Co-hosts: Amy Goodman and James Zogby

Participating: Anthony Arnove, Huwaida Arraf, Brian Avery, Nirit Ben-Ari, Leila Buck, Kia Corthron, Suheir Hammad, Leonard Hubbard from The Roots with A. Marcy Francis, Brian Jones, Liz Magnes, Malachy McCourt, Betty Shamieh, Jonathan Tasini, Zafer Tawil, Tom Wallace, Ora Wise, and Maysoon Zayid.

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This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still want to dance around to Pat Benetar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop.

— Rachel Corrie from Rafah, February 27, 2003

In April of 2006 hundreds of people came to Olympia, WA, from around the world for The Rachel Corrie Foundation’s inaugural Peace Works event. The two-day conference in April followed pre-conference activities and events and focused on the struggle in Palestine and Israel.

The foundation plans to conduct annual events to analyze war, racism, global economic inequality, oppression of women, and other forms of injustice, and to formulate a hopeful vision of a world community that responds constructively to its inhabitants’ rights, needs and aspirations. For more bacground on the conference, read this.

Video

The following films were produced from the first annual Rachel Corrie Foundation Peace Works - April 2006, courtesy pdxjustice.org.

PART 1
Diana Buttu - “From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State”
Diana Buttu is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer. In 2000, she left North America to move to Palestine in order to assist with the then “peace” negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel as one of the PLO’s legal advisors. With the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation (and the breakdown of negotiations) Diana decided to remain in Palestine.

PART 2
Amira Hass - “From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State”
Amira Hass lives and works in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. In 1993 she became the first Israeli reporter to live in Gaza, reporting on the Israeli occupation for Ha’aretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, which is available in English translation through their website. Amira Hass received the International World Press Freedom award for her work in the Gaza Strip. Her time there also resulted in her first book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege. She is also author of Reporting from Ramallah : An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land. She spoke, along with Palestinian-Canadian lawyer, Diana Buttu, on the topic “From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State.”

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By Andrew Ford Lyons
Orginally in The Palestine Chronicle

How quickly we backslide: In June of 1937 the federal government slapped chains and a padlock onto the doors of Maxine Elliot Theatre in New York. It was an attempt to halt a performance of “The Cradle Will Rock,” a Marc Blizstein musical the feds found far too full of dangerous ideas for public consumption. The show’s director, Orson Welles, rushed back from Washington, D.C., on opening day after a failed attempt to convince the government to lift its ban. He found about 600 people waiting to see the performance idling in front of the theater, along with his cast.

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By Serena
Read at the November 29th International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People event in Olympia, live from Rafah. Delegates from Olympia staying in Rafah joined our Palestinian partners there for a live teleconference.

Up until now Rafah has only been a word on a page to me. Images of rubble and tanks. Nothing of everyday life beyond this. No smell of falafel or burning trash, no sound of the music coming from the trucks selling gas or the constant honking of taxis. No faces I knew, friends to say hi to walking down the street or looks of confusion like “what are you doing here”? (more…)