NICHOLAS’ Update from Aqaba, 26th December 2009

Not rolling onto the ferry yet, but making waves.

Galloway gave a personal speech about his involvement with the Palestinian cause, starting with an encounter with a young Palestinian student in 1975. Makes me think of the crucial value of one-to-one conversations, such as we have on the Saturday stall in Parliament Street, York.

Most of our day has been spent communicating - making sure that our friends wherever they are in the world know what's happening to us and what to do to help. Now we are going to a music event, Turkish and Irish. Tomorrow, the first anniversary of Israel's criminal assault on Gaza, we plan a rally and other non-violent events: candle-lit vigil, hunger strike. Trying to express through visible action the strength and depth of our emotions. A phlegmatic Englishman with emotions ? Yes indeed! Frustration at being balked, kept here when the Gaza Strip is only some 150 miles away as the crow flies, and we can see Taba in Egypt across the bay. Disgust that comfortable men and women in democratic governments have done nothing to redress the results of last year's onslaught. Sorrow and sympathy with the people of Gaza. Afraid only of not being able to handle the sights, sounds and stories we will hear when at last we do meet those people.

Communicating well starts with thinking about the audience, the readership. Who are you, out there reading our blog ? If you are anything like me you may well resent being asked to do something public when you are wrapped up in a private world, with a social life and things you really want to be getting on with around your home. Here is someone who says you should go out into the cold, stand somewhere and demonstrate against what Israel did this time last year. Not something I ask lightly. But we need to put our own comforts and plans on hold sometimes when faced with enormous injustice. Like the killing of 99 policemen. Like the shelling of an UNRWA school where some 1300 people were sheltering. Like the destruction on Day 1 of the wells which supply the Jabaliya refugee camp with water.

Injustices which thanks to the Goldstone Report we have on record but which no one has remedied.

Our convoy is not the whole remedy for those injustices, but it is a vehicle of hope - the rolling pebble which starts a landslide. We need people like you, reading this, to get up and give it a shove, help it roll that little bit further after its 3000 miles. Perhaps you do not even have to get up or go out.

Please find out the phone and fax numbers of the Egyptian embassy nearest to you. Give them a call, say who you are, say quite simply that you think the Viva Palestina convoy ought to go into the Gaza Strip on its humanitarian mission. Thanks in advance if you do that !

Nicholas