Freedom Summer Palestine is less than 2 weeks away

Freedom Summer Palestine is less than two weeks away

Hundreds of people from all over the world will converge in Palestine for 6 weeks of actions aimed at highlighting and challenging the oppressive Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and lives, through coordinated popular, nonviolent direct-action.

ISM will be joining Palestinians in paving roads, dismantling roadblocks, challenging checkpoints and tearing down the Apartheid Wall.

Looking forward to seeing you in Palestine!

Join the INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT for

Freedom Summer Palestine 2003

From July 1 – August 15, 2003 the International Solidarity Movement invites you to join the Palestinian people for Freedom Summer Palestine 2003 – a campaign designed to directly challenge the Israeli occupation policy of caging Palestinians in their cities, towns and villages, denying 3 million people their basic right to freedom of movement.

The Palestinian people are living under a brutal military occupation that is a source of a terrible cycle of violence in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. But while the world focuses on the “War on Terror” a blind-eye is turned to the terror practiced by the State of Israel against a largely unarmed population struggling for their freedom. While the mainstream media focuses on the “road map” to peace, roads for colonizing settlers continue to be paved over Palestinian olive trees and Israeli soldiers and roadblocks prevent Palestinians from traveling freely to home, work and school.

The Israeli government continues to build a massive wall to surround Palestinian areas and turn their ghettos into large prisons. Twice as high and planned-to-be three times as long as the Berlin Wall, Israel’s new project has already uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinian fruit and olive trees and has destroyed or isolated from Palestinian farmers tens of thousands of dunams of farmland, de facto confiscating the Palestinian people’s most fertile land and most important water wells. Entire farming communities are losing all of their agricultural. Entire farming communities are losing all of their agricultural land.

More statistics:

· 10% of the West Bank will be confiscated by and for Israel by the path of this wall

· As of December 2002, some 11,500 dunams of land have been razed for the footprint of the wall, and 83,000 trees uprooted.

· Over 31 groundwater wells will be in the confiscated areas of the wall’s first phase. A number of villages are to lose their ONLY source of water.

· Land confiscation, destruction, and severe restriction of movement will translate into the loss of over 6,500 jobs.

· Over 100 buildings have thusfar been destroyed to make way for the wall, mainly shops, an important source of income for families and communities

· At least 17 Palestinian communities will be trapped between the wall and the Green Line. Some communities will be surrounded on all sides by the wall.

· If completed as planned, some 95,000 Palestinians will be isolated

· A number of small villages have been informed that their proximity to the wall will deem most of their community demolished

- Courtesy of PENGON. For more information and statistics, see: www.pengon.org

The ISM invites you to join the Palestinian people in coordinated direct-action, nonviolent resistance to this strangulation, oppression and affront to peace initiatives. While leaders talk about peace and the “road map”, take part in working for justice on the ground and paving the road to freedom.

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