Mario SavioMario Savio was a Sicilian - American political activist and key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his impassioned speech promoting direct action, as a key figure in the establishment of the current Equal Opportunity policies present at UC Berkeley today. He was, an ongoing inspiration for civil disobedience worldwide:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” - December 2, 1964
Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin was a Russian Revolutionary and founder of the modern Anarchy and Libertarian Socialist concepts of liberty and rebellion. Believing in an altruistic sense of freedom for all as tantamount to individual evolution, he is most remembered for his commentary on dignity in revolution:
“The freedom of all is essential to my freedom. To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt. The passion for destruction is also a creative passion."
GeronimoGeronimo was an Apache during the US' earliest imperial period of conquest. He was the leader of the last Native American fighting force formally to capitulate to the United States. Because he fought against such daunting odds and held out the longest, he became the most famous Apache to this day. To Natives both past and present, Geronimo embodied the very essence of Apache values and courage in the face of adversity.
Geronimo's final surrender in 1886 was the last significant Native American guerrilla action in the United States. At the end, his group consisted of only 16 warriors, 12 women, and 6 children. Upon their surrender, Geronimo and over 300 of his fellow Chiricahuas were shipped to Fort Marion, Florida. One year later many of them were relocated to the Mt. Vernon barracks in Alabama, where about one quarter died from tuberculosis and other diseases. Geronimo died on Feb. 17, 1909, a prisoner of war, unable to return to his homeland. He was buried in the Apache cemetery in Oklahoma.
Gyasi Ross is a member of the Blackfeet Nation of Browning, Mont., and currently lives in New York City while attending Columbia Law School. He has a particular interest in international affairs as they apply to Indigenous People.
Why I, as a Native American, support the Palestinian people
By Gyasi Ross
June 25, 2002
As a Native person of this country, I've come to the conclusion that I must support the Palestinian people and the pursuit of an autonomous Palestinian state.
Although many view both Native Americans and Palestinians as "indigenous and displaced people," this is not the reason that I feel a sense of kinship with Palestinians.
Instead, this fraternal feeling for my brothers and sisters in Gaza and on the West Bank is due to a much more basic and primal feeling of fear: the realization that what befalls one oppressed group inevitably befalls others.
Indigenous people, as well as other oppressed groups worldwide, regardless of race or religion, have a vested interest in learning from the genocidal atrocities that the U.S. government initiated on Native Americans. Every person who strives for humanity also has a strong interest in preventing those same atrocities from occurring in another place at another time to another group of people -- in this particular situation, to the Palestinians.
Palestinians, like Natives, are captives in their own lands. They, too, have no place to go, no geographical recourse. Lebanon, Syria and Egypt have all shown their callousness to Palestinian people and have used them like human chess pieces against Israel.
Short on options, Palestinians, like Natives, have no choice but to continue to be a thorn in the side of the oftentimes apathetic and oppressive governments that have come to power by whatever means available.
By comparison, Natives have been fortunate. We have used gaming revenues and population explosions to gain political strength. Palestinians have chosen -- rightly or wrongly -- to use different methods. Although one might feel compelled to view the suicide bombings employed by a small minority of Palestinians as "wrong," one must also recognize that many Palestinians have been working nonviolently for a just political solution, which the Israeli government spurns.
My sense of kinship with Palestinian people thus comes from a reminder of my own people's suffering, and from an interest in stopping such suffering from happening ever again.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said.
So when I see such injustices carried out anyplace, I think of my young nieces and nephews, or my 13-year-old brother, living in fear that their homes could one day be raided -- possibly with their parents being used as human shields, as in Jenin, in the West Bank.
I get the same uneasy feeling that I got upon first viewing photos of the dead Jewish children at the hands of the Sonderkommando, the same feeling as when I first watched "The Killing Fields" and saw the bodies of thousands of dead Cambodian children. It's the same feeling I got when my mother told me about the 7th Calvary's massacre of Indian women and children at Wounded Knee on Dec. 29, 1890.
There are enough similarities among these events that people should awaken to the pain and agony of blood being spilled -- whether that blood be Palestinian, Native American, Israeli or yours.
Sami KitmittoFrom the University of California, Davis and presents a uniquely human face to the Palestinian-Americans. He is frequently a commentator on the situation in Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine from first hand observation, continually dedicated to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East and awareness of Arab-American identity."
Quoted on 9-12-01:
"As a Palestinian American, I mourn twice. I try to focus on mourning for those who were lost in the bombing yesterday, but I also worry for the future of my family & for Palestine's uncertainty."
http://www.photowords.com/Islam.htm
To see Sami speak, click here
Friend and fellow activist for peace, Rachel Corrie, was murdered at age 23 on Sunday March 16, 2003, when she was purposely run over by an Israeli-driven, US-made (Caterpillar D9) bulldozer, while trying to prevent a Palestinian civilian home from being demolished by the Israeli military in the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip.
