Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian now living in the United States, grew up in Gaza. In Chicago last week, addressing activists committed to breaking the siege of Gaza,  he held up a stack of 31 papers. On each page were names of 1,254 Palestinians living in Gaza who had been killed in just one month of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” attacks five years ago.

“I felt shaky and uneasy all day preparing for this talk,” he told the group. He described his dismay when, looking through the list of names, he recognized one of a young man from his small town.

“He was always friendly to me,” Abusalim said. “I remember how he would greet me on the way to the mosque. His family and friends loved him, respected him.”

Abusalim recalled the intensity of losing loved ones and homes; of seeing livelihoods and infrastructure destroyed by aerial attacks; of being unable to protect the most vulnerable. He said it often takes ten years or more before Palestinian families traumatized by Israeli attacks can begin talking about what happened. Noting Israel’s major aerial attacks in 2009, 2013, and 2014, along with more recent attacks killing participants in the “Great March of Return,” he spoke of ongoing dread about what might befall Gaza’s children the next time an attack happens.

Eighty people gathered to hear Abusalim and Retired Colonel Ann Wright, of US Boats to Gaza, as they helped launch the “Free Gaza Chicago River Flotilla,” three days of action culminating on July 20 with a spirited demonstration by “kayactivists” and boaters, along with onshore protesters, calling for an end to the siege of Gaza. Wright resigned from her post as a U.S. diplomat when the United States launched the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq. Having participated in four previous international flotillas aiming to defy Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza’s shoreline, Wright is devoting her energies preparing for a fifth in 2020.

Elizabeth Murray sounds the gong after each name is read aloud

Another organizer and member of US Boat to Gaza, Elizabeth Murray, who like Wright formerly worked for the U.S. government, recalled being in a seminar sponsored by a prestigious think tank in Washington, D.C., when a panel member compared Israeli attacks against Palestinians with routine efforts to “mow the lawn.” She recounted hearing a light tittering as the D.C. audience members expressed amusement. But, Murray said, “Not a single person objected to the panelist’s remark.” This was in 2010, following Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead, which killed 1,383 Palestinians, 333 of whom were children.

Abusalim’s colleague at the American Friends Service Committee, Jennifer Bing, had cautioned Chicago flotilla planners to carefully consider the tone of their actions. A colorful and lively event during a busy weekend morning along Chicago’s popular riverfront could be exciting and, yes, fun.

But Palestinians in Gaza cope with constant tension, she noted. Denied freedom of movement, they live in the world’s largest open-air prison, under conditions the United Nations has predicted will render their land uninhabitable by 2020. Households get four to six hours of electricity per day. According to UNICEF, “sewage treatment plants can’t operate fully and the equivalent of forty-three Olympic-sized swimming pools of raw or partly treated sewage is pumped into the sea every day.”

Facing cruel human rights violations on a daily basis, the organizers urge solidarity in the form of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. U.S. residents bear particular responsibility for Israel’s military attacks against civilians, they note, as the United States has supplied Israel with billions of dollars for military buildup.

U.S. companies profit hugely from selling weapons to Israel. For example, Boeing, with headquarters in Chicago, sells Israel Apache helicopters, Hellfire and Harpoon missiles, JDAM guiding systems and Small Diameter Bombs that deliver Dense Inert Metal Explosive munitions. All of these weapons have been used repeatedly in Israeli attacks on densely populated civilian areas.

During the 2009 Operation Cast Lead, I was in Rafah, Gaza, listening to children explaining the difference between explosions caused by F-16 fighter jets dropping 500-pound bombs and Apache helicopters firing Hellfire missiles.

Israel continues using those weapons, and Israeli purchases fatten Boeing’s financial portfolios.

On July 19, young Palestinians outside of the Israeli consulate read aloud the names of people who had, five years ago, been killed in Gaza. We listened solemnly and then proceeded to Boeing’s Chicago headquarters, again listening as young people read more names, punctuated by a solemn gong after each victim was remembered. Ultimately, 2,104 Palestinians, more than two-thirds of whom were civilians, including 495 children, were killed during the seven-week attack on the Gaza Strip in 2014.

During the Free Gaza Chicago River flotilla on July 20, Husam Marajda, from the Arab American Action Network, sat in a small boat next to his grandfather, who was visiting from Palestine. His chant, “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go!” echoed from the water to the shore. Banners were dropped from bridges above, the largest reading, “Israel, Stop Killing Palestinians.”

Kayakers wore red T-shirts announcing the “Gaza Unlocked” campaign and managed to display flags, connected by string, spelling out “Free Gaza.” Passengers on other boats flashed encouraging peace signs and thumbs up signals. Those processing along the shore line, carrying banners and signs, walked the entirety of our planned route before a sergeant from the Chicago Police Department arrived to say we needed a permit.

We can’t permit ourselves to remain silent. Following the energetic flotilla activity, I sat with several friends in a quiet spot. “So many names,” said one friend, thinking of the list Abusalim had held up. “So many lives,” said another.

