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Indybay Feature

SF Gaza Action No Business As Usual

Date:
Monday, January 05, 2009
Time:
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Event Type:
Protest
Organizer/Author:
Location Details:
Market and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco

Israel has launched a ground invasion of Gaza; we must respond. No more business as usual Monday morning. After 60 plus years of occupation, Israel continues its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Israel is going into Gaza with tanks paid for with our tax dollars to the tune of $15 million a day. Meanwhile, our schools are being closed because there is supposedly no money for education, and the same is true for healthcare, housing and pensions, while there is plenty of money for war. This cannot continue. Please join this protest.
http://www.araborganizing.org/
Added to the calendar on Sat, Jan 3, 2009 7:39PM

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by araborganizing.org
The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) condemn the unprecedented Israeli attacks on Gaza, killing more than 300 Palestinians and injuring more than 700. Israel will not cease to stop its terror and has vowed to continue and increase what it claims to be "terrorist centers" in Gaza. Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, has announced that "…the operation will go on and be intensified as long as necessary".

While Israel attempts to justify its massacres as targeting Hamas security centers in retaliation for rocket fires, in reality what one can clearly see in the streets of Gaza is nothing short of an outright massacre of men, women and children. Children on their way to school, men and women who are simply walking around the street running daily errands were stricken down by US made F16 airplanes and missiles.

The US immediately declared its support for the attacks and Israel's "war on terrorism". This rhetoric has become far too familiar to the trained ear. As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and as we've been seeing in Palestine the "war on terrorism" has become a war on all peoples pursuing their international human right for self-determination and freedom from occupation and oppression. Israel's Zionist Colonial project must be exposed! A country where a group of people have the exclusive right to a land and its resources based on religion/ethnicity, while the indigenous people of the land are forced to move and many murdered is Racist and Inhumane.

Three fabrications continuously being used by the US backed Israel and must be interpreted and understood as a complete falsehood to the reality on the ground;

1. "Disengagement" from Gaza

The government of Israel claims it "disengaged" or "pulled out" of Gaza in August 2005. As a result, Israel argues that it is no longer responsible for Gaza and that with the inception of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian Authority is not responsible for the Gaza Strip. Even though Israeli soldiers are not physically present inside Gaza, they control all entry and exit points of all goods and people from land, air or sea. Gaza's main crossing point to the outside world, Karni, has repeatedly been shut down for extensive periods of time by Israel, except when Israeli producers wish to "dump cheap products into Gaza". Israel has only allowed a few "essential items" through the Kerem Shalom and Sufa crossings. However, both these crossings are completely controlled by Israel.

It does not stop there! 90 percent of private industries in Gaza have shut down, 80 percent of the population lives on food aid, if and when its allowed into Gaza, all construction sites are idle and unemployment has reached record highs. Even more frightening, water, gas and electricity are also controlled by Israel. All three of these supplies of BASIC resources have been cut of from Gaza in what has become what many top officials have described as the "gravest humanitarian crisis yet".

Imagine living with no water to drink, no gas to run a vehicle or heat your food, no electricity for light and communication. Imagine living in complete darkness for not one, two or three days but weeks at a time. This is not disengagement, but is a strategic move to starve out a population because of their demographic threat to the exclusionary racist state of Israel.

2. Rocket Fire from Gaza into Sderot

Since the December 19th ceasefire has been broken NO Israeli's have been affected by the rocket fires. Yet, the series of airstrikes culminating to Saturday's attacks have killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians by F16 warplanes and US made missiles and mortar shells. However, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declares Palestinian "citizens are not our enemy". Israel argues that a ceasefire has been broken. Yet, during the ceasefire, borders continue to be closed, movement restricted, and resources of the Palestinian people blocked by Israel.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war with two equal participants. It is a colonial-settler occupation of a land at the expense of the indigenous population. The Palestinian have a right, which has been recognized internationally by the United Nations, to protect themselves against this attack on their self-determination.

3. Palestinian Authority and Arab Leaders Response

Recent negotiations amongst the Arab league and the Palestinian Authority have, as has become customary, been a series of blank statements with no action on the ground to support the Palestinian people. It was not until the Palestinian people, who found no hope amongst their Arab neighbors, broke down the border with Egypt on January 24, 2008 yearning for basic supplies and medicine. Today, Egypt continues to deny the Palestinian people the ability to breathe from the Israeli stranglehold of Gaza.

Giving the green light to Israel to kill innocent civilians in Gaza has become commonplace amongst Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies considered to be "friendly neighbors" to Israel, as Ehud Barak announced on CNN. Ignoring the Palestinian people's calls for unity. Abbas and much of the Palestinian Authority have pushed aside the basic needs of its peoples for their own political agenda. Disregarding the polemics of their so-called leaders, the Palestinian people in the West Bank broke out in protest declaring to their brothers and sisters in Gaza "we are here for you".

It is important to understand that: a) there continues to be an occupation of Gaza even though Israel claims it "disengaged", b) the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, and c) the representatives of the Palestinian people, supported by the West, have not meet the needs of its own people.

Our anger, frustration, sadness and love go to the courageous people of Gaza who are resisting the stranglehold of the Israeli occupation.

For it is in the struggle for Justice that it has become imperative amongst freedom loving people all over the world to come together in solidarity with the Palestinian people for Liberation against Occupation.


WE CALL FOR:

1. An Immediate Israeli Ceasefire and end to the Israeli siege of Gaza
2. The Arab masses to come out in the streets to voice their support for the Palestinian people
3. The United States government cease its unconditional support of the Apartheid State of Israel
4. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of all Israeli goods
5. All allies and supporters of the Palestinian people to come out in protest against the Massacres in Gaza
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