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Palestine

Welcome to Palestine

Press Release 2: “Welcome to Palestine” Organizers decry Israeli propaganda
efforts and threats of mass deportation

Bethlehem and Jerusalem 5 July 2011–The organizers of the “Welcome to
Palestine” initiative decry the numerous attempts by Israeli and other media
to distort our message and planned activities.  There were messages claiming
that we are attempting to reach Gaza by going to Lod Airport (aka Ben Gurion
airport) on July 8. Some claimed that this initiative came after the
flotilla was blocked. Others claimed our visitors want to disrupt things at
the airport and some even claimed they will try to take over planes. These
claims and many others being circulated are false; we urge media not to
disseminate false statements.

As stated in our first press release: we invited international guests,
including families, to visit us in Palestine.  We hope and expect the
Israeli authorities to allow them safe passage in compliance with
International law and normal diplomatic bilateral protocols. We also reject
the Israeli government threat to engage in mass deportation of peace
activists and the apparent attempt justify this unjustifiable action by
using rumors that they spread.

We are accessible to the media and encourage them to speak with the actual
organizers and participants of this peaceful initiative.  Journalists will
be flying with us, and we encourage more  journalists to join us and to
report on what actually happens (without innuendos and propaganda efforts –
Israeli hasbara).

Our visitors are coming to Palestine with a nonviolent approach to peace
building and conflict resolution, with full respect of the universal
declaration of human rights. We urge the Israeli authorities to allow the
journalists to have access to our participants and to report the true story
of “Welcome to Palestine.”

Inviting Palestinians and internationals to join us is our right as people
under colonial occupation who yearn to be free.

Some journalists are flying with our visitors and we invite all journalists
who want to exercise their right to free press to fly in of the 8th of July
to Palestine.

We will have a press conference Friday July 8 at 10 AM at the Bethlehem
Peace Center in Bethlehem.

Contact: info@palestinejn.org
##End###

Press Release from the European group is posted at
http://bienvenuepalestine.com/

نتنياهو في مطار بن غوريون يُعد لخطة احباط وصول نشطاء السلام
http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=402801

Xinhua agency Report
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90854/7429516.html
AFP Report
http://beta.news.yahoo.com/israel-readies-pro-palestinian-airport-protest-21
1323198.html

Israel to expel pro-Palestinian airport protesters
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=402646

نتنياهو في مطار بن غوريون يُعد لخطة احباط وصول نشطاء
http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=402801

الشرطة الاسرائيلية ترفع حالة التأهب في مطار بن غوريون بعد أنباء عن وصول
نشطاء سلام
http://www.alarab.net/Article/382010

جلسة تشاورية للحكومة الاسرائيلية في مطار “بن غوريون” قبل وصول المتضامنين
http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2178444
<http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=217844
4&Language=ar> &Language=ar

Challenging Israeli apartheid, starting at Ben Gurion Airport
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/06/challenging-israeli-apartheid-starting-at-ben-
gurion-airport.html

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Ph.D.
http://qumsiyeh.org

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WELCOME TO PALESTINE

PRESS RELEASE

« WELCOME TO PALESTINE » MISSION FROM 18 TO 16 JULY 2011

Nearly 600 women, men and children, among whom more than 350 French citizens, will fly to the West Bank next Friday 8 July, in answer to the call from 15 West Bank Palestinian civil society organizations.

The aim is to show that, if our governments do not seem to be interested in the fate of these people who have been under occupation for far too long, there are men and women from all countries, who are ready to bring them moral support, using a week of their holidays to go and meet them.

In order to go to Bethlehem, we have no other choice than first landing at Tel Aviv airport, since the only Palestinian airport was destroyed by Israel in the early 2000’s. We know that the internationals who go to Palestine are very often subjected to arbitrary, indeed criminal practices, when they are not turned back, which often leads them to lie on the reasons of their journey.

However, all the French, Belgian, British, German, Italian and American participants decided of one accord that, having nothing to hide, and coming with totally peaceful intentions, they would inform the Israeli authorities of our wish to go to the West Bank immediately after our arrival at Tel Aviv airport.

