PDA Calls for End to Illegal Israeli/US Blockade of Gaza

PDA Calls for End to Illegal Israeli/US Blockade of Gaza
Statement of Support for Gaza Freedom March--Take Action

Since June, 2007, the state of Israel has enforced an inhumane and illegal closure of Gaza’s land, air, and sea borders that has almost completely barred all shipments of building supplies, medicine, food, and humanitarian aid from reaching the 1.5 million citizens of Gaza. The blockade is an obvious form of collective punishment banned by international law. It has been compared at times to the inhumane and fatal Nazi German blockade that ended in the deaths of over a quarter of a million Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.



Beyond the inhumanity of the blockade itself, beginning last December 27th, the state of Israel, with the assent, aid, and financial backing of the U.S. government, launched an overwhelming three-week-long, one-sided war of aggression on Gaza that intentionally destroyed hospitals, medical clinics, schools, factories, power plants and farmlands.



In response to these brutalities, on December 31, 2009, an international coalition of more than 50,000 Palestinians, freedom fighters, and people of conscience from around the globe arrived in Egypt in an effort to enter Gaza and participate in the [Gaza Freedom March (http://www.gazafreedommarch.org)], demanding that the Israeli government lift its blockade, and sending a message to Israel, and to the United States as a key supporter of Israel, that the situation in Gaza is totally unacceptable. 



Inspiration for the Gaza Freedom March comes, of course, from the long-suffering and courageous people of Gaza, and from the U.N. Goldstone Report, which described Israel’s recent military campaign in Gaza as "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population” in which there were numerous attacks on civilian targets for which there was "no justifiable military objective.” PDA strongly supports and endorses this March and reiterates its call for a cessation of U.S. military aid to Israel until the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of Palestine are ended. (Israel, with a population of under six million people, is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign and military aid. Israel’s aid, plus U.S. aid to Egypt—for keeping peace with—consumes more than half the U.S. foreign-aid budget.)



In this struggle we join with PDA Board member and March initiator, Medea Benjamin, who equated the situation in Gaza to historical struggles for human rights elsewhere and said, "We are doing this in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and non-violent resistance." Like others worldwide, PDA wonders how the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza's children—more than 50 per cent of the population—can benefit anyone, or how the search for peace can be served by sickness, trauma and malnutrition. Indeed, without the lifting of the blockade no peace of any kind is possible. 



PDA members are encouraged to call the main number for the State Department (202-647-4000) and ask to be put through to the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, where you can ask/demand that the U.S. government provide greater assistance to the marchers (and cut of military aid until the end of the occupation and siege if you are so inclined), and to call the U.S. Embassy in Cairo ([20] [2] 2797-3300), where you can again demand that the U.S. government provide greater assistance to the marchers.

Join PDA's Israel/Palestine Action Group; learn more here.