Following the attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla ship Mavi Marmara a week ago and the seizure of the crew and activists of the MV Rachel Corrie on Saturday, Lebanese, Palestinian, and foreign press based in Lebanon are together attempting to break through the blockade on Gaza by launching an aid boat early next week.
The "Naji Al-Ali" Flotilla will carry medical aid, food, educational tools as well as monetary funds. It is named after the late Palestinian political cartoonist and cultural icon.
Rezeq Faraj was the co-founder of the group Palestinian & Jewish Unity, and a president of the Canadian Arab Federation. He died Oct. 24, 2009.
Thousands across Gaza live with severe injuries: youth war amputees, mothers severely burned by phosphorus bombs, countless Palestinians coping with physiological wounds, all injuries stemming from the disaster wrought on Gaza by the Israeli military assault in the winter of 2008/2009.
And war injuries remain a consistent reality in 2010.
"Every night, even last night, Israeli warplanes bombed Gaza," said Muawiya Hassanein, director-general of ambulance and emergency services for the Palestinian Ministry of Health, in an interview from Gaza City during the recent strikes.
"Many were injured... there are serious injuries and those people are being treated right now at the European Hospital in Gaza."
In Canada, Holocaust Memorial Day has been established by Heritage Canada to be on April 11. It is a good opportunity to review what we learn from the Holocaust experience and how we apply these lessons to the troubled situation in the Middle East.
Controversial Jewish American scholar Norman Finkelstein does not feel like a pariah anymore.
Visiting Canada again this week on a tour of campuses to deliver lectures and answer questions about the seemingly intractable situation in the Middle East, he reports receiving more invitations to speak than ever these days.
"It is much more difficult in public life to defend Israel than to criticize it," Finkelstein explains in a telephone interview with rabble.ca. "I've gotten more invitations from more mainstream places."
Normality has always figured in Jewish experience. For almost two millennia, living in exile among non-Jews seemed normal for religious reasons: Jews had somehow botched their relationship with their God and exile was the consequence. In His own good time, he'd eventually end it. Meanwhile, Jews lived among "the nations," fruitfully, painfully or both. There were occasional messianic eruptions involving attempts to return to the Holy Land; they were always treated by rabbinic authorities as heretical.
AMIRA HASS
ISRAEL - PALESTINE: Fear of the Future
Amira Haas, a journalist with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz since 1989, has been covering daily life in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1991. She is the only Israeli journalist to have lived full-time in the Palestinian territories: in Gaza from 1993 to 1997, and in the West Bank since 1997.
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