derry

I'm in Derry, Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland, depending on who you ask.)

Today I spent most of the day hanging around the Bogside, the working-class neighborhood that was the center of Derry's Civil Rights movement and the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre.  Since I was still getting my bearings yesterday, I didn't realize it was basically around the corner from where I was staying (although everything is kind of around the corner from everything else here--it's a small place.)

There's a small museum with artifacts from the Civil Rights era, directly across from a spot where several people were shot on Bloody Sunday (my tour guide describes how soldiers flanked the march and took aim at the fleeing crowd.)  The man who runs the museum is the brother of one of the martyrs, Michael Kelly, murdered at age 17.

Uniquely chilling among the museum's small collection is the raw audio recording taken by a journalist on Bloody Sunday, which plays in a continuous loop throughout the small space.  Sound has an unmatched ability to bring you into the immediacy of a moment.  I listened to nearly the whole thing, lingering long after I'd read all the plaques on the walls.  You can hear the day begin with jubilation, chants, speeches, songs, the joy of mass resistance.  Somewhere along the line, there is a transitional moment, when it's clear to those on tape that something is kicking off but the full horror of the day is not yet apparent.  Voices take on an eerie, detached calm--interspersed with hacking tear-gas coughing--that I recognize from my own thankfully far less lethal confrontations with police.  Go here, move there, get down.  Are you all right?  Can you see what's going on?  And then the screams begin and all dissolves into terror, rage and grief; audible shock from people who are not unused to political violence; a mother of four being talked down from running out into the streets to extract revenge (with her bare hands?) in between instructions to her children to stay away from the windows or they'll shoot you.

I wonder what affect it has on Mr. Kelly, listening to this day on continuous repeat every day.  He seems used to it.

As in many places where there have been sustained periods of oppression, there are former political prisoners who now give tours to tourists.  My guide, who was seven years old on Bloody Sunday, at age seventeen was given a 14-year prison sentence for suspected membership in the IRA.  He served 7 years before being released.  As a teenager he was arrested, he says, "14 or 15 times," held for a week of interrogation before being released.  Every single time they arrested him at home, the soldiers broke down the front door, because they could.  It was only years later that he found out his mum had also been active in the IRA while raising nine children.  Neither one of them knew of the other's involvement at the time.

He gives me a tour of the sundry murals and monuments, and other landmarks less obvious.  I wonder what it's like, walking around every day through the markers of battles and massacres in which your community was intimately involved.  I suppose it is like this in every conflict/post-conflict zone.  This is the street where I was searched.  This is the corner where we threw rocks. This is the car park where there, against that fence, unarmed people were shot while fleeing.  This is that intersection, now a benign traffic circle, where for three days and two nights during the Battle of the Bogside, the rooftop of the Rossville Flats delivered a non-stop barrage of rocks and Molotov cocktails, defending the barricades that kept the police out, a people's version of the cannons protruding from the fort the settlers built on the hill above the neighborhood.

From settlement patterns and enforced residential segregation to house raids, internment (which we would today call administrative detention) and hunger strikers, to tear gas, "rubber bullets" the size of Red Bull cans and rock-throwing teenagers, there are many, many similarities to Palestine.  It's no coincidence that the Palestinian flag flies over the Bogside along with the Irish and several others from oppressed nations.  In this context it's quite interesting to see a peace process that has contained some actual peace and not just process, and a divided city trying, slowly, to put itself back together again.  But that's the subject of another post.

the history of the occupy movement as told in viral videos

Thanks to the ubiquity of Youtube, Twitter, livestream and smartphones with enough power to shoot a feature film, the Occupy movement has been one of the most citizen-documented in history.  In fact, almost all of its iconic images so far have been captured by citizen/activist/independent journalists.

Here, in roughly chronological order, are 16 videos that I think best tell the story of Occupy's first two months.  They are rather New York-centric, as that's where I live.  I'm sure you have your own list--why don't you share it?

1. Tony Baloney's 9/24 pepper spray rampage.  The video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying trapped and clearly non-threatening protesters one week after Occupy Wall Street began stoked outrage and built instant sympathy for the movement.



2. October 1 on the Brooklyn Bridge.  Whether it was an intentional police trap or not, it produced a New York Post headline for the ages: "S#!t Hits the Span."



3. October 5 Labor Solidarity Rally.  The multiracial, union-backed 20,000-person crowd announced Occupy as a mass movement.


4. October 14 defense of Zuccotti Park.  After not one but two emails from the AFL-CIO essentially urging civil disobedience, thousands of people poured into the park in the early morning hours to prevent a scheduled "cleaning."  Shortly before the deadline for eviction, the park's owners announced that they were "satisfied with the condition of the park."  The sentiment of the moment was somewhere along the lines of "Holy shit. We actually won something!"