We then duly informed the French Foreign Office who forwarded the information to the Israeli authorities.

They therefore know perfectly well that we are not coming “to spread chaos at Tel Aviv airport” – contrary to claims by certain agencies, only to pay a visit to Palestinian families, share their daily life for a week, visit the towns, villages and refugee camps, discover the difficulties encountered by their inhabitants, also their culture and their expectations.

Our programme includes in particular exchanges with the Al-Rowwad Centre of the Aïda refugee camp (Bethlehem), help with olive tree planting around Ramallah, also a solidarity visit to the organizers of the Jenin Freedom Theatre whose manager, Juliano Meir Khamis, was brutally assassinated recently.

We strongly stress that we campaign for a just peace and for the freedom and security of both the Palestinian and the Israeli people. Such a peace necessarily means the end of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the respect of international law. There are many Israelis who share this point of view.

We are leaving with our passports in order. We are not carrying anything dangerous. We often come as families and we are ready to submit to the controls in force in all the airports of the world. However, we refuse both arbitrary practices, we mean without any connection with anyone’s security, and humiliation.

More information on :

www.bienvenuepalestine.com

contact@bienvenuepalestine.com

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Freedom for Palestine

Order from here

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July in Palestine

Hundreds of Internationals and Hundreds of Palestinians Gear-up for July
8-16 activities

Some 40 Palestinian civil society organizations, popular resistance
committees, and political factions announce the “Welcome to Palestine”
initiative July 8-16 where hundreds of Internationals will work with
hundreds of Palestinians for Peace.  The hundreds of men, women, and
children will arrive July 8 at the Lod Airport. The international community
must recognize the basic human right to receive visitors from abroad and
support the right of their own citizens to travel to Palestine without
harassment. Where Israel works to isolate us, we invite all to join with us
openly and proudly. We do not accept the attempts to keep us apart or to
force us to speak less than with full honesty.

This July initiative comes in a planned series of events and follows similar
events carried out in December under the slogan of “ending apartheid and
ethnic cleansing.” The week of activities starts on July 9 because that is
the anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling about the
illegality of the Settlements and the apartheid wall in the occupied
Palestinian Territories and the anniversary of the Palestinian Civil Society
Call to Action: 7/9 Ramallah area, 10/9 Bethlehem area, 11/9 North, 12/9
Hebron and Jordan Valley, 13/9 Neqab, 14-15/9 Jerusalem.

The July “Welcome to Palestine” initiative will take participants
(Palestinians and Internationals) to different parts of Palestine from the
north to the Negev and highlight the power of nonviolence and peace building
efforts. Visitors will be accommodated locally and will enjoy Palestinian
hospitality and a program of networking, fellowship, and volunteer peace
work in Palestinian towns and villages together with hundreds of local
activists.

The full program of activities is available for credentialed media outlets.
Volunteers and participants are needed and welcome.  Some news stories that
already appeared on this are linked below.
Contact: info@palestineJN.org

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Gaza Island

and this rerun

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A CALL FROM GAZA in Support of the Freedom Flotilla II

A CALL FROM GAZA in Support of the Freedom Flotilla II

12.6.2011

Besieged Gaza, Occupied Palestine

We the Palestinians of the Besieged Gaza Strip, on this day, five years after closures began on Gaza , are saying enough inaction, enough discussion, enough waiting – the full siege on the Gaza Strip must end.

Shortly after 2006 democratic election which were supervised by people and bodies from the international community, nations formerly supporting aid and cultural organizations in Gaza withdrew their support. In mid-2007, our borders, controlled by Israel and Egypt, fully closed, locking Palestinians within and preventing imports and exports from crossing our borders.

From December 27 2008 to January 18 2009, Israel waged an all-out slaughter on Gaza, killing over 1500 Palestinians, the vast majority innocent civilians and among them over 430 children, and destroying thousands of homes, businesses, factories and buildings including universities, schools, hospitals and medical care facilities, and damaging vast tracts of our water and sanitation system.

