Join a Convoy to Gaza

We will fly out from the US to Cairo on July 4 (message being that Palestinian independence is as worthy as US independence) where we will cohere the convoy, aid and vehicles and head off aiming to enter Gaza on July 12.  We organized a similar operation from Britain in February - driving for 23 days with 107 vehicles, 255 people and approx $2 million worth of aid through France and Spain, and then across the Maghreb.
 
Support for the convoy is already taking off. Ron Kovic is the co-leader of the convoy alongside George.  As in Britain, the climate post the December/January offensive against the people of Gaza has turned markedly. There is a renewed confidence around this issue - notwithstanding the shocking verdict and sentencing in the retrial of the Holy Land Foundation people.  

We are taking strictly medical aid and have gone to great lengths to meet the stringent requirements of the US authorities on charitable contacts with organizations operating in Gaza.  We want the convoy to show the world - particularly the Middle East - a different face of the US, that something other than the US Marine Corps can come from these shores.
 
We hope that it will play a part in continuing to shift US public opinion on the issues surrounding Israel/Palestine and the wider region. A changed public opinion is a precondition for a changed and more just foreign policy.
 
We also hope that the sight of many hundreds of US citizens brining aid to the people of Gaza will have an impact throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds - demonstrating that the US population is not congruent with the policies pursued for the last eight years and longer. That can only be of benefit to all those who want the US to be seen to play a different role in the world.
 
It would be possible for you to fly in to Cairo on 11/12 July, meet up with the convoy, enter Gaza and be back on a flight to the US on Thursday 16 July.
 
There is, naturally, a great deal of support for the initiative among particularly the Arab and Muslim communities in the US. But we want the convoy to reflect also the breadth of US support for justice for the Palestinians. So American figures who are widely known in the US or abroad will have a disporportionate impact.
 
The convoy delegates are leaving from JFK on July 4 to Cairo and thence, a week later to Gaza. Given the pressures of time some people will be flying out on the weekend of July 11 and 12 to join us on the final push to the Rafah crossing - scheduled for July 12 or 13.
 
You can find further information about the US convoy at
http://www.vivapalestina-us.org

and on the British at
http://www.vivapalestina.org
 
Best wishes,
Kevin Ovenden
312 493 4630
Kevin.Ovenden@gmail.com

Don't Carp, Organize: Our Convoy to Gaza
By GEORGE GALLOWAY, CounterPunch

"Where is the ummah; where is this Arab world they tell us about in school."

Those words will forever remain etched on my brain. They were spoken by a 10 year old girl in a bombed out ruin in Gaza in March. She had lost almost her entire family in the 22-day Israeli bombardment earlier this year. The second time she spoke, it was to the back of my head. I had to turn away; what answer could you give her?

While Hugo Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador to Venezuela, the leaders of the Arab League, with a handful of exceptions, spent those murderous weeks in December and January scarcely summoning even the synthetic indignation that has so often attended previous bloody episodes in the Palestinian tragedy.

But that was not so of public opinion, not only in the Muslim world, but mobilized on the streets of Western capitals. In Britain, over 100,000 people took to the streets and night after night we blockaded the Israeli embassy. Above all, the Gaza onslaught produced in the US an unprecedented outpouring. There have, for sure, been protests before, but this has turned out to be more than an ephemeral release of impotent rage. Something is changing.

That has become more and more apparent to me over the last two months as I've spoken on Palestine at packed meetings and fundraisers across the US.  The opinion polls in January showed a plurality of Americans against the Israeli onslaught. It may not have been a surprise to those of us who witnessed Ariel Sharon's leveling of Beirut in the late summer of 1982, but the sight of white phosphorous – which forms a gaseous cloud – being used against civilians in Gaza stunned the senses of millions or people who had up to that point been led to believe that it was somehow the Palestinians who were occupying Israeli land rather than the other way round.

Seasoned activists in the Palestinian cause confirm that there is now a window of opportunity to take this case beyond the ghetto and into the mainstream of political life – in the US and in Britain, which between them bear the heaviest responsibility for the suffering in Palestine: the US as the cashier for Israeli colonization; Britain, as the author of the tragedy in 1917, when a leader of one people, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour (an anti-Semite), gave to the purported leaders of another people, the Zionist movement, the land belonging to a third people, the Palestinians. And all without asking any of the people, which even by the standards of British imperialism is quite a triumph.

How then to bring to the cause of Palestine the kind of political movement that helped shatter apartheid, between the hammer of the ANC resistance and the anvil of international solidarity? This is the question that has led to me flitting backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, between lectures and fundraisers here, and the unfolding of an extraordinary political crisis at home. It was the question we asked ourselves as we marched past the Israeli embassy on those cold days in January.

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