Rachel’s Words

A spiel about security in the land of milk & honey…
October 6, 7, & 8

Join us for this High Holiday Edition in response to present-day violence in the Middle East.

An Olive on the Seder Plate is a multimedia performance about how American Jews wrestle with the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This revised and expanded High Holiday Edition responds to present-day issues of the meaning of security, as well as Israel’s relations with neighbors.

This project is collaboration between over a dozen Jewish musicians, performers, and artists. The play doesn’t end when the cast takes their final bows, but continues with an optional post-performance dialogue.

An Olive on the Seder Plate presents history, humor, politics and Midrash through a collection of Jewish voices. The performance is a creative, innovative contribution to ongoing peace and justice work within Jewish communities and beyond. Please join us for a show after this year’s Days of Awe.

Friday, Oct 6, 8pm
Saturday, Oct 7, 8pm
Sunday, Oct 8, 2pm & 7pm

Times Square Arts Center
300 W 43rd St, NYC
(corner 8th Ave & 43rd St)

What you can do for Gaza

Editor’s note:

The Independent is trying to launch a campaign to bring the world’s attention to what is happening in Gaza – they need strong letters of support and encouragement for this. Otherwise the momentum will not build and grow as it must in the coming days. This is front cover of today’s paper:

www.independent.co.uk/

(front cover: A People Betrayed By The World)

The leader article:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article1371992.ece

Please if you can take a second to write to:

Letters@independent.co.uk and cc to D.Orr@independent.co.uk

today.

Leading article: A brutal siege the world must ignore no longer

09.08.2006 | The Independent

Gaza is being slowly strangled. This small strip of land on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean has been under siege by the Israeli military for three months. Its 1.5 million inhabitants have been subject to more than 270 air strikes, numerous ground raids, and a severe artillery bombardment. Since Gaza’s sole power plant was bombed in June, its people have been forced to survive by candlelight after dark. Hospitals use electric generators to keep essential services running. The strip’s water mains have been destroyed, causing serious supply problems and increasing the risk of disease. Bridges have been bombed and checkpoints closed. No Palestinians are allowed in or out of what has in effect become a prison.

“Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.  There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it.  Some brave pilots refused to partake in the operations, two journalists (out of the 150 in their newspaper alone…not naming any names….) do not cease to write about it.  But people, this is it.  In the name of the holocaust memory let us hope the world wwill not allow the genocide in Gaza to continue.”

Genocide in Gaza
Ilan Pappe – Monday, 04 September 2006, 19:26

IMEMC

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred.  An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Many of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

Gaza’s darkness
Ha’aretz, Israel Sept. 3
By Gideon Levy

Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.

Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn’t even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about ‘the end of the occupation’ and ‘partitioning the land? now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied.