Four Valley women, Paki Wieland of Northampton, Ruth Hooke of Amherst, Ellen Graves of West Springfield and Priscilla Lynch of Conway, will travel to Gaza to participate in the Gaza Freedom March December 31. The march commemorates the Israeli invasion of Gaza last December in which 1,400 people died and the Israelis blew up a United Nations warehouse containing hundreds of tons of food and medicine.
Organizers of the march expect over 1,000 people from 42 countries. Participants (who must sign a commitment to nonviolence) range from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker to a Parisian hip-hop group, Ministere des Affaires Populaires, and from Michael Ratner, president of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights, to Hedy Epstein, a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist whose family died in the Holocaust.
Clergy of several faiths and Jewish people opposing Israeli policies will take part in the event. Once in Gaza, the marchers will join an expected 50,000 Palestinians organized by non-government organizations in peaceful demonstrations to protest the tight border control on Gaza and its 1.5 million residents by the Israelis. Demonstrations within Israel, by Palestinians and Israelis, will occur at the same time. The protest is aimed not only at Israel but at the American and other governments organizers accuse of inaction in the face of the "siege" against Gaza.
Wieland and Graves were in Rafah this summer to witness conditions at the strategic area that is the site of the only Egypt-Gaza border crossing. Graves told the Advocate, "There are a lot of Jewish families that are very sympathetic to the situation in Gaza… Egypt and the U.S. are equally involved in the situation and haven't done anything to change it. We give Egypt an enormous amount of money and we, just by putting on a little bit of pressure, could change the situation. The people are without electricity and without electricity they can't make their water pumps run. They're not getting enough food in and the country itself is just being strangled."
