Open Letter from Gaza: Three Years after the Massacre, Justice or Nothing!

Tuesday, 27^th December, 2011

We, Palestinians of Gaza, 3 years on from the 22-day long massacre in Israel’s operation ‘Cast Lead’, are calling on international civil society to make 2012 the year when solidarity with us in Palestine captures the spark of the revolutions around the Arab world and never looks back. On this anniversary we demand an international liberation movement that eventually leads to just that, liberation for us Palestinians from 63 years of brutal military occupation and ethnic cleansing that pours shame on any organisation or government claiming to endorse universal human rights.

We will never forget the hurt of 3 years ago, the criminal onslaught that we lived through, the blood of over 1400 murdered men, women and hundreds of children running through the streets of Gaza, between the rubble, soaking our beds and etched on our minds. We will never forget. For they are still dead, and thousands more are still maimed. ^[1]

  We will never forget the last 63 years during which our land, homes, olive groves, lemon trees and cherished way of life was taken away from us, while Israeli soldiers held our fathers’ faces in the sands, imprisoned them, or shot them in front of us. We will not forget the sickening cowardice of the international community that has allowed and enabled this ethnic cleansing of our people, subjecting us to Israel’s racist Zionist vision that defines us, the indigenous people of Palestine, as the undesired ‘ethnic group’ for the region.

The US continues to ‘reward’ Israel with 6 billion dollars of tax-payers money while the EU increases its trade and diplomatic relations. For the Israeli apartheid regime this translates as the green light to unleash the 4^th most powerful military on us to ‘do its worst’ against our civilian population, of which over half in Gaza are children and over 2 thirds are UN registered refugees.

children’s pictures of the devastating assault on Gaza

December 13, 2010

[Video features Palestinian children’s drawings depicting their
fears of the Palestinian Israeli conflicts.
The total collection of artwork by the Palestinian children is available
for a gallery or museum show.
Contact: achildsview1@gmail.com]

by Susan Johnson on December 22, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/v/TE-GwpgJTKs?fs=1&hl=en_US

A picture is worth a thousand words, and this video goes beyond that. It contains powerful drawings, created by children in Gaza, expressing the horrors they experienced during Operation Cast Lead, which of course began nearly two years ago. These children share the painful physical and emotional devastation caused by Israel’s actions. Many of these young artists will never escape the hell they lived through.

This video is part of a larger project, the traveling art exhibit, “A Child’s View from Gaza,” developed by Joyce Ravitz and myself after we visited Gaza in June 2009. Having seen drawings in an art therapy class, we felt an exhibit of similar drawings should be developed and shown in the US. “A Child’s View from Gaza.” was born!