Tearing Down the Ghetto Walls--Tony Sayegh

Tweet "Yesterday I listened to Dr. Mona El-Farra from Gaza speak in person about the abysmal human conditions in the Gaza Strip as a result of the genocidal total blockade which has been in effect for more than a year now. This blockade is entering a more intensified and dangerous phase, since in addition to USrael, the EU, most Arab regimes and in particular Egypt, the Palestinian Karzai is now aggressively urging the continued closure of the Rafah crossing which is the only outlet the Gaza Strip has left to the outside world.

"Listening to Dr. El-Farra's words and watching her slides, you quickly realize that you are watching a holocaust unfolding in front of our eyes. This is no exaggeration, and the holocaust analogy has been used by many authors including Jewish authors such as Professor Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University. As Professor Falk put it in a recent piece, titled "Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust", "The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of 'a responsibility to protect,' recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of 'humanitarian intervention' is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering."

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"About a year ago the Palestinians discovered the power of unarmed, civil collective action. Israel was calling various people in Gaza to warn them a few minutes in advance that their homes were selected to be destroyed by Israeli missiles and that they had to vacate their homes immediately. This practice continued until the people came up with an idea to resist this atrocity. As soon as a home owner got such a call from the IOF, calls went out to neighbors and to supporters. Crowds gathered in and around the house and in many cases on the roof of the house. The message was that if the IOF was going to destroy the house then it had to kill scores of civilians. This collective resistance worked in more than one occasion.

"This success should inspire the Palestinians in Gaza to come up with peaceful, creative mass-action ways to break the siege. An example comes to mind; it involves breaking the naval siege imposed by the Israeli navy on the Gaza coast. Volunteers from the group Women in Black will attempt to sail to Gaza in sailboats. They realize that the Israeli navy will prevent them from proceeding, but the objective is to expose the myth that Israel tries to perpetrate that it no longer occupies or controls Gaza.

Found on Palestinian Pundit