Rachel was in Rafah volunteering for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led movement of both Palestinians and internationals working together for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Rachel and the ISM have chosen nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles to resist the daily brutality of Israel's 36-year-old military occupation and its ongoing and illegal land confiscation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A direct result of the international community's failure to offer Palestinians an international protection force, Rachel Corrie and other ISM activists have actively confronted Israel's policy of home demolition and international apathy towards this policy by living with families under threat and by refusing to leave homes or areas threatened with demolition. The ISM believes that its presence slows the process of destruction and hopes that the international community will ultimately act to support the daily nonviolent struggle of normal Palestinian families to exist.
Demolishing civilian homes is an atrocious act of violence that violates Articles 12 and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Articles 33, 53, and 54 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Despite this clear international prohibition, the Israeli military government has carried out thousands of these home demolitions with impunity; resulting in thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians left without basic shelter and experiencing a cataclysmic blow to their lives, some becoming refugees for the second or third time in their lives.
Deaths during home demolitions are far too common. On 2 December 2002, 68-year-old Ashur Salem, deaf, was crushed to death when the Israeli army dynamited his home while he was sleeping. On 6 February 2003, 65-year-old Kamla Abu Said, partially deaf, was also crushed to death when the Israeli army razed her home in Gaza. On February 19, brothers Said and Ala Heloo, were crushed to death when the Israeli army blew up a nearby building causing the collapse of their home. And less than two weeks before Rachel's killing, on 3 March 2003, 33-year-old Nuha Sweidan -- 9 months into her pregnancy -- was crushed to death when the Israeli military dynamited an adjacent home to her own, causing Nuha's house to collapse on top of her. This is only a small sample.
None of the governments or international bodies that criticize Israel's destruction of Palestinian homes has taken any concrete actions to stop it, despite universal condemnation by human rights organizations. Words of criticism are empty when they come at the very moment an additional $1 billion in supplemental military aid to Israel and an extra $9 billion in loan guarantees are under consideration by the US Congress. Rachel's death should at least give them pause. Instead, news of her death was juxtaposed in one newspaper with two articles detailing wide bipartisan support for further aid to Israel.
On Sunday 16 March 2003, Rachel and her fellow ISM volunteers were confronting the drivers of two bulldozers who were in the process of razing Palestinian civilian land and homes. For two hours, Rachel and other ISM activists followed the bulldozers, trying to block their passage and hamper their efforts at destruction. Rachel was clearly identifiable in a bright fluorescent orange jacket and was speaking through a bullhorn when she was brutally run over.
In its attempts to sweep responsibility for the incident under the carpet, the Israeli government has undertaken efforts to discredit Rachel, and to blame her and her colleagues for her death. Reports from the other seven ISM volunteers who witnessed the event and what is plainly obvious from photographs taken at the scene -- before and after -- make it incredible to assert that Rachel's death was an "accident". Following her crushing by the bulldozer, an Israeli tank came near the fallen activist and her friends, and then backed off. At no point did the Israeli forces offer any assistance.
The Israeli government typically blames its victims for their fate. In the pages of the international media Palestinians whose homes are destroyed or who die trying to protect them are reflexively called "terrorists" or "terrorist supporters". Rachel was not Palestinian and therefore was hard to label a "terrorist", but nevertheless, Rachel was blamed for her own death. In addition, Rachel was accused of "protecting terrorists", even though the home she died protecting was that of a Palestinian medical doctor.
- When she was killed, Rachel was engaging in what is typically a relatively low-risk action, serving as an international monitor to an ongoing, blatant abuse of international human rights law and confronting a soldier in the process of committing an act of violence against an unarmed, nonviolent Palestinian family.
- Rachel was clearly identifiable and non-threatening in both her nature and approach. Rather, Rachel did put her life on the line to stand up against a policy that is inhumane. Thousands of people do this every single day around the globe, in an effort to stop violence and atrocities against land, people, animals and crops. In this case, the bulldozer driver decided not to stop when Rachel nonviolently confronted him, instead choosing to run her over with a 9-ton bulldozer. Rachel is guilty only of assuming that another human being into whose eyes she was looking would not take her life.