Two and a half years following the cessation of Israel’s attacks, almost no homes and few buildings have been rebuilt, our sanitation and sewage system is more dire than ever, raw waste continues to be pumped into our sea –for want of proper treatment facilities –polluting our water and the fish along the coast which fishermen are forced to harvest –banned from entering the 20 nautical miles of sea accorded to Palestinians under the Oslo agreement—contaminating our drinking water and food supply.

Our farmers continue to be shot at, maimed and killed by Israeli soldiers along our border, prevented from working, growing and harvesting their land, denying us a rich supply of produce and vitamins. Nutrient deficiencies and malnutrition continue to rise, affecting our children’s growth and their ability to study. Our economy is shut down by lack of functioning factories and electricity. Our students hold little to no prospects of exiting for study abroad, even when placements and scholarships have been secured, due to the Israeli control of the Erez crossing and the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing being closed more often than opened. Our ill suffer for want of necessary medications and medical supplies and equipment.

Since 2005, over 170 Palestinian organizations have called for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to pressure Israel to comply to international law. Since 2005, Palestinians have weekly met in villages in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, to protest Israel ‘s occupation policies.

Creative civilian efforts such as the Free Gaza boats that broke the siege five times, the Gaza Freedom March, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and the many land convoys must never stop their siege-breaking, highlighting the inhumanity of keeping 1.5 million Gazans in an open-air prison.

On the 2nd of December, 22 international organizations including Amnesty, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, and Medical Aid for Palestinians produced the report ‘Dashed Hopes, Continuation of the Gaza Blockade’ calling for international action to force Israel to unconditionally lift the blockade, saying the Palestinians of Gaza under Israeli siege continue to live in the same devastating conditions. Human Rights Watch published a comprehensive report “Separate and Unequal” that denounced Israeli policies as Apartheid, echoing similar sentiments by South African anti-apartheid activists.

The recent announced opening of the Rafah crossing has yet to be fully enacted. Even when open, it will mean little with respect to the imports and exports of goods to and from Gaza and will not improve the plights of fishermen, farmers and Gaza ‘s unemployment and manufactured poverty rates.

We request that the citizens of the world oppose this deadly, medieval blockade. The failure of the United Nations and its numerous organizations to condemn such crimes proves their complicity. Only civil society is able to mobilize to demand the application of international law and put an end to Israel ‘s impunity. The intervention of civil society was effective in the late 1980s against the apartheid regime of South Africa . Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have not only described Israel ’s oppressive and violent control of Palestinians as Apartheid, they have also joined this call for the world’s civil society to intervene again.

We call on civil society organizations worldwide to intensify the anti-Israel sanctions campaign to compel Israel to end to its aggression. We call on the nations and citizens of the world participating in the Freedom Flotilla 2 to continue their plans to sail to Gaza where they would be welcomed by Palestinians. The civil society initiatives of the Freedom Flotillas are about taking a stance of justice and solidarity with besieged Palestinians when your governments will not. We call on the Flotilla movement to grow and continue to sail until the siege on Gaza is entirely lifted and Palestinians of Gaza are granted the basic human rights and freedom of movement citizens around the world enjoy.

Signed by:

