Statement from organizers -

In response to the international consensus in opposition to the Israeli Apartheid wall, and the International Court of Justice's recent decision determining that the Israeli Apartheid wall violates:

The rights of the Palestinian people.

The U.S. administration and the majority of Congress joined Israel by defying the world and supporting this

racist and colonial Apartheid wall.

Recognizing that the upcoming period provides an

important window to address the US policy.



The Anti-Wall Taskforce (AWT) was formed to coordinate all efforts pertaining to the proposed protest actions and Solidarity Fasts to be carried out in various cities in the United States and Canada.



Eyewitness Report Back –

I’d like to share a brief report and a public thank you regarding last weekend’s "tent of peace and justice" in Santa Monica.



The event started on Friday afternoon, and continued throughout Saturday and until Sunday afternoon. during this entire time, 10 activists fasted in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters back home. the tent was set up in a prime spot near the Santa Monica pier and got great visibility by hundreds or thousands of passers-by. It included a mock wall with photos and information taped to it, an information table, and a projector and screen where documentary films were shown in the evening. Participants in this event held pro-Palestinian and anti-wall signs, and flyers were passed out. Various activists spoke on the p.a. system, and There was a candlelight procession in the evening.



The Zionists, as usual, arranged a counter-protest. They hired an airplane on all 3 days to carry anti-Palestinian signs in across the beach (a different message each day - one was something about arafat and terrorism, and others were about Palestinians teaching hate and sending their children on suicide bombings). On Sunday afternoon, they came out in full force, with many racist signs and many of their hardcore members. A lot of friction resulted, in many cases very heated exchanges, including insults, and at least in 3 cases that I saw it turned physical. we chanted pro-palestinian and anti-wall slogans; they chanted their racist slogans. (of course since we had the p.a. system, our voices were louder, although their numbers were comparable to ours).



I would like to thank all the organizers for a remarkable effort that they put in. the names that immediately come to my mind are those of xxx, xxx

xxx, xxx, the free Palestine alliance, and answer coalition. of course there were other individuals and groups involved too, but still the whole effort hinged on just a handful of individuals. They organized and implemented all of this, which entailed an enormous amount of physical

effort (I just showed up a couple of hours each day, and helped close down on 2 of the nights, without fasting, and found that quite tiring!). So I

think they deserve a huge acknowledgement from everyone who cares about Palestine but for one reason or another wasn't able to participate even partially.

Again, thank you to xxx, xxx, xxx, xxx and others for the AMAZING job you've done!!



Note: Individual names were removed, much of the information provided was obtained from the Women in Black list serve.

The belief that security can be provided by walls and physical barriers is as old as the most ancient walled city. But that city is Jericho and any Israeli schoolchild can tell you what happened to its defensive walls once the ancient Israelites emerged from their desert exodus. They came tumbling down. Walls and barriers meant to provide lasting security never ultimately work. They have a habit of cracking, falling, being breached, circumvented, written on or even ignored altogether. That's why Hadrian's Wall, The Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line and the Berlin Wall, among others, are now better remembered as monuments to failure than as monuments to lasting peace and security. Yet the illusion that walls and barriers will provide lasting security lives on today in modern Israel and in the U.S. Congress, where this archaic belief has been resurrected as the solution to the similarly archaic practice of human sacrifice utilized by Palestinian suicide bombers…



Published on Thursday, July 29, 2004 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Israel Ignores the Lessons of History

by Steve Niva

and why?

“You must end the illegal occupation,”

– Kofi Annan

addressing Israel in a meeting of the UN Security Council March 11, 2002

and its staunchest supporters in Congress have ignored lessons of history by rejecting the International Court of Justice's ruling that Israel's barrier in the West Bank is illegal and that those portions located in the occupied territories must be dismantled. The House of Representatives wasted little time in passing House Resolution 713, which strongly condemns the court's ruling and supports Israel's right to build the barrier anywhere it chooses. To their credit, Washington Reps. Brian Baird, Jay Inslee and Jim McDermott opposed the resolution. A similar resolution in the Senate, Senate Resolution 408, cosponsored by Washington Sen. Patty Murray, is likely to win overwhelming support before the Senate summer recess. Those who profess concern for Israeli security are dangerously mistaken if they believe that building a combination of concrete walls and electrified fences around Palestinians in the West Bank will end suicide bombings and enhance Israel's overall security. In fact, as history has shown, it will likely lead to even more, not less, daring and devastating forms of violence.

