LIGHT A CANDLE FOR GAZA - FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE

Lift the siege of Gaza: End the Economic Blockade. Tear Down the Apartheid Wall and Illegal Settlements. End the Occupation. Let the Refugees Return. Freedom for Palestine!

A candle lit vigil and protest, 5.30 - 7 pm, Monday 18 January at the Nye Bevan Statue, Queen Street, Cardiff (opposite Castle). Please bring candles, posters, placards, banners, people etc!


Between 27/12/08 and 18/01/09 the Israeli military fell like wolves upon Gaza hospitals, ambulances, housing apartments, universities and schools were bombed, and 1400 people died, over a third of these children: Another episode in six decades of war, occupation, ethnic cleanising, colonisation, racism and dispossession the most powerful states in the West have inflicted upon the people of Palestine.

In Gaza, Palestinians still live a desperate life, surviving another bitter winter in the rubble of destroyed homes, with the Israeli & Egyptian government denying the necessary food, medical and even reconstruction materials in a brutal blockade backed by the West.

Many families are now forced to live on grass and scavenge in rubbish tips for food with almost half the agricultural land destroyed during the war, eight out of ten now dependent on aid to live, and massive unemployment caused by the destruction of most industry.

Meanwhile slow (and not so slow ethnic cleansing) continues in occupied East Jeruslaem and the West Bank with the expansion of illegal settlements and the apartheid wall that may create the biggest refugee crisis since the nakbah in 1948

Israel’s massacre of over 1400 Palestinians in less than a month last year shocked the world. But it also created a sea-change in support for the Palestinian call for peace and justice.

Join this human rights vigil to demand an end to occupation and justice for the people of Palestine. In the words of author and activist, Naomi Klein, 'the so-called international community is a joke. We have to fill the vacuum'

NOAM CHOMSKY:

'Gaza is a maximum security prison, something like Guantanamo, basically a torture chamber under a constant harsh and brutal siege. A seige is an act of war; a total seige is a major war crime. And it's not dramatically different in the West Bank where just about everything going on there is in violation of international law.'

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL:

'The wretched reality endured by 1.5 million people in Gaza should appal anybody with an ounce of humanity. Sick, traumatised and impoverished people are being collectively punished by a cruel, illegal policy imposed by the Israeli authorities.'

RONNIE KASRILS, Former leader of the armed wing of the ANC and most well-known Jewish politician in post-Apartheid South Africa:

'The violence of the apartheid regime, as inhuman as it was, ‘was a picnic’ (in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu) in comparison with the utter brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. I refer to the whole of Biblical Palestine from which Palestinian Arabs have been driven or are struggling to survive from the 1948 ethnic cleansing to the violence in the occupied West Bank and Gaza today. We did not see tanks with guns blazing protecting armored bulldozers reducing homes and bones to dust. We did not see helicopter gunships ‘taking out’ militants with their families, children and their homes with calculated precision. In South Africa we did not see the destruction by bombing of apartment blocks such as in Rafah in the Gaza Strip where children were sleeping. We did not see town centers such as Jenin and Ramallah razed to the ground reminiscent of the bloody suppression of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War.'

GERALD KAUFMAN MP:

‘My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.’

VIGIL INITIATED BY CARDIFF STOP THE WAR COALITION, if your organisation would like to add its name to the call-out, email  cardiff_troopsout@hotmail.com