Kathy Kelly (info@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

A version of this article first appeared in The Progressive.

Courtesy: Counter Current

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The “caterwaul” on Capitol Hill reflects years of determined effort by grassroots groups to end U.S. involvement in war on Yemen, fed by mounting international outrage at the last three years of war that have caused the deaths of an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under age five.
How might we understand what it would mean in the United States for fourteen million people in our country to starve? You would have to combine the populations of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and imagine these cities empty of all but the painfully and slowly dying, to get a glimpse into the suffering in Yemen, where one of every two persons faces starvation.

Antiwar activists have persistently challenged elected representatives to acknowledge and end the horrible consequences of modern warfare in Yemen where entire neighborhoods have been bombed, displacing millions of people; daily aerial attacks have directly targeted Yemen’s infrastructure, preventing delivery of food, safe water, fuel, and funds. The war crushes people through aerial bombing and on-the-ground fighting as well as an insidious economic war.

Yemenis are strangled by import restrictions and blockades, causing non-payment of government salaries, inflation, job losses, and declining or disappearing incomes. Even when food is available, ordinary Yemenis cannot afford it.

Starvation is being used as a weapon of war—by Saudi Arabia, by the United Arab Emirates, and by the superpower patrons including the United States that arm and manipulate both countries.

During the thirteen years of economic sanctions against Iraq— those years between the Gulf War and the devastating U.S.-led “Shock and Awe” war that followed—I joined U.S. and U.K. activists traveling to Iraq in public defiance of the economic sanctions.

We aimed to resist U.S.- and U.K.-driven policies that weakened the Iraqi regime’s opposition more than they weakened Saddam Hussein. Ostensibly democratic leaders were ready to achieve their aims by brutally sacrificing children under age five. The children died first by the hundreds, then by the thousands and eventually by the hundreds of thousands. Sitting in a Baghdad pediatric ward, I heard a delegation member, a young nurse from the U.K., begin to absorb the cruelty inflicted on mothers and children.

“I think I understand,” murmured Martin Thomas, “It’s a death row for infants.” Children gasped their last breaths while their parents suffered a pile-up of anguish, wave after wave. We should remain haunted by those children’s short lives.

Iraq’s children died amid an eerie and menacing silence on the part of mainstream media and most elected U.S. officials. No caterwauling was heard on Capitol Hill. But, worldwide, people began to know that children were paying the price of abysmally failed policies, and millions of people opposed the 2003 Shock and Awe war.

Still the abusive and greedy policies continue. The U.S. and its allies built up permanent warfare states to secure consistent exploitation of resources outside their own territories.

During and after the Arab Spring, numerous Yemenis resisted dangerously unfair austerity measures that the Gulf Cooperation Council and the U.S. insisted they must accept. Professor Isa Blumi, who notes that generations of Yemeni fighters have refused to acquiesce to foreign invasion and intervention, presents evidence that Saudi Arabia and the UAE now orchestrate war on Yemen to advance their own financial interests.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, Blumi states that although Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman wants to author an IPO (International Public Offering), for the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, no major investors would likely participate. Investment firms know the Saudis pay cash for their imports, including billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, because they are depleting resources within their own territory. This, in part, explains the desperate efforts to take over Yemen’s offshore oil reserves and other strategic assets.

Recent polls indicate that most Americans don’t favor U.S. war on Yemen. Surely, our security is not enhanced if the U.S. continues to structure its foreign policy on fear, prejudice, greed, and overwhelming military force. The movements that pressured the U.S. Senate to reject current U.S. foreign policy regarding Saudi Arabia and its war on Yemen will continue raising voices. Collectively, we’ll work toward raising the lament, pressuring the media and civil society to insist that slaughtering children will never solve problems.

Kathy Kelly is a peace activist and a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence http://vcnv.org/ . Kathy Kelly’s email is kathy@vcnv.org

This article first appeared on the website of The Progressive magazine.
 

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President Donald Trump and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, May 20, 2017, at the Royal Court Palace in Riyadh. Credit: Official White House Photo, Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
 

“I come and stand at every door
But none shall hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen.”  
 
Nazim Hikmet, Hiroshima Child

At a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on July 18 2017, Republican Senator Todd Young asked officials if the ongoing war in Yemen would exacerbate the catastrophe developing there—one of four countries, along with Southern Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, which are set to lose 20 million people collectively this year from conflict-driven famine.

Yemen is being bombarded and blockaded using US-supplied weapons and vehicles by a regional coalition marshaled by Saudi Arabia, with US support.  Yemen’s near-famine conditions and attendant cholera outbreaks are so dire that a child dies there every ten minutes of preventable disease.
At the hearing, Young held aloft a photo of a World Food Program warehouse in Yemen which was destroyed in 2015. He asked David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program, to name the country responsible for the airstrike that demolished it. Beasley replied that the Saudi-led coalition blockading Yemen had destroyed the warehouse, along with the relief supplies it contained.  

