November 30
GUEST: Ellen Davidson, member
of Jewish Voice for Peace, Veterans For Peace, and contributor
to the NY based Indypendent as well as Mondoweiss, talks about
her trips to the West Bank and the meaning of apartheid.
Calling
Israel an apartheid state
Ellen is a long time activist for Palestine. She uses her considerable writing and newspaper production skills to publish Peace & Planet News, a Veterans for Peace publication. I met her in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March. About 1,500 members from all over the world waited in Cairo for permission to go into Gaza, permission that never came.
We stayed busy anyway, organizing courses on apartheid and Palestinian liberation. We also stopped the traffic in Tahrir Square, a breathtaking experience when we sat down in front of eight lanes of traffic. You can see what happened to us in a documentary I shot: "Still in Cairo."
So Ellen is one of those people who has worked for social change most of her life. She is Jewish, and considers her work for Palestine to be in the best traditions of Jewish activism and social justice.
How is it that the state of Israel seems to have thrown out all that history of leftist change to become a nationalist state modeled on fascism? Or is the creation of Israel the second catastrophe of the Holocaust?