Published on Thursday, July 29, 2004 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Israel Ignores the Lessons of History

by Steve Niva

but, as BBC Washington correspondent Stephen Sackur reveals, Israel has found new support from American Christians.

Since 11 September, support among Americans for Israel has grown massively as many now see the Middle East conflict as the frontline in the US "War on Terror".

Joining well-established Jewish lobby groups in America is a new and powerful phenomenon - Christian Zionism.

There are an estimated 40 million Christian Conservatives in America and they may be in a position to wield unprecedented influence in support of Israel.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1969542.stm



Israel expands West Bank settlements

Aerial photos reveal extent of land grab, say peace groups

The Guardian

Months after Ariel Sharon announced his dramatic plan to pull Jewish settlers out of Gaza, portraying it as a sacrifice for peace, the government is grabbing more land for West Bank settlements. Israeli peace groups and Palestinian officials say thousands of homes are under construction in the main settlements, in addition to an expansion of Jewish outposts that are illegal under Israeli law. Mr Sharon has promised

the US he will dismantle the outposts, which are usually clusters of containers or trailer homes serviced by government-built roads, but has failed to do so. One Israeli group, Settlement Watch, says in the three months to May, West Bank settlements expanded by 26 hectares (65 acres).The government has

approved construction of thousands more homes in the three main settlement

blocs on the West Bank, encouraged by an apparent endorsement by George Bush for their eventual annexation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1269707,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1269622,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,720353,00.html

Snapshots is a visual dedication to life in Palestine.

Through the struggle, the glory, to the inevitable freedom, we will capture life as it unfolds.

Our goals are to bring you what your eyes don't see, and tell you stories that your ears don't hear.

http://snapshots.palestinechronicle.com/snapshots.php



Amira Hass:

Life Under Israeli Occupation - By an Israeli

Jewish journalist Amira Hass doesn't merely report on the experiences of Palestinians on the West Bank - she shares their lives

by Robert Fisk

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0826-04.htm

Just curious as to what glory the arabs have seen??? 4 years of intifada with no progress, Arafat holed up in what must be some really smelly rooms, 4 wars all lost, arabs still living in abject poverty because Arafat steals their money, a fence separating the civilized from the barbarians, and lots of dead arabs. Oh the glory of it all!!!!

Weapon of mass population



"I want to have many boys, so we have more people and can get the Jews out."

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent

Published September 21, 2003

--------------------------------------------

Thuraya Eshbear, 35, has 13 children - from 20 years to 10 months - nine of whom are in this photograph. Her husband, Majed Eshbear, back left, is the father of 20 children, including all 13 here. Majed's other wife, back left, is Manal Sultan.

Members of the Abbas family of Gaza stroll to the beach for sunset, where they will make coffee and talk for several hours as a way to pass the time.

Friends toss Mohammed Abuzaya into the air as they celebrate the night before his wedding.

Mohammed Basheer, 3, clings to his brother through the fence at his preschool in Deir el Balah.

AML preschool in Deir el Balah is home to 120 students.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Times art: Amanda Raymond]

The fertility rates of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are skyrocketing past those of Jews throughout Israel. Total fertility is the average number of children a woman of child-bearing years (assumed to be between 15 and 49) is expected to bear during her lifetime, according to the specific birth rates of women in the population in a given year.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - In the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, Thuraya Eshbear wields a powerful weapon.

Babies.

At 35, this wisp of a woman has 13 children, from 20 years down to 10 months. Though she can't afford to school them all, though she rarely has a minute to herself, she would gladly bear more.

"I have many children so that the Palestinian people will have more than the Israelis," says Eshbear, a -a-week cleaner in the maternity ward of Gaza City's biggest hospital. Here, on any given day, dozens of other Palestinian women are doing their part to ensure ultimate victory over Israel.

It is a war fought not just with F-16s and suicide bombers, but with diapers and Similac.

Ever since Israel was created in 1948, starting a clash with the Arab world that has no end in sight, Jews have feared what Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat calls his "biological bomb." In Israel and the neighboring territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Arabs are reproducing at a rate double that of Jews.

