The Palestinians Deserve to be Heard
There are only a few days left until we leave for Palestine and lots of things to be taken care of before departure. The joint delegation consists mostly of elected trade union representatives and we are currently embroiled in the largest public sector strike to hit the country for many years. Negotiations are at a standstill and already some 50 000 of our fellow union members are on strike.
In the midst of the run up to the dispute, I have been trying to focus on collating news and information on Palestine. A while back, I decided to follow Norwegian media more carefully than usual over the final few weeks leading up to the departure. I was hoping to glean as much up-to-date knowledge as possible on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank.
It has been an easy enough project because there quite simply hasn’t been a lot of news about Palestine. If you didn’t already know it, you can take it from me – if you want to know what is going on in Palestine then you can’t depend on mainstream news sources in Norway. You have to delve further afield. We will need to do something about that. The Palestinians deserve to be heard.
We will be visiting Palestine in the run up to the 5 year anniversary of the start of the blockade of Gaza. It seems longer than that to me. To the people that live there it must seem like an eternity.
The blockade has isolated this small coastal region from the rest of the world and turned Gaza into what is often described as the “world’s largest open air prison”. The residents’ are deprived of access to basic medical and humanitarian supplies and denied the right to travel in direct violation of international laws and conventions. Only recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently adopted a resolution condemning the Israeli siege and calling for all restrictions on Gaza border terminals to be lifted.
We are also travelling to Gaza as the fuel crisis enters its sixth month. Extended power cuts are the order of the day for the area’s 1.6 million population. Needless to say, the fuel crisis is severely disrupting the lives and health of the people living there but it is also severely affecting the local fishing industry which has already been crippled by Israeli restrictions. Several of the organizations we will be meeting work directly with these issues. We will do our best to keep you up to date.
Solidarity 