- A picture has been circulated that shows Rachel burning a drawing of the American flag. Trying to use this picture to somehow indicate that Rachel deserved to be run over by a bulldozer is an appalling act of demonization that infers that forms of protest which include flag burning are capital offences. In the words of Rachel's parents: "The act, while we may disagree with it, must be put into context. Rachel was partaking in a demonstration in Gaza opposing the war on Iraq. She was working with children who drew two pictures, one of the American flag, and one of the Israeli flag, for burning. Rachel said that she could not bring herself to burn the picture of the Israeli flag with the Star of David on it, but under such circumstances, in protest over a drive towards war and her government's foreign policy that was responsible for much of the devastation that she was witness to in Gaza, she felt it OK to burn the picture of her own flag. We have seen photographs of memorials held in Gaza after Rachel's death in which Palestinian children and adults honor our daughter by carrying a mock coffin draped with the American flag. We have been told that our flag has never been treated so respectfully in Gaza in recent years. We believe Rachel brought a different face of the United States to the Palestinian people, a face of compassion. It is this image of Rachel with the American flag that we hope will be remembered most."
- Eyewitness testimony to Rachel's killing is clear and consistent. However, some journalists chose to selectively quote Rachel's colleagues, leading to different reports of the events that led to Rachel's death. For example, some media outlets reported that Rachel "slipped and fell", leaving out the additional detail her colleagues reported -- that she fell under the weight of the dirt and rubble that was heaped on top of her.
- Some journalists reported that Rachel sat, crouched, and/or lay in front of the bulldozer, implying she could not be seen. Witnesses report that first she sat down in front of the bulldozer when it was still at least 10 meters away and she was in plain sight. Then as the bulldozer kept advancing, she got up, climbed up on a mound of dirt and rubble, in order to look the bulldozer driver in the eye. It is not credible to assert that the bulldozer driver could have missed her.
- The photographs taken on the day of the incident and at the scene show various angles of Rachel engaging the bulldozer drivers and show two different bulldozers. Again, reading the eyewitness testimonies will clarify that Rachel and the other ISM volunteers were in the area engaging two bulldozer drivers for approximately two hours before Rachel was crushed. The photos are 100% consistent with the eyewitness accounts and offer clear evidence that the bulldozer drivers were aware of the presence of the ISM volunteers and their efforts.
Rachel Corrie was acting in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King when her life was deliberately snuffed out. Many justice and human rights defenders before Rachel have lost their lives in their struggle for righteousness and in their attempts to make this world a better place and, sadly, others will follow after her.
Rachel was a mature, conscientious human being who worked to bring people together and did wonders as an ambassador of the true face of the American people in a different part of the world -- an American people that does not turn up outside Palestinian homes and give their occupants 5 minutes to gather what possessions they can, before bulldozing into dust the fruits of a life spent working to provide for a family.
In a very direct way, Rachel stood up for family values and for those who were too poor and powerless to be able to protect themselves. She was a true American hero.
The United States government has a particular responsibility to investigate Rachel's death, not only because she was a US citizen killed by a foreign government, but also because the US government actively supplies Israel with the military hardware and funds that enabled and continue to enable Israel to carry out these illegal and immoral acts.
The world cannot go on ignoring the violence that continues daily to claim the lives and livelihoods of many other unarmed, nonviolent Palestinian civilians. Rachel Corrie offers us an opportunity to look through a window into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see things as they are. Let us not close the curtains and go about our business. She and the people of both Palestine and Israel deserve better.
For eyewitness accounts and photos:
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
RACHEL CORRIE MEMORIAL WEBSITES
http://www.rachelcorrie.org
PHOTO STORY: ISRAELI BULLDOZER DRIVER MURDERS AMERICAN PEACE ACTIVIST
Nigel Parry and Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada, 16 March 2003
THE DAY AFTER: ISRAELI FORCES KILL 9 PALESTINIANS, INCLUDING 3 CHILDREN
PCHR, press release, 17 March 2003
REMEMBERING RACHEL CORRIE
Peter Bohmer, The Electronic Intifada, 17 March 2003
OF BROKEN BODIES AND UNBREAKABLE LAWS
Laurie King-Irani, The Electronic Intifada, 19 March 2003
RACHEL CORRIE, NUHA SWEIDAN AND ISRAELI WAR CRIMES
Steve Niva, The Electronic Intifada, 17 March 2003
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNS KILLING OF RACHEL CORRIE
GROUP CALLS FOR INVESTIGATION, SUSPENSION OF WEAPONS TRANSFERS
Amnesty International , Press Release, 17 March 2003
ACTIVISTS DEMAND IMMEDIATE HALT OF CATERPILLAR
BULLDOZER SALES TO ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES
Press Release, SUSTAIN, 18 March 2003
"THIS IS NOT A POEM. THIS IS A PROMISE."
Suheir Hammad, Poetry, 20 March 2003
Thomas "Tom" Hurndall was a British photography student, member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and activist against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. On April 11, 2003, he was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper, Taysir Hayb. According to witnesses, this occurred while he was acting “as a human shield, escorting children away from gunfire.”Hurndall was left in a coma and died nine months later.
Hayb was convicted of manslaughter and obstruction of justice by an Israeli military court in April 2005 and sentenced to eight years in prison. On April 10, 2006, a British inquest found that Hurndall had been "intentionally killed" (i.e. an official verdict of unlawful killing.)
