Dozens to Bike from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to Raise Funds for Medical Relief for Gaza’s Children

Dozens to Bike from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to Raise Funds for Medical Relief for Gaza’s Children

Dozens to Bike from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to Raise Funds for Medical Relief for Gaza’s Children

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued 17 September 2014 by Cycling4Gaza.]

Dozens to Bike from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to Raise Funds for Medical Relief for Gaza’s Children 

Between September 18 and 21, more than 40 cyclists are expected to pedal more than 217 miles (350 km) from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, to raise money for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) so that it can continue to treat and care for the children of Gaza. Riders will include 16-year-old Ahmed Abu Nammous, from Gaza, whose life was changed after being fitted with a prosthetic leg in the U.S. on a PCRF-sponsored trip. Participants hope to raise $250,000 for the PCRF’s REACH Gaza project.

In 2013, Cycling4Gaza partnered with the PCRF for the first time to launch the REACH Gaza (Reaching Every Affected CHild) project. REACH Gaza aims to improve and strengthen the severely underdeveloped healthcare system in Gaza, particularly when it comes to providing specialised surgeries for children. This will be Cycling4Gaza’s first U.S. effort following successful fundraising cycles that mobilised over 100 people worldwide and covered over 1,120 miles (1,800 km) across the UK, France, Italy, Jordan, Turkey and Germany. Through these efforts, Cycling4Gaza has raised over $1.12 million for sustainable healthcare and education projects that provide critical support to vulnerable Palestinian communities.

Cycling4Gaza is delighted to welcome Ahmed Abu Nammous to join its U.S. cycle. Ahmed is an energetic and passionate 16-year-old from northern Gaza who was shot at the age of 14 by an Israeli sniper at the Erez border. The bullet hit right above his knee and his leg had to be amputated. As part of the PCRF’s ongoing endeavours in Gaza, they arranged for Ahmed to travel to Ohio to be fitted with a prosthetic leg. Upon his return, Ahmed was able to walk, run and go back to his daily routine.

In an effort to thank the PCRF, raise awareness on what is happening in Gaza, and inspire and motivate other innocent victims of war, Ahmed has chosen to join us on the 2014 Cycling4Gaza ride. When asked what he would like people to know he said: “Think of the children of Palestine and help us get out of this conflict and end the siege on Gaza.”

Cycling4Gaza hopes to help children affected by the seven-year long siege on the Gaza Strip, which has caused a chronic shortage of medical equipment and supplies and prevented children and their families from travelling freely into the West Bank or abroad to receive urgent care and treatment. The situation has worsened severely following the recent Israeli military assault on Gaza. According to the UN, at least 501 children were killed and 3,374 physically injured, while 373,000 others require direct and specialized psychosocial support.

Over 1,500 children a year can be supported through this project. REACH Gaza aims to alleviate the burden of the current healthcare situation in the Gaza Strip by providing accessible and necessary medical treatment to every child in need. To support these initiatives, please visit www.cycling4gaza.com.

About Cycling4Gaza

Cycling4Gaza is a non-profit initiative founded by a group of determined and passionate young people in the wake of the 2008-2009 war on the Gaza Strip. Our mission is to raise critical funds for carefully selected non-profit organisations that support vulnerable Palestinian communities, and to raise awareness about the ongoing siege on Gaza. With the support of its cyclists, volunteers, and donors, Cycling4Gaza has positively impacted the lives of over 8,000 children and 3,000 family and community members in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.

For detailed information on fundraising history and for visual accounts of each of the challenges, visit

www.cycling4gaza.com.

For additional information on Cycling4Gaza please, write to us at info@cycling4gaza.com

About Our Partners:

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
A Registered 501(c)(3) Non-Governmental Organization

The PCRF was created as a non-profit, non-political medical relief organization during the first Intifada by concerned people seeking ways to contribute in a positive way to the humanitarian needs of children under Israeli military occupation, through treating children in need of medical care. Over the past twenty-two years, the PCRF has sent over 1,000 children from Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq for free surgery in North and South America, Europe, Asia and other parts of the Middle East. Over 10,000 children have had direct surgery by hundreds of visiting teams from all over the world.

http://www.pcrf.net

Medical Aid for Palestinians Registered UK Charity No. 1045315

Established in the aftermath of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, today MAP UK delivers health and medical care to those worst affected by conflict, occupation and displacement. Working in partnership with local health providers and hospitals, MAP UK addresses a wide range of health issues and challenges faced by the Palestinian people. With offices located in Beirut, Ramallah and Gaza City, MAP UK responds rapidly in times of crisis, and works directly with communities in the longer term on health development.

http://www.map-uk.org/

Welfare Association Registered UK Charity No. 1020238

The Welfare (WA) Association is a non-profit organisation established in Geneva in 1983 to support Palestinian society in sustainable development. The Welfare Association is dedicated to making a distinguished contribution toward furthering the progress of the Palestinians, preserving their heritage and identity, supporting their living culture and building civil society. WA beneficiaries are the more than 4 million Palestinians who are served by Palestinian non-governmental organizations, community institutions and charitable organizations in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Galilee, Jaffa, Akka, Nazareth and Naqab, as well as in refugee camps in Lebanon.

www.welfareassociation.org.uk

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412