Two persons, Joe Meadors and Dr. Swee Ang, who personally faced Israeli violence in the past, faced violence again on the Al Awda ship in the 2018 Gaza Freedom Flotilla that challenged the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza in July 2018. Dr. Swee is back home in London, UK, and Joe Meadors is at home in Corpus Christi, Texas, both ready to go on the next mission to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

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Two persons, Joe Meadors and Dr. Swee Ang, who personally faced Israeli violence in the past, faced violence again on the Al Awda ship in the 2018 Gaza Freedom Flotilla that challenged the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza in July 2018. They cared for the victims of Israeli violence on Al Awda, including the threatened execution of the captain of the boat by Israeli commandos and the beating of the captain and engineer, the tasering of three persons and the broken ribs of three of the delegates and crew, including Dr. Swee herself.

On June 8, 1967, Joe Meadors was an 18-year-old US Navy sailor on the bridge of the USS Liberty located off Gaza when the Israeli military purposefully attacked and almost sunk the US Navy ship. The Israeli Air Force strafed and bombed the ship and the Israeli Navy shot torpedoes at the ship. Thirty-four US personnel were killed and 174 injured by the Israeli military. Israeli napalm dropped on the ship turned the deck into an inferno. Torpedo boats fired missiles that blasted a hole in the side of the ship 39 feet wide and 24 feet tall. Stretcher bearers were shot and life rafts filled with sailors were machine gunned by Israeli military. The injured and dying were put on tables in the mess area, sailors with no training stitched up wounds in other sailors, transfusions were given arm-to-arm.

Fifteen years later, in 1982, Dr. Swee Ang was a young doctor in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut, Lebanon. She had resigned her medical position in the UK and answered the international appeal for an orthopedic surgeon to treat the victims of relentless bombing of Beirut by Israeli military.

In her remarkable book "From Beirut to Jerusalem," Dr. Swee recalls part of the history of the horrific brutality of the State of Israel toward Palestinians and her presence as a medical doctor to help survivors of the brutality. She begins with her arrival in Beirut in early September 1982 as 14,000 members of the Palestinian government in exile, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were leaving as a part of the international brokered agreement and ceasefire to end the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Some were PLO fighters but many were civil servants such as doctors, lecturers, trade unionists, media personnel, engineers and technicians.

They left behind their families in the many Palestinian refugee camps, including Shabra and Shatilla, that had been created in 1948 when the violence of Israeli militias forced over 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in Palestine, in what is known as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Many descendants of those 800,000 still live in refugee camps located throughout the Middle East, including refugee camps in Gaza for those who were forced from their homes in the West Bank.

Three weeks later, the 2,300 multinational peace-keeping force, including 800 U.S. Marines, charged with protection of the Palestinian civilians left in Beirut, suddenly withdrew. On September 15, 1982, several hundred Israeli tanks rumbled into Beirut, sealing off the Shabra and Shatilla camps, trapping the inhabitants -- women, children and elder Palestinians.

Then the Israelis ordered their allies, Christian militia, into the camps to rape and murder. Israeli military forces sealed off the camps so none could escape, provided bulldozers to bury the dead in mass graves, shot illumination flares so the murders and rapes could continue at night. Israel provided the weapons and training to the militias. Three days later on September 18 when the Israeli tanks withdrew and the militias finished their rampage, over 3,000 civilians had been killed on the direct orders of Israeli officials. As a doctor attempting to deal with the carnage, Dr. Swee witnessed first-hand the horrific violence orchestrated by Israeli military forces. In 1983, a commission chaired by Sean MacBride, the assistant to the UN Secretary General and President of United Nations General Assembly at the time, concluded that Israel, as the camp's occupying power, bore responsibility for the violence.

In the next years from 1985-1988, Israeli militias attacked the refugee camps of Shatilla, Burj-el-Branjneh and Rashiddyeh, killing another 2,500 Palestinians and making 30,000 homeless. Nahr-el-Bard Camp, home to 40,000 Palestinians, was destroyed by Israel in 2007.