Israel's 5.4-million Jews make up just more than half of the region's population, but Arabs will become a clear majority within 20 years, Haifa University professor Arnon Soffer says. By 2020, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be home to 8.5-million Arabs and just 6.4-million Jews.

Unless Palestinians get their own state, the soaring Arab population could mean one of two things: Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish nation or it would be forced into an apartheid-like system in which a Jewish minority ruled a Palestinian majority.

Unless something changes, "our country is finished in 17 years and there will be a collapse," Soffer warned Israeli political leaders.

Others say the demographic threat is exaggerated, that studies like Soffer's fail to take into account such important factors as continued Jewish migration to Israel. The Palestinian population figures are meant to scare Israel into giving up land - especially in the West Bank - to which it has an historic right, one expert charges.

"The same thing took place in '48 when Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was urged by top statisticians to refrain from declaring independence for the same reason," says Yoram Ettinger of Israel's Ariel Center for Policy Research. "They predicted, based on certified figures, that by 1969 there would be an Arab majority. Their predictions were crashed against the rocks of reality."

Yet the battle for population supremacy rages on, although Israel at present seems to be lagging. A bleak economy has forced the government to cut once-generous allowances for big families, and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said poor Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike, should stop having such large broods.

"A man can and should have a family with as many children as he likes," Netanyahu said, "but he must understand he is primarily responsible for providing for them, educating them, feeding them."

Meanwhile, the women of Gaza keep producing baby after baby. The Gaza Strip, where more than 1-million Palestinians live, has one of the world's highest growth rates - 4.5 percent, enough to double the population every 15 years.

"Many people have been killed in the intifada by Israeli soldiers so they want to reproduce," says Hala Sarraj, a Gaza psychologist, referring to the uprising in which more than 2,400 Palestinians have died since 2000.

That is true of Hanan Himad, whose 21-year-old son, Jawdad, was shot dead two years ago while throwing rocks at the Israelis, she says. He was the oldest of her nine children - Himad was pregnant with her 10th this summer when she tripped and fell while running from an Israeli bomb dropped near her home east of Gaza City.

A few weeks later she miscarried, and on this Thursday morning she was in the hospital, awaiting surgery to remove the dead fetus. But at 39, she is not about to quit.

"I want to have many boys," she says, as other women nod approvingly, "so we have more people and can get the Jews out."

A prize for the 10th baby

Except for the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee, there would seem little reason for two groups of people to fight so long and so hard over one New Jersey-size wedge of land.

Arab sheep and camel herders long roamed the desert from which the Israelites were expelled more than two millennia ago. But in the late 1800s, after centuries of persecution, the Zionists announced their goal of resettling as many of the world's Jews as possible in their biblical homeland.

That set the stage for a struggle in which demographics might forever play a role.

By the end of World War I, what was then known as Palestine had 60,000 Jewish inhabitants. Growing Arab hostility toward the newcomers erupted in the 1921 Jaffa riots that killed 47 Jews.

But the huge migration came after World War II, when survivors of the Nazi Holocaust began flocking to the promised land. Some 650,000 Jews were living in Palestine by 1948 when Israel declared independence, and Arab nations immediately launched war against the new Jewish state.

Thus began another major population shift. To this day, there is strong debate over whether Arabs left Israel at their leaders' behest, on the promise they could return soon (as most Jewish historians say) or were forcefully removed by Jewish soldiers (as Arabs say).

Whatever the case, 700,000 Palestinians - as the Arabs began calling themselves - went to neighboring countries or to Gaza, then under Egyptian control, or the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule.

"Contrary to most colonial projects, the Israeli one was intended to substitute one people for another," French researcher Phillipe Fargues said in a 2000 study on the region's demographic battle. "It was not a will to dominate the Arab peoples so much as to dominate the territory. Relative sizes of the two populations were at stake."

As early as 1943, while the British ruled the area, the chief rabbi of Palestine urged Jewish families to have big families: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth."

Pressure to procreate grew even greater after 1948.

"Being a Jewish state and knowing that we lost 6-million Jews during the Holocaust, it is on the back or front of every Jew's mind that it is our responsibility for the future to make up for that traumatic loss," says Ettinger of the Ariel Center.

