People without a Country, an Opportunity, or Food

Can you believe travesties of sickening proportions are happening now, are happening just as the patterns of history provide for, are happening just as prophesied and expected and yet they are not at all inevitable? Now, in our time, in our life, when we can do something about it and change it, or lose another part of our life stories to observation and complicity.

The Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are people without a country, without enough land, without internationally recognized leadership or legal power.
They have few opportunities to make money, travel, to even get out of their fenced-in territories and into the country of Israel.
At least in the Gaza Strip, they can access the sea.
But today I woke to several real occurring, recurring nightmares of the Palestinians, happening in that world across the ocean and a sea from me, accessible only by pictures and letters and reports.

Now the people living in the Gaza Strip are running out of food, besides having been cut off from trade and all means of production.

Walled in, Bombed, Surrounded. I hardly imagined that things could get worse-- especially during and right after the holidays.

I hardly imagined that an American I care about would be in the center of this conflict's shifting storm, waking me up and making me care. (God, why do songs and celebrities pull me into the world's heartaches more than written pleas, documentaries, sermons or petitions?)

Ships and caravans and planes have headed to Gaza for many months with humanitarian relief. And today, the Dignity, a ship bearing humanitarians and journalists from many countries, was stopped on its relief mission to Gaza. Now I hear from the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the US Campaign to End the Occupation of Palestine, and a US Social Forum group that the Dignity was surrounded by Israeli warships at 5 am (US Time) today and rammed into, damaged and losing fuel. The Dignity carries journalists from Al Jazeera, CNN, doctors, and one humanitarian from the US, Cynthia McKinney, who had recently run for President as a Green. Israel wants no dignity or food to arrive at the Gaza Strip for the starving, poor, and displaced, but rather wants the Dignity to return to its launching point, Cyprus, though it doesn't have enough fuel to do so.

How did I get word of this so soon? I don't even know how word got around, but besides prayer, it is our main starting point. The main way that these battles can engage the world.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/30/gaza.aid.boat/index.html