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| Greta Berlin. Image (c) Greta Berlin |
What got you into activism for
Palestine?
Like a lot of
activists who fight for Palestine, I met a Palestinian and married him. So many
others know Palestinian people as friends, as spouses, as roommates, as teachers,
as students, or as colleagues My husband was driven out of Safad, Palestine in
1948, and I have been working with the Palestinian cause for forty-six years
now. In the past 14 years,
there are two things I have concentrated on; my volunteering with the
International Solidarity Movement where I worked in the occupied West Bank with
Palestinian farmers and shepherds. I was in Jenin in 2003, and later in 2005 in
Bili’n. When I went back in 2007, I spent most of my time in Hebron, where I walked with children to make
sure they were not attacked on their way to school by the illegal settlers. Then,
in 2006, I co-founded the Free Gaza Movement, the initiative that sends boats
to Gaza. I do not see myself as a Human Shield, but rather, as a Human Rights
Watcher, someone who goes to occupied Palestine to watch, observe, document and
bear witness to what Israel does to the Palestinians it occupies.
In the course of your activism,
what were your biggest challenges? What did you do to overcome them?
I live in France since
2004, but lived in the US all my life until then. One of the biggest issues and
challenges whilst in the US is getting people there to pay attention to the
66-year occupation of Palestine. Of course, we know what happened to the Jews
who went through the Second World War, but what they suffered gives them no
right to inflict such trauma on Palestinians, a group of people who had nothing
to do with WW II! Never again simply means never again for everyone. 750,000
people were driven out of Palestine in 1948 and over 150,000 in 1967: and you
never hear their narratives! In the US, we only heard the Israeli side of the
story. I started working for the Palestinian cause orignally, because I was
married to a Palestinian, but I have stayed because I was furious about being
lied to all my life. We only get the Israeli narrative in the US – because the
US funds Israel and its campaigns against Palestine. I am happy to say that the
world is changing. It has certainly changed in Europe, where people have access
to many more news channels than we have in the US and are much more
sophisticated about what happens in Palestine.
Why does the Palestinian voice
remain unheard? Why aren’t we hearing their narrative?
It is difficult to hear
the Palestinian voice, because it is not given attention. The media, especially
in the US, chooses not to show the Palestinian narrative, and instead uses the
Israeli narrative, labelling them as terrorists and militants. But, this trend
has been developing a lot of cracks in it, simply because social media has
taken over from conventional media. People are hearing Palestinians now through
online magazines, blogs, Facebook,
Twitter, and so many other platforms. Palestinians
have been oppressed, occupied and brutalised since 1948, and they were not
heard until lately. For exampel, in
1967, I went to picket the Israeli Consulate in Chicago. There were just four
of us: my husband, my two little children and me We couldn’t even find a
Palestinian flag to hold. Today, the plight of occupied Palestine is becoming
mainstream. It is tremendous to see how many people are supporting the cause,
from our boats to Gaza to the BDS movement to people going to see for
themselves what Israel is doing. After 46 years of being involved in one way or
another, I see the movement going faster and faster and am very encouraged.
Having worked for the cause for a
while now, do you see an end in sight? What would you say is a solution that
needs to be pursued?
I don’t believe that I
have a right to advocate a solution, though, my former husband is Palestinian,
and I have two children who are Palestinian. It is not my place, but I will
always be a supporter for their cause. However, we all have our point of view,
and, personally, I believe that the right solution should be one state – a
state where all people are treated as equals and are guaranteed their rights. The
idea of a two-state solution is simply crazy – it is like saying that the
Israelis get to live in a mansion, while the Palestinians should remain in the
dungeon. And yet, there are
many supporters for the two-state solution. This happens for two reasons. On
the Palestinian side, there is a longing, a sense of yearning for a home. They
have been kept out of their land for a very long, that even a small fraction of
land on 22% of what was once Palestine is important and sacred to them. The
other reason – and I believe this bears a more sinister overtone – is that
concentrating on a two-state solution single-handedly denies the right of
return for the Palestinians who were driven out in 1948. A two-state solution
will focus exclusively on the Palestinians driven out in 1967– when the 1948
Nakba was Israel’s original sin.
Take us through your activism for
Palestine. You’ve done some really inspiring stuff!
I began in earnest
again with advent of the 21st Century. I was winding down my career
and knew I had time to actively get back into working for justice in Palestine,
the way I had once done in the 60s. Of course there wasn’t Facebook or Twitter
or Instagram at the beginning of the century, but, in 2003, 2005 and 2007, when
I was working with the International Solidarity Movement, I could see what was
happening to the world, Palestinians begn to be connected, through the
Internet, through Google and through other social platforms. When we started
working on the concept of sending boats to Gaza, it was social media that helped get the
messages out. For example, the Free
Gaza Movement was founded in 2006, Israel was busy bombing Lebanon. We five
co-founders thought that if things were left as they were, and Israel was
bombing Lebanon, the world’s attention was focused on Israel’s aggression
against the civilian population there.
