The following press release was sent to Mondoweiss by the Israeli group “Return” regarding an action today along the fence with Gaza:
A group of Israeli activists, dubbed “Return,” advanced today towards the fence besieging the Gaza Strip, and hung pictures on the fence depicting Palestinians slain by the military during the Great March of Return.
The activists responded to a call for solidarity made by the organizers of the protests. Gazan organizations have requested that the pictures of the fallen protesters be hung in various locations around the world and particularly in the fronts of Israeli and U.S. embassies, in order to support the protests and their aims. Similar actions are expected to take place globally in the coming weeks.
An Israeli military jeep arrived on the scene as the posters were being hung and demanded the activists remove them. The activists finished hanging posters along the fence and refused to remove them.
One of the activists, Omer Sharir, explained that they were aiming to protest the killing of unarmed protesters as well the siege on Gaza, and that they supported the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Palestine: “the right of return is a basic human right extended to any one who was forced to leave their home as a result of conflict” Sharir stated.
Another activist Anna said: “there is nothing preventing the refugees to return to the towns and villages from which they were forced to flee, and similar resettlement programs have been implemented in other places around the world in the aftermath of wars. I am appalled that protests stemming from such an elementary desire to return to one’s home, and from longings for a place and a homeland, are again and again met with live and lethal fire from the Israeli side.”
The activists explained that: “Every day more people are shot dead in Gaza. More the 135 unarmed protesters have already been killed and 14,000 people were wounded including medical staff, journalists, and children. The global media offer less and less coverage of the carnage that are unfolding in the Strip. That is why we felt it imperative to respond to the request to solidarity from the organizing committee, as a result of our responsibility as Jewish Israelis for the occupation and the siege of Gaza, and similarly to reinforce the goals of the protests, which is the implementation of the right of return.”
Resources:
The call for solidarity by the organizers of the Great March of Return:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10Z9_j1R6xOurJJui0qDsC0G-OHRtDB_RdGkzc_lyxtc
Background information about Great March of Return: https://www.facebook.com/aburtema/posts/10211861629240043
Last week’s action of hanging the portraits of the fallen protesters in front of the Knesset:
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/posters-return-heroes//
Last week’s action of hanging the portraits of the fallen protesters on the fence around Gaza:
Last week’s action of hanging the portraits of the fallen protesters in Be’er Sheva’, near a mosque now serving as a museum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKwEtwstZ6Q
The demonstration on the Israeli side of the fence was held following a call to action from organizers in Gaza asking supporters to hold protests with pictures of those killed during the Great March of Return. Here is the press release:
A Call to Action from Gaza!
Palestinian organisations in Gaza are calling upon all people of conscience around the world, to make posters of the fallen heroes of the recent Great March of Return and plaster these all over your cities and towns, especially opposite Israeli and American embassies. This is an action that will greatly benefit the visibility of our cause!
PDF files of the fallen demonstrators can be found here : https://tinyurl.com/y96mb76m
Please send pictures of your action to: greatmarchsolidarity@gmail.com
Following the media coverage of the massacre that Israel carried out against us on the first day of our march, we have been receiving less and less media coverage.Yet more and more of us are being killed every day. Gaza has been bombarded night and day too. Since the start of the Great March of Return, over 135 unarmed protesters have been shot dead and more than 14,000 wounded by the occupation forces, including children, medical staff, journalists, and the disabled. Gaza’s health system has been pushed to the brink of collapse, as hospitals struggle to handle an influx of serious and life-threatening injuries.
Help keep the freedom of Palestinians and the right to return in the spotlight!
Signed:
Great March of Return-Steering Committee
The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU)
University Teachers’ Association in Palestine
Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel Al-Aqsa Universit
One Democratic State Group
Voices Against Israeli Apartheid
I won’t hold my breath waiting for a few photos of this and a minute or two of discussion of it on any TV news show in my country. Bernie Sanders put up a video of Palestinians explaining their actions about the protest by the fence on his Twitter account; it was around Twitter for a few days but nothing about it on any TV news show here in the good old USA.
