The Palestine story: to exist is to resist: Lois and Martin Griffiths make a plea for the end of the oppression of the Palestine people.

• Author: Griffiths, Lois

'The blockade of Gaza has brought death, destruction, pain and suffering to the people there. The international community must not ignore their cries for help.' Jimmy Carter made this statement before the infamous attacks of December 2008. He is referring to the siege imposed to punish the Gazans for voting for Hamas. Israeli Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom describes the siege as 'genocide in slow motion'. Some say that Palestinians voted not so much for Hamas as against the Palestinian Authority, which was seen as corrupt and doing Israel's dirty work in stifling dissent.

Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who lived and reported from Gaza in the 1990s, wrote that closure of Gaza began long before the Hamas election, as early as 1991. Significantly, the first Qassam rocket was not fired until 2002. Hass is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her mother told her of being marched to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, as villagers looked the other way. Hass swore that she would never look the other way. She is the only Jewish Israeli journalist who has lived full-time among the Palestinians, in Gaza in the 1990s and now in Ramallah from 1997.

Ever since Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, we have become more and more focused on the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. And so has much of the world. Gideon Levy, who writes in Haaretz, said in an interview with the Independent:

I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what's going on fifteen minutes away from their homes.... The brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is] almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people so full of ignorance and cruelty. He gives an example. During Operation Cast Lead, 'a dog--an Israeli dog--was killed by a Qassam rocket and it was on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.'

And those who do not believe war crimes were committed should refer to Norwegian Dr Mads Gilbert. He said he had never seen anything like it; he cited the use of white phosphorus and experimental weapons, such as DIME (dense inert metal explosive). 'There's a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons,' Gilbert told reporters when he returned to Oslo.

Gazan doctor Mona El Farra reports that children suffer all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress discorder: bed wetting, fear of planes, even loss of the will to live. He adds that the people of Gaza say that the hardest thing for them to endure is the feeling that the world has forgotten them. Any contact with people, not just goods, from the outside world means so much. That is why attempts to break the siege and reach the people are so important. Robert Fisk has said that civil society is doing what governments should but will not do.

Relief convoy

In 2010, Viva Palestina organised a relief convoy, overland from London, that was able, after a long delay in Syria, to reach Gaza. Six New Zealanders, calling themselves Kia Ora Gaza, took part. One of them, Roger Fowler, maintains that 'Until there is justice for Palestine, there can be no peace in the Middle East. And until there is peace in the Middle East, there can be no peace in the world.' Another was a woman, Julie Webb-Pullman, who is now back in Gaza, providing reports that appear in Scoop. Another Kia Ora Gaza team is there now, joined by people from eighteen countries.

Last July, a Freedom Flotilla 2011 tried to get to Gaza but was stopped by the Greeks under pressure from the West. Passengers on the American boat Audacity of Hope included Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor, and Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple. The latter said that the flotilla reminded her of the Freedom Riders in America in the 1960s. The Audacity of Hope's cargo was letters from Americans to Gazans, from American children to Gazan children--in the words of Alice Walker, letters of love. These two women represent what is best in America.

Defenders of the Israeli regime complain that Israel is 'singled out'. In past years, you could say that Northern Ireland was singled out, South Africa was singled out, Nicaragua was singled out, and indeed Vietnam was singled out. Actually, Israel is singled out. No other country would get away with what it does.

Consider the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the largest boat in the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, in the early morning of 31 May 2010. This was carried out by Israeli commandos in international waters. Eight Turks and one Turkish-American were killed. The Guardian reported that 19-year-old Turkish-American Farak Dogan was 'shot 5 times from less than 45 cm, in the face, in the back of the head, shot twice in the leg and once in the back'. A New Zealander, Nicci Enchmarch from Canterbury, was not killed but was near one of the very first to be killed, a Turkish cameraman who was shot in the forehead.

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Young victims

American Rachel Corrie and Englishman Tom Hurndall were both killed in Gaza in 2003. They were both aged 23. Corrie was killed by a soldier driving a Caterpillar bulldozer-tank while trying to prevent a house demolition. Tom was killed by a sniper while trying to rescue some children. Why should anyone care about something happening in a far away country? We hear the word globalisation a lot. We are in an age of globalisation of concern, for humanity and the planet.

How do the Israelis get away with it? A DVD called Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land (2004) produced by the Media Education Foundation tells how Israelis officials thought the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila was a disaster for Israel, not because of the deaths but because of what it did to Israel's image. So in 1983, Israel created its 'Hasbara Project', to promote itself,, especially in the United States and in American media. In the film, the University of Texas-Austin's Robert Jensen, a journalism professor, states that Israel has succeeded in 'ideologically occupying the American media'. The film describes an organisation called CAMERA that harasses any publication that dares to criticise Israel. Robert Fisk says that his American colleagues in the TV and print media have 'Let their fear reign...