Dear friends, the following sections are from an email from Kathy Kelly, Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, January 19, 2009:

Children in Gaza. Photo courtesy of Nora Barrows-Friedman

Dr. Atallah Tarazi, a General Surgeon at Gaza City’s Shifaa Hospital, invited us to meet him in his home, in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital.

“One of the worst aspects of this war,” says Dr. Tarazi, “is the lack of respect for the UN.  Three United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools were bombed.  In Jabaliyah, more than 45 people were killed at a UN school; F16s bombed UNRWA supplies and stores.”

“In Shifaa Hospital, we saw plumes of smoke for day and night. All Gaza, every day, was covered with smoke and chemicals.  We don’t know how it affects the health.”

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Bringing Forward Wisdom in Adolescence:
A forum for parents, educators, and faith leaders

Saturday, 21 Feb 2009, 10 am – 1 pm
1 Fort Mason (at Franklin & Bay) in San Francisco
$10 family / $7 single / $5 before 7 February

“What experiences will help young people develop the compassion and integrity that our world so desperately needs?” Join Michael Nagler and four other speakers from the areas of education and social organizing for this panel discussion on creating a movement towards wisdom in education. Please see http://youngspirit.org/fortmason.pdf for more information, or call or email the Young Spirit Foundation at now@youngspirit.org, 650-209-6692.

Message from a Girl in Gaza. Photo courtesy of Nora Barrows-Friedman.

Revised January 14, 2009.

I have just gotten off the phone with my friend and colleague Oren Yiftachel, a co-founder, with Dr. Eyad El Sarraj of Gaza, of the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.  Prof. Yiftachel lives and works in Beer-Sheva, which is within range of the Qassam rockets coming from Gaza.  Yet when I asked him what the Israeli peace movement was doing to stop the counterattacks he said simply, “not enough.”  The same is true here, even 7,500 miles away in West Marin.

There is another lesson or two for those of us who work for peace and believe in it: we have to do much more, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  That is, we need to understand more things to do and when to do them, for if the last eight years’ wars have shown us anything, it is that protests aren’t enough. There is a time for protests and vigils.  This isn’t one of them.  We need direct action, not excluding, when all else has failed, downright civil disobedience, coupled with vigorous development and promotion of peace alternatives to replace what we — all of us — must now decisively reject: the starving of a whole population, the bombing of civilian neighborhoods in order to ‘target’ individuals within them.  In the final analysis, we need to reject war as an instrument of peace.

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