Our main presentation today is Nancy Murray's reportback on her 13th visit to Gaza in April. She went in order to be involved in the 6th international conference entitled âMental Health and Human Rightsâ last April, sponsored by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP).
A remarkable feature was its venue, Gaza City, which Israel has long decreed off-limits for international visitors. This is a tall order in the Gaza Stripâs crushing conditions. But Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei â who lost 28 members of his extended family in a single missile strike during Israelâs 2014 military onslaught â is determined to build on the legacy of the late Dr. Eyad el Sarraj, who founded the GCMHP in 1990 to instill hope and heal the spirit of a people who were exposed to violence and the loss of freedom and human rights on a daily basis. âPlanting hope is our main duty.â So declared Abu Jamei, now head of GCMHP, during his April 19th keynote address to the 800 people who attended. For nearly a decade, Israel has imposed a devastating chokehold on the territory, subjecting its 1.8 million inhabitants to collective punishment for Hamasâ victory in the 2006 legislative elections and its rout of US-backed Fatah forces the following year.
Dr. Murray first visited Gaza in 1988; she co-founded the Gaza Mental Health Foundation in 2001. She describes the conditions she encountered and how people under siege are seeking to rebuild their lives.
Planning an international conference in the locked-down Gaza Strip was itself an exercise in optimism. Internationals, other Palestinians and Israelis were blocked from entering Gaza for the 5th International GCMHP Conference held in October 2008, and had to participate via tenuous video-link from Ramallah. This year, German efforts secured Israeli permits for the entry of just over a dozen Europeans and Americans, an accomplishment presented by conference organizers as a harbinger of the day when Gazaâs intense isolation would be at an end. We were given a warm â even joyful â reception, as if our presence was in itself life-giving oxygen from the outside world.
The world inside Gaza was grimly portrayed in an exhibit of childrenâs drawings of the machinery of death, compiled by GCMHP. As Jeff Halper details in his 2015 book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Israel has profited greatly from the sale of weapons that are âbattle-testedâ in the Gaza Strip. In the process, Gaza has been turned into a kind of lab to find the breaking point of human beings.
Before Nancy Murray's presentation:
Our host offers brief observations about the so-called Palestinian Authority (PA). At the center of Israel's control mechanisms is its use of the PA. It's certainly not a trusted Palestinian institution that has as its mission the security and well-being of Palestinians, as some hoped when it was established by the Oslo Accords.
This Week In Palestine (a weekly part of Truth and Justice Radio) is an award-winning three-quarter-hour segment of news from Palestine and discussion of issues relevant to the Palestinians' struggle for freedom from Israel's brutal military occupation and colonization of their homeland. It speaks from the point of view of Palestinians and those who care about them. It's a regular part of Truth and Justice Radio, aired Sundays 6-10am ET on WZBC 90.3FM, Newton, MA, streaming and archived for two weeks at wzbc.org; TJR's website, truthandjusticeradio.org, has a link to This Week In Palestine archives back thru 1-6-2008; earlier editions are obtainable from radio4all.net or by navigating through our playlists. (At this important time, TJR has been airing a lot of Palestine coverage IN ADDITION to that provided by This Week In Palestine.) We hope you'll write to us at tjr@bluebottle.com if you rebroadcast our work, or have questions or comments.
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