University Teachers’ Association

Palestinian Nongovernmental Organizations Network

Al-Aqsa University

Palestine Red Crescent Society in Gaza

General Union of Youth Entities

Arab Cultural Forum

General Union for Health Services Workers

General Union for Public Services Workers

General Union for Petrochemical and Gas Workers

General Union for Agricultural Workers

Union of Women’s Work Committees

Union of Synergies—Women Unit

Union of Palestinian Women Committees

Women’s Studies Society

Working Woman’s Society

Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel

One Democratic State Group

Palestinian Youth against Apartheid

Association of Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Info

Palestine Sailing Federation

Palestinian Association for Fishing and Maritime

Palestinian Women Committees

Progressive Students Union

Medical Relief Society

The General Society for Rehabilitation

Afaq Jadeeda Cultural Centre for Women and Children

Deir Al-Balah Cultural Centre for Women and Children

Maghazi Cultural Centre for Children

Al-Sahel Centre for Women and Youth

Ghassan Kanfani Kindergartens

Rachel Corrie Centre, Rafah

Rafah Olympia City Sisters

Al Awda Centre,

Rafah Al Awda Hospital,

Jabaliya Camp Ajyal Association,

Gaza General Union of Palestinian Syndicates

Al Karmel Centre,

Nuseirat Local Initiative,

Beit Hanoun Union of Health Work Committees

Red Crescent Society Gaza Strip

Beit Lahiya Cultural Centre

Al Awda Centre, Rafah

Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Information Society

women section -union of Palestinian workers syndicate

Middle East Childrens’ Alliance -Gaza

Local Initiative -Beit Hanoun

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Long live Palestine : the song

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Ghassan Kanafani

ONE

Introduction

Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936, and his family was expelled from Palestine in 1948 by Zionist terror, after which they finally settled in Damascus. After completing his studies, he worked as a teacher and journalist, first in Damascus, and then in Kuwait. Later he moved to Beirut and wrote for several papers before starting Al Hadaf, the weekly paper of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in 1969.To begin with, Kanafani was an active member of the Arab Nationalist Movement, the forerunner of the PFLP, but later, along with his comrade George Habash, he became a Marxist, believing that the solution to the problems which faced the Palestinians could not be achieved without a social revolution throughout the Arab world.Kanafani was killed when his car exploded in July 1972: murdered by Zionist agents. His sister wrote:

“On the morning of Saturday, July 8, 1972, at about 10:30 am, Lamees (Kanafani’s niece) and her uncle were going out together to Beirut. A minute after their departure, we heard the sound of a very loud explosion which shook the whole building. We were immediately afraid, but our fear was for Ghassan and not for Lamees because we had forgotten that Lamees was with him and we knew that Ghassan was the target of the explosion. We ran outside, all of us were calling for Ghassan and not one of us called for Lamees. Lamees was still a child of seventeen years. Her whole being was longing for life and was full of life. But we knew that Ghassan was the one who had chosen this road and who had walked along it. Just the previous day Lamees had asked her uncle to reduce his revolutionary activities and to concentrate more upon writing his stories. She had said to him, “Your stories are beautiful,” and he had nswered, “Go back to writing stories? I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty. If I were to leave behind my principles, you yourself would not respect me.’ He was able to convince the girl that the struggle and the defense of principles is what finally leads to success in everything.”

In the memoir which Ghassan Kanafani’s wife published after his death, she wrote:

“His inspiration for writing and working unceasingly was the Palestinian-Arab struggle…He was one of those who fought sincerely for the development of the resistance movement from being a nationalist Palestinian liberation movement into being a pan-Arab revolutionary socialist movement of which the liberation of Palestine would be a vital component. He always stressed that the Palestine problem could not be solved in isolation from the Arab World’s whole social and political situation.”

This attitude developed naturally out of Kanafani’s own experiences. At the age of twelve he went through the trauma of becoming a refugee, and thereafter he lived as an exile in various Arab countries, not always with official approval. His people were scattered, many of them making a living in the camps or struggling to make a living by doing the most menial work; their only hope lay in the future and in their children. Kanafani himself, writing to his son, summed up what it means to be a Palestinian:

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, ‘Mama, am I a Palestinian?’ When she answered ‘Yes’ a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then – silence. Afterwards…I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you…I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child…Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly – a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”

“To our departed and yet remaining Comrade; you knew of two ways in life, and life knew from you only one. You knew the path of submission and you refused it. And you knew of the path of resistance and you walked with it. This path was chosen for you and you walked with it. And your comrades are walking with you.”

Read on
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Christmas 2010 in Palestine and invite for this year

Here is a short video of the unforgettable moments we spent with our Palestinian friends at the end of December 2010… and the reasons why we decided to return this summer… with you ! 76 French volunteers and 10 Scots, aged between 9 and 85 years, answered the call made by 14 Palestinian associations. During one week, we joined the peoples’ resistance movement to demand the end of the occupation and the right to freely come and go throughout Palestine.

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