Tom's mother Jocelyn Hurndall, who spent time in Israel as a Kibbutz volunteer in her youth, has written a biography of him called Defy the Stars: The Life and Tragic Death of Tom Hurndall, published in April 2007.
Dying for Peace, the Tom Hurndall story
Robert Young PeltonRobert Young Pelton is a Canadian born adventurer, journalist, and former strategic planner. He publishes a regularly updated guide, The World's Most Dangerous Places, which provides practical information to people wishing to enter the world's war zones. He is also the author of "The Hunter, The Hammer & Heaven", a chronicle of time spent in Sierra Leone, Chechnya and Bougainville. He was also host of the Discovery Travel Channel series "Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places". He is currently writing a book on private military contractors and regularly contributes to National Geographic Adventure.
He is best known for his world exclusive interview with John Walker Lindh during the battle of Qali e Jangi, on December 2, 200, as well as his 10 day kidnapping in the Darien Gap in 2003 by right wing death squads, and his exclusive interview (inside Grozny in December of 1999,) with captured Russian GRU agent Alexi Galkin. Galkin, at the time, admitted that the Russian FSB was behind the October 1999 apartment bombings that triggered the second Chechen war.
James NatchewayJames Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer.
In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.
Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 - 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Palazzo Esposizione in Rome, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, Culturgest in Lisbon, El Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, the Canon Gallery and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the Carolinum in Prague,and the Hasselblad Center in Sweden, among others.
He has received numerous honours such as the Common Wealth Award, Martin Luther King Award, Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, Henry Luce Award, Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World Press Photo Award (twice), Magazine Photographer of the Year (seven times), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (three times), the Leica Award (twice), the Bayeaux Award for War Correspondents (twice), the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, the Canon Photo essayist Award and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Grant in Humanistic Photography. He is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and has an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Arts.
Uri AvneryThe oldest, most prominent, and most admirable Jewish Israeli peace & social justice advocate, Uri Avnery is is a German-born Israeli journalist, left-wing peace activist, and former Knesset member, who was originally a member of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement. Avnery founded Gush Shalom in 1993, a left-wing peace activist group at the heart of the Israeli peace movement, objecting to the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Israeli war crimes. The movement supports soldiers' refusal to serve in these territories, a pragmatic implementation of Palestinian right of return, and an Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line. Gush Shalom activists regularly confront Israeli security forces on settlement construction sites in the West Bank and Gaza, and along the Separation Barrier.
Described as everything form "resolute" to "militant," Avnery is known for his unwavering stand in times of crisis and has continued to play a leading role in determining the moral and political agenda of the peace forces in Israel through his dedication to truth and educational campaigns.
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/index_en.html
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html
Tali FahimaTali Fahima is an Israeli Jew of Algerian origin, who was tried and convicted for her contacts with Zakaria Zubeidi, Jenin chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. Officially her crime is in translating text of an aerial photograph to Zubeidi which read 'This is Jenin."
Originally from a single parent family in Qiryat Gat, a town in the south of Israel, she was a supporter of Israel's Right-Wing Likud, until 2003 when she read an interview in which Zubeidi described his transformation from peace activist to wanted terrorist, Intrigued, she found Zubeidi's phone number, and spoke with him several times, learning that Zubeidi was at the top of Israel's list of intended assassinations. She subsequently decided to travel to Jenin and live in his home as a human shield and later became involved in the Palestinian Children's project in Jenin which was featured in the film 'Arna's Children,' along with Zubeidi, before his imprisonment. She does not deny that she later met Zubeidi in Jenin a number of times, but she denies any involvement in armed activities. In March 2004 she stated that she was prepared to act as a human shield to protect Zubeidi. Both she and Zubeidi deny the allegation that they had a romantic relationship.
She was charged with 'conspiring with the enemy,' however on December 23, 2005 she pleaded guilty to a less serious charges in a plea bargain which would have led to her early release. Nevertheless, on September 13, 2006, the Parole Board ruled that she would not be released early, since she "acted in an insolent and rude manner toward prison guards."She has publicly stated that, during her interrogation, she was told that it was the position of the state to make her into "a good Jewish girl," who could understand that "there is no Occupation."
Fahima was ultimately released in January 2007, a year earlier than her original sentence, for good conduct, however she is still banned from exiting Israel, contacting foreign agents, or entering the Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank. On April 23, 2007, she participated in an alternative torch-lighting ceremony for Israeli Independence Day, where she lit a torch in honor of Zubeidi and remains verbally outspoken against the Occupation.
http://www.freetalifahima.org/eng.php?lang=en
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1547465,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1983247,00.html
Tali Fahima's Video Blog (in Hebrew)
http://www.flix.co.il/tapuz/user/talifahima