Interesting Haaretz article:
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-toking-on-the-base-1.6213262?utm_term=20180626-01%3A53&utm_campaign=Amira+Hass&utm_medium=email&writerAlerts=true&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_content=www.haaretz.com%2Fopinion%2F1.6213262
“Toking on the Base in Israel”
“Maybe the soldiers realize that something is essentially wrong with serving in an institution whose job is to suppress 4 million subjects”
By Amira Hass Jun 26/18 – Haaretz
EXCERPTS:
“Cannabis consumption among Israeli soldiers (both in the military and doing national service) is increasing. By 2017, no less than 54 percent of the troops were using it, according to an article in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth based on a survey by the Anti-Drug Authority a few months ago.”
“The reporter, Amir Shouan, spoke to male and female soldiers in various units and learned that there are also commanders getting high, and commanders who know which of their soldiers use cannabis. And there are soldiers earning some nice money using apps to sell hashish. Drug dealers even give soldiers discounts.
“The use of the drug isn’t limited to leaves at home. ‘In many units, some of them operational and sensitive, cannabis smoking has become widespread on the bases themselves,’ Shouan writes.
“The immediate tendency is to find a positive explanation for the phenomenon. The soldiers, young and programmed as they may be, feel that what they’re doing is bad: breaking into homes; waking up children in the middle of the night and pointing guns at them; shooting at the inmates in the prison that is Gaza, whether they’re demonstrators, fishermen, shepherds or farmers; securing the demolitions of people’s dwellings and cisterns; or standing idly by under orders while masked Jews attack Palestinian shepherds and farmers.
“Reinforcement of sorts for this interpretation comes from a soldier named Shira who told Shouan that she was suffering emotional problems because of her service, ‘And then the only thing that comforts you is the toke. Cannabis helps you relax, get through the pain – mental and physical – and thoughts. And when you do it with another person, when you have someone who’s your partner in crime, for a moment you forget all your problems.’”
“Maybe the soldiers realize that something is essentially wrong with serving in an institution whose job is to suppress 4 million subjects who oppose the military junta rule imposed on them. Maybe the toke helps veil the hypocrisy. The soldiers are depicted as the people’s defenders, while they know that their mission is to ensure the peace and expansion of the settlement enterprise.
“The optimistic interpretation says that the soldiers at every moment experience the dissonance between Israel’s pretense to morality and what they’re actually required to do. Getting stoned pleasantly dulls the shame. The increased use of cannabis stems from an expanded sense of shame.”
Would it not have made this piece of yours, Mondoweiss editors, far more to the point if your headline had read: “Israeli human rights advocates respond to Palestinian call, hang photos of fallen protesters along Gaza fence”?
The label “activist”, as I am sure most of you can appreciate, often is used to cast aspersions onto individuals and liken them to extremists. These Israelis are protesting the racist, fascist terrorism exacted on Palestinians by their own countrymen who are practicing Zionists claiming to be Jewish, but are not in the true sense! Moreover, as you editors know all too well, many of your readers don’t have a clue about the difference between the accursed Zionist ruling class in Israel and Israel’s true practitioners of Judaism who are human rights advocates supporting freedom, justice and equality for their neighbors, the Palestinians. So, Mondoweiss editors, permit me to urge you to use whatever it takes to place events and participants in true context. The Palestinians really need all the help you can provide in the face of the brutality, racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, land theft, fascism and terrorism at the hands of Israel’s accursed Zionist ruling class! Thank you.
@Misterioso
“Getting stoned pleasantly dulls the shame”
Sure as hell no shit beats being targeted by existentially threatening stones;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPAI-HdFLnw
A short footnote to our dear Annie Robbins and her dislike for “feelings” over clarity and logic: please be aware that the people of Palestine, especially those in Gaza (Zionist Israel’s concentration camp) who somehow endure their racist, fascist, terrorist imprisonment in the harshest of conditions, do have feelings; your “clarity”, Annie, would issue from the fact that those Israeli human rights advocates are expressing their “feelings” in protest; and your apparent insistence for “logic” can be applied to expanding your labeling them as “activists” to human rights advocates. The failure of this piece authored by Mondoweiss editors is not having described the efforts of the Israeli protesters as a human rights initiative to win freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinians, a brief description that could have been a part of the lead and one that projects “clarity” and “logic” as well as “feelings”.