Talk nation Radio Special
March 1, 2009
Listen to this special here or try links below for various formats and downloads.
The March 7th Peace Delegation to Gaza grows to 50 including Alice Walker — Medea Benjamin reports on why they are going back.
Overview: Peace activist Medea Benjamin joins us to talk about the significance of her return visit to Gaza on March 7th with an international delegation. The writer Alice Walker will be among those traveling with her as Benjamin tries to bring in at least some aid for Gaza’s war victims. She has said the trip is an attempt to pressure the Israeli, U.S. and Egyptian governments to open the borders and lift the siege to allow food, water, and medical supplies, into this war torn area. Medea Benjamin and the writer Alice Walker will leave for Gaza on March 7th with a delegation that is now fifty strong, you can learn more details at codepink4peace.org and click on their press releases.
Produced by Dori Smith, WHUS FM 91.7 at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here if you are a member or at Radio4all.net and Archive.org
Intro: Peace activist Medea Benjamin joins us for the half hour to talk about what she found in Gaza after Israeli attacks there. “Once you see what truly happened in Gaza, it will change you forever’, she wrote about the mid February trip, ‘a trail of grieving mothers, angry fathers, and traumatized children’.
The founder of Women for Peace, Code Pink, and Global Exchange, has been speaking out and also organizing her return visit to Gaza in March when she will be joined by dozens of volunteers among them the writer Alice Walker, celebrating International Women’s Day, March 8th.
As Israel began it’s sudden air assault on Gaza just prior to Israel’s elections, the IDF, Israeli Defense Force issued a statement claiming the attacks were in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks. A statement many US peace activists interpreted as an attempt to legitimize the use of collective punishment against Gaza’s 1.5 million civilians.
‘There is very little legal doubt that collective punishment is not a permissible tactic even if it is justified by security considerations and here there is no relevant security link to justify this kind of tactic.’ Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur to Palestine
The UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, Richard Falk, told us just prior to Israel’s attacks that their use of collective punishment against Palestinians in the closing of Gaza’s borders was putting an already suffering people at risk of loss of life:
‘In Gaza every child, every old person, every sick person, is subject to the effects of this blockade that has restricted the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies, to such an extent that the population is barely able to physically survive. Recent statistics have been showing that over 80% of the Gazan population lives below the UN poverty threshold set at $1.00 dollar of purchasing power per day. And 46% of the children in Gaza are suffering from acute anemia. There are many other indications of deteriorating health and the real increasing vulnerability of the population there to disease and other kinds of terrible results of this continuing blockade’. Richard Falk
Some 1330 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed, and 437 of them were children. An estimated five to six thousand were wounded, and many bodies are still thought to be still buried in the rubble. Thousands of Palestinian families are still awaiting lifesaving food and water as well as medical aid. The UN and the Obama administration’s envoy to the region George Mitchell have asked the Israeli officials to open the borders into Gaza to allow lifesaving aid in but thus far they have refused.
”Never Again’ means not anyone, not anywhere — or it means nothing at all,’ Medea Benjamin writes in her stories about Gaza published in Huffington Post and Alternet.org.