Breaking Them Down: Walls that Block People and Walls that Block Words

un article par David Adams

Around the world people have admired the courage of the Palestinian people who broke down the wall at Rafah to get food and supplies and break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

One of the most moving descriptions on the Internet came from Gush-Shalom (Peace Now), an Israeli peace organization that works in solidarity with Palestinian peace activists. It was written by Uri Avery and is available on the Internet site of Gush-Shalom.

Avery's description is especially moving because it is written from the perspective of the peace movement inside Israel. He says, "It looked like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate. It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place. The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair. That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008."

There is another wall that has been broken, the wall that has blocked words in the past. For in the past the news services of the West might well have ignored the event. Now they cannot, because, as Avery says, "Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic. That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily, the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning."

Elsewhere on the Gush-Shalom website, one can read about the relief convoys being organized by peace organizations in Israeli that they are trying to send into Palestine. Click here for the story as of January 26. At that point in time, the Israeli army was blocking delivery of the convoys: "Since the Israeli army has not allowed the relief supplies into the Gaza strip, they were stored in a neighboring kibbutz. If the military will not permit their transfer to Gaza in the next two days, we shall apply to the High Court of Justice and start a legal fight until we succeed."

Stay tune to the Gush-Shalom website for further developments.

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How can a culture of peace be established in the Middle East?,

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The following commentary was first published in Newsday magazine on July 1, 2007.  The original is available on the Internet at Newsday.

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Israelis, Palestinians must promote peace culture
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BY MOHAMMED ABU-NIMER

With shame, hopelessness and helplessness, many Palestinians see their dream for an independent state being dismantled by their own so-called national leaders.

This evolving reality is hard to comprehend, and it has caused the majority of Palestinians, according to a recent survey from the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, to blame both Hamas and Fatah leaders for what has happened to them under the Israeli occupation.

Hamas claims to have "liberated Gaza," and in response Fatah leaders declared they are "managers" of the West Bank. As a result, there is no discussion of two-state solution of Israel and Palestine. Instead, Hamas and Fatah seem to support a two-mini-cantons solution in which each leadership can continue to protect its narrow self-interest in cooperation with its patrons (Israel, the United States, Syria, Iran).

Again, the Palestinian leadership has failed its people. The competition between Hamas and Fatah, with each taking control of a portion of the bread crumbs that the Israeli government left when it pulled out of Gaza and agreed to elections in the West Bank, entails disastrous results for anyone interested in securing a free and democratic Middle East.

The Palestinians have been set back several decades, to the time when they were fighting over who should represent them. Now there are too many leaders, voiceless people, and an internal culture of violence that has been nurtured by the Israeli occupation system and the creation and growth over time of various Palestinian paramilitary militias. Both Israelis and Palestinians paved the way by tolerating the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority, thus giving it public legitimacy to operate.

The illusion among certain Israeli and American political forces is that the two mini-cantons eventually will end the Palestinians' demand for a viable and independent state and will bring security or stability to the region.

However, as the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and many other colonial and post-colonial struggles has taught us, a cantonization of the Palestinian national identity will not end people's yearning for their own single country and likely will bring on only higher levels of violence. . ... continuation.

Cet article a été mis en ligne le January 29, 2008.

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