The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan War and Occupations was held on July 10-12, 2009 at La Rouche College outside Pittsburgh. The following is a greeting from the Viva Palestina convoy that I delivered to the National Assembly the evening of July 11 as the convoy prepared its first attempt into Gaza.


We greet the National Assembly in solidarity from Cairo. We are two organizers from Boston who are part of the Viva Palestina US convoy–which involves over 200 people from around the US bringing medical aid to Gaza. Imposed in response to Gazans’ “crime” of democratically electing Hamas into government, the US-backed Israeli blockade of Gaza was heightened in June 2007, and has forbidden and restricted food, fuel, construction material, medical supplies, and other essential humanitarian aid. As in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our government is concerned more with the extent to which regimes align themselves with its interests than whether they represent their own people.


After starving and disarming the population, Israel massacred 1,400 people, and destroyed billions in infrastructure in December and January through an aerial assault. Gaza has not been able to rebuild a single structure since the bombing due to the embargo, which has taken crimes against humanity to the level of absurdity with the list of banned items including soccer balls, crayons, textbooks, office paper, and even chocolate–all allegedly threats to Israel’s security. The egregious arrest of the Free Gaza mission’s crew and passengers is one of many acts of the same crime. Vehicles filled with aid have been taken and destroyed in the desert by border police. An independent journalist among us has born witness to literally an entire stadium filled with blocked aid reeking of rotting food, with chocolate and candy melting into the dirt.


Yet despite the mountains of adversity imposed on Gaza and those who would extend their hand to these most devastated and oppressed people, our convoy presses on in growing strength, the wind at our backs. We’ve made arrangements to carry with us into Gaza not only the aid brought from the US, not only the aid purchased in Egypt with the gracious donations of the American people including dozens of new vehicles and hundreds of thousands in medicine and supplies, but also a whole warehouse of aid from other organizations denied by the authorities at the border. What’s more, people who’ve been denied entry in the past shall cross with us, including Palestinians who haven’t seen their families in Gaza in years upon years. We carry the torch brought nearly to Gaza’s horribly polluted shores by the Spirit of Humanity, and in recognition of this the newly released Cynthia McKinney will also join us to cross when she couldn’t before. The strength of our numbers, our identity as US citizens, our leadership and political power spearheaded by the brilliant and indomitable George Galloway is a force to be reckoned with.


Not long ago, in the very city from which we pen this message, Barak Obama pronounced the situation of the Palestinian people “intolerable,” and rightly stated that “…any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” And only two days ago in Rome, the Group of Eight urged Israel to lift the siege and open the crossings into Gaza. These developments encourage us, boding well for our safety and success. Yet we won’t be naively mollified by the sweet-smelling but hypocritical declarations of the masters of imperialism. What do their ovations to “global peace” mean as just outside their doors, 15,000 officers are ordered to descend upon the people of Italy who would demand that very thing, or as the Obama government funnels billions of dollars in aid and weaponry to the out-law Zionist state to execute that very “intolerable condition” — to crush, starve, expel, plunder, imprison, torture, humiliate and in all ways expedient oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in both obscene, racist hatred, and in cold, calculated greed.


We are here to hold Obama and the rest to every drop of good they’ve uttered, and to demonstrate that actions speak louder than words. As NYC Councilman and former Black Panther Charles Barron has put it, Obama did not “wait and see” to hand out trillions of working class dollars to the architects of the economic crisis, nor did he “wait and see” to affirm his allegiance with Israel or to escalate the war in Afghanistan. And so nor will we “wait and see” to immediately and directly break the siege of Gaza and deliver everything we can to its people, not in an act of charity, but in an act of international solidarity. We are in one struggle, and together we can win.


For Palestine,
and for a world in which people do not have to live in fear of what our government does and supports, in which all people can pursue the kinds of lives that we all deserve,

Tom Arabia and Khury Peterson-Smith
Members of the Viva Palestina-US convoy


For more on the convoy visit vivapalestina-us.org and checkout numerous stories right here at TheSitch.com/gaza-dispatches

Tags: blockade, Israel, National Assembly, Palestine, seige, Viva Palestina