"Certainly when we talk about the demographic requirements of a Jewish state, that behooves many among us, either religious or nonreligious, hawks or doves, to have at least two children, three, four or five children."

As an incentive to reproduce, Israel in 1949 instituted the Ben Gurion Award - given to every woman delivering her 10th child. It was discontinued a decade later because so many Arab women qualified.

Israel's natural population growth has been greatly augmented by immigration, including the influx of almost 1-million Jews after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly 95 percent of Israel's Jewish population originates from immigrants; without them, there might be fewer than 300,000 Jews now in Israel.

Ettinger thinks immigration will continue, counterbalancing the effects of the Palestinian birth rate.

"We have more than 1-million Jews, probably 2-million, still in the former Soviet Union, there are 6-million Jews in America, and some of them I believe are going to end up in the Jewish state," he says. "We've got a half million Jews in France and a half million in Latin America.

"And who's to say that the Jewish birth rate has to stick to 2-point-something? It certainly could go up to 3-point-something, which would turn the whole thing upside down. When you consider the fact that we are 6-million Jews compared to 600,000 in 1948, you cannot but be highly optimistic about Jewish demographics in this part of the world."

But there is little economic incentive for Jews in America or Western Europe to emigrate to Israel, which has a lower per capita income than where they now live. Moreover, the Jewish population in the United States is shrinking and aging; even if American Jews did move to Israel, they would have only a modest effect on the birth rate.

Ettinger is more optimistic than many Israeli leaders, who have long worried about the Palestinian baby boom.

Soon after taking office in 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meier expressed concern about what would happen if Israel annexed the land it had seized in the 1967 Mideast War: "We would have to wake up every morning wondering how many Arab babies had been born during the night."

But as the prospect of a complete withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank grew increasingly remote, "both Israeli and Palestinian politicians realized that demographic growth is the Palestinians' most potent weapon," Fargues said.

Paradoxically, he found, the continuing conflict might be partly responsible for the high birth rate that so concerns Israel.

Thanks to huge amounts of humanitarian aid from the United Nations, Islamic charities and other organizations, Palestinians generally enjoy good health and live long lives, assuming they don't die of man-made causes. The aid, which includes money, food and schooling, helps ease the burden of raising children.

And while high unemployment normally discourages large families, the opposite has been true in Gaza.

In the first Palestinian uprising, from 1987 to 1993, incomes dropped 40 percent in a single year yet the birth rate went up. It seems that many fathers lowered the "bride price" to facilitate marrying off their daughters in a time of great insecurity. The result: Many more teenage brides and many more babies.

"I hate her"

In her face, Thuraya Eshbear looks older than the 35 years she admits to. But at just 5 feet and 100 or so pounds, she has the petite figure that caught the eye of Majed Eshbear as she returned home from school one day.

Tall, handsome, with a thick shock of hair, Eshbear was divorced from his first wife, by whom he had six children. He married Thuraya, and over the next 20 years, she would have 13 children and three miscarriages.

A few years ago, Eshbear began to look around again. This time he settled on Manal Sultan, 18 years his junior, a pretty woman with a wide perfect smile. Sultan had never seen Eshbear, let alone met him, before her father agreed to give her hand in marriage.

Thuraya was so angry at her husband for taking another wife that she went home to her mother's. But after 15 days she came back.

Now both wives live with Eshbear under the same roof.

"I love her," the younger woman says of Thuraya.

"I hate her," Thuraya says of her rival.

As for Eshbear, he says, wearily, the two women fight and argue all the time. He might consider getting married again, "but not in Gaza."

Under Islamic law, men are allowed to take up to four wives. The original rationale was that in time of war, when so many men are killed in battle, widows would have no one to provide for them unless the surviving men could marry more than once.

But if there is one thing that Eshbear's wives agree on, it is that the practice is anachronistic.

"It's not fair. I think one wife is enough," Thuraya says, her heavily kohled eyes flashing in anger. "As women, we can't leave our children, but as a man he can leave and take a second and a third and a fourth wife."

Both women insist, though, that they love Eshbear and that he loves them.

Thuraya, who favors tight jeans and T-shirts instead of conservative Islamic dress, is the family dynamo. After her husband married Sultan, she decided to get a job and stay out of the house as much as possible. She rises at 6, gives the kids breakfast and takes a taxi to the hospital. There she mops floors and cleans toilets up to 12 hours a day.

