By Cynthia McKinney
This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies – and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.
At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation ‘Cast Lead’ [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.
During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16’s rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs – new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.
The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water … It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.
The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime … I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?
Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for=2 0its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.
I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color & paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.
But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it’s incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream … like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better … The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.
My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."
The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.
The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can’ were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people ever ywhere truly believed in.
It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.
We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the world.
What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?
Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?
Let’s change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.
I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I’ve met at Ramle.
This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.
Original audio message available here:
Rynstone, you are totally right-on. If anti-Semitism and plain looniness were crimes, Cynthia McKinney would get life imprisonment.
Attacking Israel? Not In My Name!
Rynstone, your comments are vicious, mean spirited and a cover for great war crimes and crimes against humanity. What kind of person thinks that it is OK to carry out a MEDIEVAL siege and continual bombardment and destruction of a civilian population? What kind of person thinks that it is OK to try to crush resistance to a very oppressive,illegitimate occupation of other people\’s lands and deny them basic human rights?(it is wrong to attack civilians and innocent people, but who supplied the F16 fighter jets to Israel? Who supplied the white phosphorus bombs and the depleted uranium weapons used against the people of Gaza?- the U.S. and other western powers!) I guess war crimes and near genocide is OK when \”your\” guys are doing it.\”Never Again\” should mean \”Never Again\” to anyone, not just one group of people. The crimes of the Holocaust should never be used as a cover to carry out other crimes against people who had nothing what so ever to do with that horrific crime.
The \”Spirit of Humanity\” was in INTERNATIONAL waters when it was violently abducted by the Israeli navy and its passengers brutalized.Since you think that the resistance of the Palestinian people to the brutal occupation by Israel is illegitimate, then by necessity, you must also consider the just and heroic resistance of the people of the Warsaw Ghetto and other places to the Nazis also illegitimate.Moreover, the crimes of the Nazis was also abetted by the rulers of the other imperialist countries like the U.S., Britain, and France who knew what was going on but did nothing. FDR, who is held up as a model and a \”saint\” in U.S. politics even today had the blood of many people on his hands. The new would be FDR, Barack Obama is a war president who is also guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity right now.(Afghanistan,Iraq,Pakistan, Palestine and other countries).The truth of it,, is that this country was built on slavery, exploitation,aggression against other countries and genocide and so many people in this country refuse to come to grip with that reality. What is wrong with thinking about humanity instead of thinking like Americans? We need more people like Cynthia McKinney to step forward and to go up against horrors that go on in our name.We need a movement of resistance to the crimes of this government and we need a revolution.
This is great news. Cynthia McKinney in a Israel prison. She should not have been trying to sneak through a military blockade. Their group refused to obey an order to turn around.
Doesn\’t Cynthia have anything to say about the missiles that are launched from Gaza into Israel everyday?
Cynthia was a joke for a congresswoman and an embarrassment to Americans.