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? “