Except for two married sons, no one else in the family works.

Sultan, who has a year-old boy, stays home. So does Eshbear, who closed his sweet shop three years ago when the intifada began and Gaza's economy hit bottom.

Now he spends most of the day watching cartoons on TV with his youngest kids and smoking one cigarette after another. He is still thin and handsome, his hair is still thick and black, but he has the tired, resigned look of a man who doesn't expect life to get much better, or even much different.

Eshbear says he is 47 but he struggles to remember names and ages. He thinks Sultan is younger than she says she is. He thinks Thuraya has 15 kids, not 13. He hesitates when asked the name of a particular child.

He never intended to have 20 kids, he says, but "my sisters love children so they say, "Bring, bring, bring."'

He pauses. "I made a mistake. If there were not this number I could teach them better."

Contraceptives are available from public and private clinics in Gaza, but they are used more to space children than to limit the number. And it is almost always the woman, not the man, who takes the responsibility of birth control.

Eshbear might not be as embarrassed about his big family as he sounds, nor should he be, says Sarraj, the psychologist. Children can be a hedge against the future in a place where there are no retirement plans and the government, the Palestinian Authority, is on the verge of collapse.

"Children mean support," Sarraj says. "It is desirable to have children because of the insecurity of our society - you are not guaranteed to live tomorrow but to have children is to give some protection to the family."

And, she says, there is another reason Eshbear might actually be proud of his giant clan.

In Gaza, where the conflict with Israel has thrown 60 percent of adults out of work, fathering children is one sure way an unemployed man can prove his masculinity.

"To be a man in Gaza means providing food and money and clothing," Sarraj notes. "If you can't do this you cannot be a real man - except if you show you are productive by giving lots of babies."

http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/

about the links between the National Socialists and Militant Islamics

It is hard to have any sympathy for Palestine whatsoever. How do human beings have the stomach to support a country that idolizes suicide bombers? Why are people that support the human rights of "Jews" to live safely somewhere in the world blasted with hatered and labeling as "Zionists"?

Listen, I don't like the Likud government either, but if the author of this piece doesn't give the Israelis a fair hearing, they're no better than the corporate media. True objectivity and discouse is supposed to be the trademark of independent media, right? So try not to write any side off as racist.

Israel's government's not at all wise, and is in fact counter-productive in many ways. But before anyone goes off blaming Israel for the problems in the Mideast, consider this?

Who authorized the creation of a Palestinian and Jewish state?

The UN

Who accepted the offer?

The Yishuv (eventually Israel)

Who refused both Israel and Palestine's right to exist, and as such sent their armies to invade both territories?

Egypt, Jordan, Syria, among others.

So imagine you're Ben Gurion (first prime minister of Israel). You've got a state divided in two pieces by the UN map, and about six nations have invaded your territory. They occupy Arab villages and use them as jump off points to launch attacks.

Don't think about past wrongs. Think about what you'd do. Try to be honest.

Consider Jewish psychology. You remember (collectively) past wrongs, culminating in the thirties and forties when no other nation would take in Jews trying to flee Germany and no nation took a proactive measure to avert genocide (such as bombing Berkinau or the train lines to the death camps.) You think a state is necesary for Jews to run too, but it comes under attack again and again. Today, you hear Hamas talking about killing all Israelis (or you hear the more moderate ones who talk about only killing the decendents of those who came after 1917.) Jews

might not care for Israel's actions, but they have a culture of mistrust- if we don't take care of ourselves, no one else will. So forgive us if we don't ask Israel to charge out of the territories, since Hamas and Hizbollah have made it clear they will continue to attack afterwards. We need a real solution. Likud isn't working in the right direction; I agree on that point. And their methods of offense are bad (though no worse than Afghanistan). But just don't expect them to trust that pulling out will make them much safer. And they're the ones that have to live with the consequences.

P.S. While Sharon's fence route is preposterous- it should go along the green line- it is effective. The last attacks in Beersheva came because the fence isn't built in the South yet. Terrorists have admitted it makes their operations difficult. We can dispute the fence that is being built- I certainly do, I think it's an illegal land grab technique- but in theory it is effective, and to the Israelis, that's really all that matters.