5. Occupy Times Square/October 15 Global Day of Action.  The massive turnout for a rally that never even had a printed flyer smashed everyone's expectations.



6. Occupy the DOE shuts down the Panel on Educational Policy.  Perhaps I am a bit biased toward my teacher comrades, but as far as I can tell this is the first use of the mic check as a tool of disruption.



7. Riot police attack Occupy Oakland.  The October 25 assault critically injured Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen and reminded many of us of shit we've only seen in Palestine.  It marked the opening shot in a wave of escalated repression aimed at shutting down Occupy encampments.  But the story wasn't over...



8. Occupy Oakland calls a general strike.  One day after the brutal police attack that cleared the encampment, thousands of Occupy Oakland supporters marched back to the newly-renamed Oscar Grant Plaza.  In a 1,500-person general assembly, they voted overwhelmingly to call a general strike for November 2.



9. November 2: Occupy shuts down the Port of Oakland.



10. Scott Walker gets mic checked.  They didn't have a port to shut down.  Their former-Obama-apparatchik mayor won't even let them lie down on the sidewalk.  But Occupy Chicago made their mark by helping the mic check go viral.  And it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.



11. Berkeley students stand their ground against police brutality.  What's remarkable about this video is not the riot cops who seem intent on causing some organ damage, but the fact that students held their ground and eventually forced the cops to back down.



12. Defense of Occupy Portland.  Thousands showed up and defended the encampment from riot cops all through the night.  The cops waited until the crowd thinned in the morning and then attacked, clearing the encampment, but not before the world saw this show of mass defiance.



13. Clearing of Zuccotti Park.  Of all the video shot of the NYPD's paramilitary operation in the pre-dawn hours of November 15, this one wins for its soundtrack.

the raid on zuccotti park from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.


14. Pepper spraying of UC Davis students. The cold-blooded attack on students who were sitting in on their own quad led to a call for a UC-wide student strike on November 28.



15. President Obama gets mic checked.  Although the pre-screened crowd eventually drowns out the mic check with chants of "O-ba-ma!," this should serve as an early warning to all presidential candidates, including the incumbent.



16. November 17 Occupy Wall Street "bat signal" on the Brooklyn Bridge.  As 35,000 people marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, guerrilla video artists working from the apartment of a single mom in the Brooklyn projects projected a message of hope onto the Verizon building to celebrate Occupy's two-month birthday.

five points on the occupy movement

I bet some of you have been checking back here, expecting me to write something about Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement.  The truth is that events have been moving so quickly that it's been hard to find a moment to stop, step back and analyze--and when I do I'm usually doing that with other activists and not on a blog.

There has been a lot written about this movement already--SocialistWorker.org is now daily required reading if you want to keep up--and so much has happened that it is really hard to sum things up.  I feel like some sort of summary post is necessary before going into more detail about things like the raid on Zuccotti/Liberty Park, which, astoundingly, happened only about ten days ago.  So I want to start with five general points about Occupy.

1. Occupy is a movement against class inequality and class oppression--in particular, against the austerity, budget cuts, and permanent high unemployment and high debt that the global ruling class sees as the only solution to the global financial crisis.  This is why it's spread so quickly and so widely--because despite the fact that we're not supposed to use the C-word in America, there is an enormous, untapped reserve of class anger boiling just under the surface.

One of the most powerful achievements of the movement is the sense of class identity, class solidarity and class anger that has come to the surface in a remarkably short period of time.  All you have to do is look at the We Are The 99% blog to see this.  There are over 200 pages of posts on it now.  Over and over again, the stories boil down to the same basic content: "I did everything right.  I worked hard.  And now I'm screwed, desperate, debt-ridden.  This cannot go on."  In these handwritten testimonials from all over the country, you can see the sham politics of individual responsibility breaking down before your eyes.  People are starting to realize that it isn't their personal failing if they can't find a job, stay out of debt, make ends meet for their family.  It's the fault of a system that's stacked against us.

While Occupy has some echoes of the global justice movement, it is profoundly different because this time we're not fighting in solidarity with victims of neoliberalism in the Global South.  This time the victims are us.  The policies that financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank used to foist on developing nations have come home with a vengeance and are now being visited on huge swaths of the populations of Europe and North America.  The ruling class (or, if you don't want to use the C word, the 1%) have been waging class war against us, and for the first time in a generation, we are getting a glimpse of what it could look like if our side fought back on a mass scale.  The struggle is still primarily a street movement.  It has not yet reached the point of production (through strikes, factory occupations, etc.).  But sooner or later, it will.

