – as opposed to the people who use the “report abuse” link.
I second the request to keep Cliff. Though he sometimes goes off the cliff, the rage is understandable, even if it needs to be moderated at times. I myself bent out of shape a couple of times hearing the sanctimonious comparisons between ashdod and gaza. Or the vilification of anything associated with hamas. Just today I’ve see some pretty vulgar comments from the one known as OhioJoes who I wouldn’t mind seeing banned as he has never contributed any point of substance. Cliff has, however, many times. I think it’s dangerous to the commendable dynamics on this blog to ban people for an occasional step over the line. Who among us, in the heat of the moment, hasn’t done so?
And here is a thought – when we think of banning people on a primarily jewish/amrican/human rights-themed blog like this, we should always ask if they would have been banned if they came out as jewish.
For the record, I didn’t like to see chris moore banned either. maybe a comment or two moderated or deleted but not the commenter. That’s just my opinion offered in all due respect.
Yes, please keep Cliff.
This link to haaretz.com
may stop the march getting into Gaza from Egypt.
US Army Corps of Engineers are supervising that new reinforcement and halting wall the Egyptians are building deep to stop the tunneling. And yes, Egypt now has a security pretext to stop the entry into Gaza.
Anyway, from what I’m reading around the web, I think that Israel, and Zionism is pretty much through with American Jews. They are a pain in the ass, and way, way to picky about the methods Zionism uses to acheive its aims. Yup, they have had it with us. And truly, why bother with a bunch of over-educated, over-sensitive American Jewish liberals when all the support and money a Jewish State could ever want will be forthcoming from Christian Zionists, along with unquestioning support. I can’t wait until the first group of Christian Zionists demonstrates in front of a Temple (Temple El-Liber-Al) which has made a negative statement concerning some action of the Israeli government! Can that be far away?
Ever notice how Christian Zionists always point to the (Scofield annotated) Old Testament to justify killing or ignoring people in dire straits–they seem to never even
use passages in the New Testament. Do they ever ask themselves, “What would Jesus Do?” (especially as to the I-P conflict) Are they even Christians? Or Zionists? Are they Americans? (Would they gladly drag the whole USA and every Jew too into a giant battle in the promised land just so they could rapture up beyond the nuclear clouds?)
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I will be on the Gaza Freedom March and I expect no violence from the IDF. Instead I expect Israel to create a diversion to get the world’s eyes off of Gaza – and what better diversion than to bomb Iran? So I apologize to all Iranians: you will be getting the best US and Israeli military technology raining down on your heads because I am in Gaza trying to work for justice. So sorry….
I misspoke above: I didn’t just block the comment, in my haste, I banned Cliff. I think commenters are right that I should have just blocked the comment, which was vicious toward Nurit Peled-Elhanan. I’ll reinstate Cliff soon, if he wants to comment here again. But I’d ask all commenters to keep down the invective. I mean to be a more active presence. Phil