Free Gaza

The Morning Star
by Louise Nousratpour, Friday 25 May 2007

PALESTINE solidarity campaigners decended on the Israeli embassy in south London on Friday to announce a courageous plan to set sail for beleaguered Gaza this summer to "break the siege."

Standing firm in the face of constant police harassment, Free Gaza activists launched their campaign outside the embassy in Kensington, west London, to break the year-long international blockade on Palestine.

They held a banner bearing the image of a boat to demonstrate how they will brave the sea in August to bring solidarity and hope to the 1.4 million Palestinians trapped in the "open prison" of Gaza.

The ship will be carrying around 80 blacklisted internationals and Palestinians, as well as £12,600 worth of Red Crescent aid, including medicine and food.

Israel claims to have withdrawn from Gaza, but it still operates an "almost complete lockdown" on the region, campaigners warned, denying Palestinians access to jobs, travel, visitors, commerce, education and medical care.

Socialist comedian Jeremy Hardy, who is backing the campaign, said: "Direct action is essential.

"Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only ever been a new Labour vanity project.

"Lord Levy was chosen as special envoy to the Middle East because of his experience managing Showaddywaddy and, now, he's scarpering with Blair."

One of the organisers who will be going on the boat is Sharyn Lock, who was seriously shot while in the West Bank with International Solidarity Movement in 2002.

Despite her traumatic experience, Ms Lock continued her humanitarian activities in the region until she was blacklisted by the Israeli government in 2005.

The defiant activist stormed: "No Israeli ban can keep us out of Palestine.

"With this journey, we want to show that we will take any route into the region. We will swim there if necessary."

For nearly two weeks, people in Gaza have been caught in the crossfire between the Hamas government and Fatah factions, while Israel has rained bombs on them.

"We are setting sail for Gaza to highlight the international community's failure to uphold Palestinians' basic human rights and to call Israel to account for continuing to imprison them," Ms Lock said.

Far from enforcing these rights, the international community has put economic sanctions on Palestinians for exercising their democratic rights in voting Hamas into government last January.

Green MEP Caroline Lucas, a member of the European Parliament delegation to the occupied Palestinian territories, applauded the activists' attempt to break the economic sanctions.

The blockade "is causing real hardship, costing lives and worsening prospects for peace in the region by undermining the democratically elected Palestinian Authority, as I saw for myself last month," Ms Lucas warned.

"I applaud the humanitarian sentiment and persistence of the Free Gaza campaign and I hope it provides the catalyst for the UK, EU and Israel to renormalise relations with the Palestinians."

A campaign spokeswoman said that the project was intended to "awaken the conscience the nations of the world, who have turned their backs on these people, and to highlight the failure of the United Nations to enforce its resolutions."

The details of the three-day boat journey are being kept secret to stop Israel's notorious intelligence service Mossad sabotaging it, as they did a similar attempt in 1988.

Then, Israeli agents blew up the engine of the ship while it was docked at Limassol in Cyprus before it set sail.

Its passengers were Palestinian deportees seeking a symbolic return home by re-enacting the 1947 journey of Jewish refugees.

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