VIDEO:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/2/nobel_peace_laureate_mairead_maguire_speaks
TRANSCRIPT:
JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today with the latest news of the ship that was seized by the Israeli military Tuesday as it tried to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israeli forces boarded the ship and towed it to the Israeli port of Ashdod. The twenty-one activists on board include former Congress member and presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney and the Irish peace activist and Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire. Huwaida Arraf and Lubna Masarwa were released, while the other nineteen remain in detention.
AMY GOODMAN: Huwaida Arraf is the founder of the Free Gaza movement. She joins us now on the phone from Israel.
Huwaida, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain why you took this boat trying to get to Gaza and then what happened to you on board.
HUWAIDA ARRAF: [inaudible] Hello to you all.
The purpose of our mission was to highlight to the international community that what Israel is doing to Gaza is blatantly illegal, and our government isn’t doing anything about it. Israel constantly claims that their policies are based on security, but what they’re doing—imposing collective punishment on an entire civilian population.
We were carrying on our very, very small boat some medical aid, some rebuilding supplies, because after the January—December-January assault on Gaza, thousands of homes have been destroyed, tens of hospitals and schools all demolished. And, you know, the donor community supposedly pledged [inaudible] Gaza, but no one is saying anything. Not one country is saying anything about the fact [inaudible] the entire Gaza Strip, and not one bag of cement [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN: Huwaida, we’re going to interrupt for a minute, because, Juan, it sounds like we have someone else from a jail cell in Israel.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, it sounds like we have Mairead Maguire, the Nobel Prize winner, on the phone from her jail cell. Read More…
by Franklin Lamb
The Peoples Voice
1 July 2009
Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk was my kind of Journalist and my kind of Jew.
Sadly, he died the other day and was buried near his birth place in West Jerusalem. For more than 40 years Kapeliouk reported on Palestinian and Arab affairs for half a dozen newspapers and was an old school Robert Fisk- Janet Stevens’s type journalist for whom reporting meant getting to the scene fast and carefully scribing with pencil and note pad.
I knew Kapeliouk mainly through his writings and a dozen or so path crossings over the years following our first improbable encounter during the infamous Beirut summer 1982. Those months of US-armed Israeli carnage, which continue to shape the region, left him with an indelible scar. He once told me: “I can’t forget. It doesn’t fade. I don’t think it ever will.” I understood what he meant.
In his last communication he said he would try to attend the 27th Anniversary Memorial to the victims of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre set for this coming September 16-18 at Beirut’s Shatila Camp. Read More…
COMMENT: Who would have thought that a literary festival of well-known international writers would pose a “security threat” to a powerful military state like Israel? Well it did. If it was not for the French consulate and British Council in Jerusalem, this year’s Second Annual Palestinian Literary Festival would not have gone ahead at all. The closure occurred – according to an Israeli police spokesman and reported by The Guardian’s Micky Rosenfeld – because Israel believed it was organised or funded by the Palestinian Authority (PA), despite being supported by UNESCO and the British Council. Now, if Israel thought it was organised and funded by Hamas, it would have made more sense, but the PA, the governing body of the Palestinian state that US President Obama and other world leaders are so committed to seeing emerge? The PA that has just been offered $10 million in aid by our deputy prime Minister Julia Gillard? So much for that “shining light on the hill” democracy that journalists and politicians are all too eager to laud without questioning how that phrase ever came to be coined.
While Israel is ready to come down heavily on any positive Palestinian cultural events in Israel, we find that in Australia, Israel tries to showcase its “democracy” by encouraging some token friendly Palestinian/Israeli games and/or cultural exchanges for the benefit of Australian audiences. But try as propagandists might to normalise Israeli society, the ugliness of its government’s policies and practices are showing through. Ordinary people are quite capable of seeing the contradictions.
The repression of a Palestinian literary event for internationals in Israel certainly justifies every protest we can raise here against Israel’s cultural partnership with the Melbourne International Film Festival being held from 24 July – 9 August. Please contact us if you would like to help make the Palestinian voice heard during this event. – SK
by Claire Messud
The Boston Globe
I RECENTLY returned from a literary festival that was to have opened and closed in Jerusalem; but which, to our surprise, opened in France and closed in the United Kingdom.
Some 20-odd writers from the world over – including the popular British travel writer and comedian Michael Palin; Sweden’s preeminent thriller writer Henning Mankell; and Canadas Giller Prize-winning M.G. Vassanji – found our events at Jerusalem’s Palestine National Theater shut down by machine-gun toting Israeli soldiers in flak jackets. On the first evening, with a Gallic flourish, Jean-Paul Ghoneim of the French Consulate opened the French Cultural Center impromptu, and hosted our event on nominally French soil: we paraded through the streets in our party clothes, bearing trays of canapes and looking, I’m sure, very threatening indeed.
Israeli police shut down opening night of Palfest09
By the festival’s closing night, the British Consul General Richard Makepeace had made plans to welcome us at the British Council – which was fitting because the British Council was the festival’s primary sponsor. Read More…
IMEMC
Israel to deport 21 peace activists kidnapped while sailing to Gaza
The Israeli Authorities decided to deport 21 international peace activists who were kidnapped by the Israeli Navy while sailing to Gaza carrying humanitarian aid and medical supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. Read More…
by Free Gaza Team
Israeli naval gunboats (IMEMC archive)
“(Larnaca, 1 July 2009) Yesterday, the Israeli Navy boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, SPIRIT OF HUMANITY and kidnapped the 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and activists on their way to Gaza. As of today, none of them have had the right to see an attorney even though they came to the detention centre to see them.
The Free Gaza Movement is calling for their release and the release of our boat, seized in international waters off the coast of Gaza as our SPOT locator clearly shows. Read More…
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