A July 2016 Human Rights Watch report documented 13 civilian economic structures that were destroyed by Saudi coalition bombing between March 2015 and February 2016, including:
 

“Factories, commercial warehouses, a farm, and two power stations. These strikes killed 130 civilians and injured 171 more. The facilities hit by airstrikes produced, stored, or distributed goods for the civilian population including food, medicine, and electricity—items that even before the war were in short supply in Yemen, which is among the poorest countries in the Middle East. Collectively, the facilities employed over 2,500 people; following the attacks, many of the factories ended their production and hundreds of workers lost their livelihoods.” 
 

When asked about the Saudi coalition’s destruction of four cranes needed to offload relief supplies in Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah, Beasley confirmed that their loss had greatly impeded WFP efforts to deliver food and medicines. Young read from Beasley’s June 27 letter to the Saudi government—only the latest of multiple requests—in which he asked that the WFP be allowed to deliver replacement cranes. The WFP Director said that the Saudis had provided no reply.  Young then noted that, in the three weeks since this last letter had been sent, more than 3,000 Yemeni children had died of preventable, famine-related causes.

Medea Benjamin of the antiwar campaign Code Pink was at the hearing, and later thanked Young for rebuking the Saudi government’s imposition of a state of siege, plus the airstrikes that are preventing the delivery of food and medicine to Yemeni civilians. One day later, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported on a July 19 coalition airstrike in Yemen which killed 20 civilians—including women and children—while they were fleeing violence in their home province. The report claimed that more than two million internally displaced Yemenis have “fled elsewhere across Yemen since the beginning of the conflict, but … continue to be exposed to danger as the conflict has affected all of Yemen’s mainland governorates.”

On July 14, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed two amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would potentially end US participation in the Yemeni civil war. In the past, the White House has provided refueling and targeting assistance to the Saudi-led coalition without congressional authorization. Since October of 2016, the US has doubled the number of jet refueling maneuvers carried out with Saudi and United Arab Emirate jets. The Saudi and UAE jets fly over Yemen, drop bombs until they need to refuel, and then fly back to Saudi airspace where US jets perform mid-air refueling operations. Next, they circle back to Yemen and resume the bombing.

What can be done to end this seeming addiction to war?

In the summer of 2006, I joined peace campaigner Claudia Lefko at a small school that she had helped found in Amman, Jordan. The school served children whose families were refugees from the postwar chaos in Iraq. Many of the children had survived war, death threats and displacement. Lefko had worked with children in her hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts, to prepare a gift for the Iraqis at the school. The gift consisted of strings of paper origami cranes, folded in memory of a Japanese child called Sadako who had died from radiation sickness after the bombing of her home city of Hiroshima in 1945.  

In her hospital bed (so the story goes), Sadako occupied her time by attempting to fold 1,000 paper cranes, a feat she hoped would earn her the granting of a special wish that no other child would ever suffer the same fate as those who had been killed and injured in Hiroshima. She succumbed too rapidly to complete the task herself, but other Japanese children who heard about her folded many thousands more. This story has been re-told for decades in innumerable places, making the delicate paper creations a symbol for peace throughout the world.

The Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet wrote a poem about Sadako which has since been set to music. Its words are on my mind today as I think of all the malnourished children from the countries of the terrible Four Famines, and from other conflict-torn, US-targeted countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. I think of their months and years of hunger. Their stories may have ended already during the first half of 2017. Hikmet writes:
 

“I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead.”

The song of the “Hiroshima Child” imagines a child who comes and “stands at every door…unheard and unseen.” In reality, we, the living, can choose to approach the doors of elected representatives and of our neighbors, or we can stay at home. We can choose whether or not to be heard and seen.

Robert Naiman at Just Foreign Policy points out that many people don’t know that the House of Representatives has voted to prohibit US participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. So we must publicize the vote on social media, push for a House roll call vote on the Davidson-Nolan prohibitions on Defense Appropriation, and urge the Senate to pass the same provisions as the House.

I recognize that legislative activism at the heart of an empire addicted to war is a tool of limited use. But considering the impending disaster for which 2017 may well be remembered—as the worst famine year in post-WWII history—we don’t have the luxury to reject any of the tools and opportunities that are presented to us. I also personally oppose all defense appropriations and have refused all payment of federal income tax since 1980.

Billions, perhaps trillions of dollars will be spent to send weapons, weapon systems, fighter jets, ammunition, and military support to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, fueling new arms races and raising the profits of US weapon makers. We must choose to stand at the doors of our leaders and of anyone else who might have influence over this situation, honoring past sacrifices and the innocent lives we were unable to save even as we redouble our efforts to stop the war makers from constantly gaining the upper hand in our lives.

We can never reverse the decisions to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we cannot prevent all of the dying that is set to come this fateful summer in the countries of the Four Famines. In her song, Sadako, long beyond saving even as she folded more paper cranes in her bed, doesn’t ask us to erase her own terrible loss, but to achieve whatever change that we can, and to lose no more time in doing so:     
 

“All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.”

Kathy Kelly is the co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Courtesy: Open Democracy

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