29, 2009

An international solidarity brigade of 1400 people from many countries has gone to Gaza. Among them are Jews including Hedy Epstein, an 85 year old holocaust survivor whose parents were killed in the Nazi camps. But they have been stopped at the border by the American-funded dictatorship of Mubarak in Egypt. She and other grandmothers are currently on hunger strike (one ceases being a newsworthy Jew even a concentration camp survivor if one is on the wrong side of the Times' preferred though self-destructive policies in Israel; so far, only one brief mention on December 26 of this demonstration here). Some 300 from France staged civil disobedience at a major boulevard. The passer-bys honked or waved (ordinary Egyptians are naturally sympathetic to uprooted and brutalized Palestinians). Butthe government is so corrupt that it is planting a deep metal wall to prevent food and supplies from getting into Gaza. It will not allow housing materials to enable the reconstruction of the buildings destroyed by the Israeli offensive a year ago which murdered some 1400 people (as opposed to 11 dead Israelis from Hamas rockets). It took down paper signs of solidarity put by the marchers on the Kasr al-Nil bridge (the bridge over the Nile).

Gaza has been rightly described by my friend Tom Farer (a well-known international lawyer and also a Jew) as a large open air concentration camp. In a crime against international humanitarian law, Palestinians trapped within are unable to flee Israeli rockets. As the Goldstone report revealed (written by another Jew and