World, January 18, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) - Thus she begins, the Jerusalem Post columnist, a desperate obloquy upon those who openly expose and condemn the crimes of Israel. The targets are the 1362 international demonstrators, myself included, who converged to go to Gaza through the Egyptian Rafah crossing in late December. She reserves particular venom for the organizers of the trip. The article is written by US-Israeli author, Caroline Glick, a former IDF Captain and foreign policy advisor to the Netanyahu during his first time in office. The immediately demonstrable perversions in the article merit attention simply because they are instructive in Israeli propaganda in general, a topic we will return to directly.

According to Glick all the demonstrators are "pro-Palestinian" and intend to deliver humanitarian aid "to the Hamas terrorist organization" in "Hamastan." They are motivated by "their hatred for Israel and for their own Western governments that refuse to join Hamas in its war against Israel." "In the end, as the militant Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Amira Hass chronicled in Haaretz last week, all but 100 of them were barred from travelling to Gaza." (my emph.) As the delegation entered Gaza "Hamas immediately placed them under siege." "And then these international protesters were forced to participate in a Hamas-organized march to the Erez crossing." In an unusual twist of fate, the delegation was "happily collaborating with Hamas." This was "an opportunity for Hamas cabinet ministers to get decent media coverage in the company of Western demonstrators." All but the last quote are falsehoods contrived in a familiar craze.

Glick laments that the demonstrators "will never acknowledge" the terror of Hamas against Israel. Since "Hamas's founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jewry" it will resist "recognition of Israel." The demonstrators are coaxed by the "old psychopathic block of nearly a century of far-left Western activists," who hid "the crimes of mass murderers from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh to Daniel Ortega and Saddam Hussein." "The truth is " Glick continues, "the distance between" the opinion of the demonstrators and "the centers of state power has not been very great." Again all but the last quote are falsehoods.

It is not unfair to ask on what grounds Glick classifies the participants, which have come from more than 40 countries, as "pro-Palestinian" and the hysteric paraphernalia. The term sounds as if Glick is commenting on a soccer-game. In reality, the international demonstrators and organizers, not just those who converged in Cairo but in many countries, including Israel, constituted a large and diverse movement with many distinct pursuits, vastly different convictions and a feast of viewpoints.

Whatever the import of Glick's reductionist characterization is, it's easy to find out what the common denominator for the participants of the march was. There was an official call and however wide-ranging, it is no more "pro-Palestinian" than "pro-Israeli." The purpose of the march was "lifting the siege on Gaza" and it ends by saying: "As an international coalition we are not in a position to advocate a specific political solution to this conflict." The framework of the call is based solely on international law.

Israel is guilty of imposing the blockade, since it is responsible for the well-being of the population under the 4th Geneva Convention; the US is guilty of sanctioning it and blocking efforts to lift it in the Security Council; The European Union, far from being congruent in its policies, is by and large guilty of toddling behind, while leading aid agencies has repeatedly decried Israel's ongoing and illegal siege of Gaza. One might recall the latest report issued by Amnesty, Oxfam and many others called "Failing Gaza." The report concludes, that Israel systematically destroys "the hopes of Gaza's people for social and economic development" and with it, "the key foundations for a just and sustainable peace". This is but a single publication in the long list of reports issued against the backdrop of the "illegal blockade" and Israeli onslaught last year, urging the international community to act. So we did.

In Glick's fertile imagination reality is put on its head. Let's recall the facts since the record is unambiguously clear. Israel disrupted the "six months of lull," that is the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in 2009; maintained its "illegal blockade" throughout it and intentionally "terrorized" the population during its onslaught while denying any attempt at continually offered nonviolent alternatives.

These alternatives in the short term would have been resuming or reestablishing the effective ceasefire and gradually lifting the blockade. Some could argue that Israel's abysmal record of terror and torture and decade's long occupation, expansion and rejectionism should disqualify it from the negotiating table all together. None the less, Israel can for the longer term, still take the longstanding Hamas offer to negotiate on a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, bearing in mind that Hamas' record is stellar in comparison.

The massacre in Gaza last year and the ongoing blockade have been a defining turning point. One result has been the convergence of those that were privileged enough to take direct action in Cairo. The annually 1.4 billion US dollar bribed Mubarak dictatorship, who received an additional 32 million in March 2009 to prevent the transport of foodstuffs, building materials and weapons into Gaza, predictably thwarted our mission.

Glick quotes my account with unsurprising misrepresentation. She describes me as an "American woman," while picking out of context statements of mine that are critical of Hamas. She leaves out, the part where I explain my free decision to walk alongside Hamas in a nonviolent and peaceful march: "if our very own movement consisted of communists, liberals, conservatives and so on, why should we then be hypocritical about joining Hamas in the very narrow common denominator that had brought us all together: breaking the siege. To me, everything else at this point was extraneous to our mission."

Mustafa Barghouti writes, that the "same world that rejects all use of Palestinian violence, even clear self-defence, surely ought not begrudge us the non-violence employed by men such as King and Gandhi." Glick is guilty of such "begrudging" while Israel "continuously deploy methods to destroy" nonviolent resistance, as described by Israeli Professor Neve Gordon from Ben-Gurion University.

According to Henry Siegman, Israel is no more the "only democracy in the Middle East," if it ever was. Glick is a columnist in the "only apartheid regime in the Western world." Siegman's article in The Nation is based on "a longer study commissioned by the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre in Oslo." Siegman concludes, that Israel's "colonialist enterprise" can now "be reversed only through outside intervention," a concept that is "no longer taboo." He is a former Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Popular opinion has changed. You can no longer call yourself liberal and support Israel. This followed the opinion of the International Court of Justice rendering Israel's wall and its settlements illegal.

With the U.N. Goldstone report on the Gaza massacre, the global movement is not likely to stop its efforts to end Israeli impunity any time soon. We shall continue to call for a reckoning.

Poya Pakzad, participant in the Gaza Freedom March

Photo Eman Jomaa