Dr. Swee later worked in hospitals in Gaza under the auspices of the United Nations. She wrote in her book, "The wounds of Gaza are deep and multi-layered. Are we talking about the Khan Younis massacre of 5,000 in 1956, or the execution of the 35,000 prisoners of war by Israel in 1967? Yet more wounds of the first Intifada, when civil disobedience by an occupied people against the occupiers resulted in massive wounded and hundreds dead?"

She reminds us that 5,420 were wounded in southern Gaza alone since 2000, not counting the execution of over 160 and wounding of over 16,000 by Israeli snipers in 2018 during the Great Return March.

Ten years ago, in the Israeli attack on Gaza from 27 December 2008 to the ceasefire of 18 January 2009, Israel dropped an estimated million and a half tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, which is only 25 miles long by five miles wide and home to 1.5 million people. Prior to this, Gaza had been completely blockaded and starved for 50 days. On the first day of the 2008 Israeli attack and invasion of Gaza, 250 people were killed. Every police station in Gaza was bombed killing large numbers of police officers. Having wiped out the police force, Gaza's governmental buildings including the Parliament, were bombed from the air by F16 jets and Apache helicopters, shelled from the sea by Israeli gunboats, and from the land by tank artillery. Many schools were reduced to rubble, including the American School of Gaza, 40 mosques, hospitals, UN buildings, 21,000 homes, 4,000 of which were demolished completely. It is estimated that 100,000 people were made homeless.

Dr. Swee rushed to Gaza and worked on the orthopedic staff of several hospitals following the Israeli attack and documented the use of a new weapon given to the Israelis by the U.S. government to test on Palestinians -- the dense inert metal explosive (DIME) bomb that slices victims in a manner not seen by experienced war trauma doctors, and white phosphorus bombs that burns victims down to the bone.

And in 2014, the 51-day Israeli attack on Gaza killed 2,300 Palestinians and wounded almost 11,000, including 3,374 children of whom over 1,000 were left permanently disabled. Homes for 10,000 families were destroyed and 89,000 homes were damaged. Rebuilding costs will be 4-6 billion dollars.

With her husband Francis Khoo, and some friends, Dr Ang Swee Chai helped to form the British charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), following the 1982 Sabra-Shatila massacres. In 1987, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat awarded Dr Ang Swee Chai the "Star of Palestine" the highest award for service to the Palestinian people.

For the eight days, the converted fishing trawler Al Awda was underway from Sicily to Gaza, Dr. Swee was the medical officer for ship and Joe stood watches at the helm of Al Awda.

Joe had experience with Gaza Freedom Flotillas having been on the passenger ship Sfendoni in 2010 when the Israeli military stormed all six ships in the flotilla, murdering nine persons and wounding over 50 on the ship Mavi Marmara. On the Sfendoni, numerous persons were tasered and Joe was shot with a paint bullet in the chest. Joe has been a part of flotillas in 2010, 2011, 2015 and 2018.

When the Israeli Occupation Forces hijacked Al Awda in 42 nautical miles in international waters off Gaza, well outside Israel's self-designated 20-mile "security zone," three persons were tasered and the Captain and Engineer were beaten by Israeli commandos. Dr. Swee and several others were hit by commandos and three have suffered broken ribs, including Dr. Swee. The IOF tightened handcuffs on one delegate so tightly that his hands turned blue. Four persons were dragged off the boat when it arrived in the Ashdod harbor and sustained injuries including a broken foot.

Dr. Swee is back home in London, UK, and Joe Meadors is at home in Corpus Christi, Texas, both ready to go on the next mission to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza and bring international attention to the conditions the Israeli government has imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Authors Website: www.voicesofconscience.com

Authors Bio:
Ann Wright is a 29-year US Army/Army Reserves veteran, a retired United States Army colonel and retired U.S. State Department official, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She received the State Department Award for Heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She is most noted for having been one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Wright was also a passenger on the Challenger 1, which along with the Mavi Marmara, was part of the Gaza flotilla. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience." She has written frequently on rape in the military.