Justice, Respect and Dignity .... Israel Plus Palestine = Hope.

I imagine Alice Walker, well known American Activist and Novelist never did get to Gaza this year on the freedom flotilla. Today the last surviving small boat "Dignite al-Karama" (dignity in French and Arabic) was forced to sail to the Israeli port of Ashdod. The rest of the flotilla have been prevented by sabotage, or diplomatic pressure on Greece (economy in crisis) and Turkey (struggling with regime change in neighboring Syria). This at least prevents the violence of last year when nine activists were killed ( I should probably say murdered ) by Israeli soldiers on the "Mavi Marmara".

In Alice Walker's article in the British "Guardian" Newspaper called "This is why I sail" she explains the reasons for her proposed voyage ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/25/alice-walker-gaza-freedom-flotilla ). One of these is Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, her ex-husband's, answer to why he had become involved with the civil rights struggle in sixties America :

"   I thought he might say it was the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King Jr, or of others in the movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that led him, inevitably to our struggle.
   He was a little boy on his way home from yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after school let out. His mother a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.
   Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head."

She then goes on to say "It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child."

The claim of the Zionist propagandists is that Palestinians have the rest of the Arab world to move to. They are fond of the map with the sea of the Arab world set against the small island of Israel. In reality this Arab world is impoverished, deliberately fragmented by foreign powers, (until recently) almost entirely ruled by dictators propped up by powerful foreign governments and even in it's geography largely inhospitable and arid. The propagandists retort falsely that it is the "evil" religion of Islam that is responsible, often claiming that fragmentation and dictatorship is the only way to constrain it. There has even been the absurd notion that Arab backwardness had made the land arid and infertile. Really this is racism. The experience of the Palestinian refugees is that often there has been nowhere else to go. The struggle for freedom for Palestine has been going on for nearly 90 years since the 1917 Balfour agreement.

We pray that one day a Jewish Israeli, a person with the rare gift of inspiring humanity, will look with fresh eyes on the experience of the Jewish people, and say "I am a Palestinian".