Gaza, would just disappear altogether in the minds of the public, if it
even was considered. We decided to buy a boat and sail it from New York City to
Gaza – since most of us were no longer allowed to get into the Occupied West
Bank, the boat seemed our best bet to keep the occupation of Palestine on the
front burner.
Of course, we never
were able to sail from New York, but we did manage to sail two small,
ramshackle fishing boats from Cyprus to Gaza and land at the port there on
August 23, 2008. We had actually spent two years raising money for this
initiative, close to $700,000 by the time we actually sailed. A lot of people
told us we would never make it – but we five simply didn’t bother listening to
them. Ironically, it was just the beginning of the social media revolution, and
we managed to organise this project with the help of Gmail only. By the time we
left, we had hundreds of volunteers working with us and thousnds who donated –
the smallest donation was $1.50 from Burma, and the largest was $100,000 from a
person of Iraqi origin who had settled in the USA. The support was tremendous.
People were sending us their social security cheques, their pension cheques.
The USS Liberty survivors sent us their
monthly cheques from the military. The first trip we undertook was truly a
civilian movement. The 44 of us who finally sailed that August were just a
bunch of very determined, ordinary people who represented civil society. That
first trip is documented by two dozen of us in a book called Freedom Sailors, the Maiden Journey of the
Free Gaza movement and how we made it in spite of ourselves. We were so
determined, we didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘defeat.’
Let’s talk about the Free Gaza
Movement…
The Free Gaza Movement
has always been a women’s movement. On our founding team, there were four out
of five that were women, and women ran most of the funding. That doesn’t mean
that men didn’t work with us. They did, and we could not have bee succesful
without them. But the driving force has always been women. Even now, four of
the five members on the Free Gaza board are women. I think that’s because women
are more oriented towards finding a solution and not getting our egos in the
way. We’re much more willing to compromise. Yet, Paul, Mary,
Sharon, Renee and I really succeeded, because we didn’t know that we couldn’t.
On the day we arrived in Gaza on August 23, 2008, 40,000 Palestinians were waiting for us at
the port, cheering us on. It was day that we will never forget, one that
brought hope to the people of Gaza that they were not forgotten. Actually,
after that first trip, a groupof Palestinians stepped up and bought us a proper
boat, a yacht we called the Dignity. On that boat, we got into Gaza four more
times successfully. We had promised the people of Gaza three things; that we would
return, that we would take out Palestinians when we could, and that we would
tell the world about the illegal Israeli seige on 1.6 million Palestinians. We
did all of those things until Operation Cast Lead when Israel started attacking
us, ramming our boat, trying to sink another boat, hijacking a boat, stealing
all of our equipment, and then, with Freedom Flotilla 1 in May 2010, murdering
nine of our passengers.
When we were able to
get in, those heady days at the end of 2008, we took in Members of Parliament; Mairead
Maguire, the Nobel Peace Laureate; journalists and labor leaders. Each trip was
a testament to the determination that the Palestinians and we had. We were just
absolutely determined that nothing was going to stop us. We organizers, by then,
more than three dozen of us, each had our talents and banked on them to bring
our movement to life. For me, I saw the whole project as a production, what
with my Masters’ Degree in Theatre, with a director, a producer, actors, props
and an audience of people watching the boats and reading our stories.
What’s coming in the next couple
of months on the activism front?
We’re now working on an
initiative called Gaza’s Ark. The ark, which started out as another ramshackle
fishing boat, will set sail from Gaza into the world in the summer of this year,
loaded with products from Palestine such as embroidery and olive wood carvings.
The organizers of this project decided that, instead of sending a boat into
Gaza, as the first 14 voyages were, we will send one out of Gaza and into the
world. Just a reminder, Gaza is the only territory in the Mediterranean that
doesn’t have access to its own sea.
Finally, I would like
women and girls around the world to use their voice and become activists. In this
Gaza Ark project, they might have a
woman captaining the Gaza Ark – just the fact that a woman came forward and
volunteered to captain is simply wonderful. It used to be men running projects
and women supporting them. But now, the time has come for women to run projects
and men to support them. It has been a remarkable journey for me, one a new
generation of women who are passionate about justice for
Palestine. I am very encouraged about the state of activism in the world, and
it feels great to see more and more women come out to support and fight for
causes.
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