2. Occupy is not like other movements.  In fact, it's not like any movement most people alive today have been involved in, unless you are old enough to have been an activist in the 1960s.  Even for those of us who are seasoned activists, the idea of weekly and often daily protests, and of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people involved in organizing on a daily basis, in dozens of cities across the US, is something new.  Add to that the fact that the vast majority of these protests are unpermitted and frequently face intense levels of police violence--as intense as any I've seen in the US--and you have a whole generation of activists (both new people and those who've been around for a while) on a very steep learning curve out of sheer necessity.  Regardless of what comes out of this movement in terms of concrete victories, a new generation of the left is being forged, and it is so long overdue.

3. Occupy is more than the encampments, but the encampments are important.  One of the great things about this movement is the fact that you can now put "occupy" in front of almost anything and people will have some general recognition of what that means.  While the permanent encampments in parks and public places are one element of the movement, they are not the whole movement.  Students have occupied campuses, using both encampments and other tactics to protest tuition hikes, budget cuts, and the treatment of campus workers.  Teachers in New York launched an ongoing Occupy the DOE campaign to protest school closings and privatization.  One of their first actions was to use the now-ubiquitous "mic check" to shut down a meeting of the unelected, Bloomberg-appointed Panel for Education Policy in late October.  Since then, activists across the country have mic checked Scott Walker, Eric Cantor, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Israeli propagandists, and even President Obama.  At the same time, large national and international days of action have brought tens of thousands (collectively, probably hundreds of thousands just in the US) into the streets every couple of weeks--in New York on October 5 (20,000), October 14 (several thousand at the crack of dawn for an emergency defense of Liberty Plaza), October 15 (up to 100,000 in what became a massive unpermitted street party in Times Square), November 2 (several thousand in solidarity with the general strike call from Oakland), and November 17 (32,000 according to the police scanners).  When you add in the countless smaller protests of a few dozen to a few hundreds that are an almost daily occurrence, the combined scale and pace of these mobilizations is unlike anything at either the height of the global justice or antiwar movements.

While the movement stretches well beyond the encampments, the role of the tent cities as (semi-)permanent organizing centers should not be underestimated.  At the height of its development, Liberty Plaza became both a fairly impressive self-organized community and a vital political gathering space.  It had a library of 5,000 books, a thoroughly-stocked kitchen that served probably hundreds of free meals a day, clean energy via bike generators, a multi-faith sacred space, a media center and an info tent keeping tabs on the times and locations of countless meetings, training, discussion groups and protest events happening each day.  Far more important than any of these, it was the central, identifiable place where new people came to talk politics and get involved in the movement, and where activists who had been slogging away at small struggles for years could form powerful connections of solidarity and shared interests.  It was a place where people came to teach and learn, to debate and strategize, to start to figure out what they thought about the world and how to change it.  The hunger for knowledge, history, books, newspapers, for ideas and learning, was palpable.  In a country where collective political space is virtually nonexistent, the existence of such an organizing hub in the very shadow of Wall Street was incredibly powerful--and ultimately, too dangerous to be allowed.

The police know what they are doing when they attack the encampments.  By destroying the physical infrastructure of the Occupy movement, they're also attacking our ability to organize.  "We built a community there, and they destroyed our institutions," said one activist after the NYPD razed Liberty Plaza, and she was right.  Destroying an encampment physically scatters the movement, as people spend time in jail or supporting those in jail, trying to reclaim seized possessions, finding other places to sleep, etc.  It's intended to send a message that the reclaiming of space for purposes of organizing resistance will not be tolerated, and that basic democratic rights like freedom to assemble will themselves barely be tolerated at all.

4. There is an intense, sustained, nationally coordinated police offensive against Occupy.  There had been police violence against Occupy protesters from the start--one of the movement's most iconic images remains the pepper-spraying of several young women at a protest in New York one week after the movement's birth.  But as it moved into its second month of existence, the movement faced a highly coordinated wave of repression, which started in late October in Oakland and peaked with the clearing of Zuccotti Park in a military-style raid in the early morning hours of November 15.  This systematic nationwide assault, aimed at destroying as many of the encampments as possible, was coordinated, it seems, through conference calls organized by a think tank called the Police Executive Research Forum, whose board of directors reads like a who's who of the architects of American police repression since the birth of the global justice movement.  It has been accompanied by a secondary offensive of campus police against student protesters--most notably at Berkeley, UC Davis and CUNY--aimed at preventing the Occupy movement from getting a new foothold on campuses.

5. This is only the beginning.  Regardless of what happens with the physical encampments, the spirit of the Occupy movement has already penetrated a very broad layer of society very quickly.  One of the strengths of Occupy is its broadness.  It's a generalized revolt against the sense that a tiny elite (what Marxists would call the ruling class) control both the financial system and the political system.  There are all kinds of debates and varying points of view about how the levers of economic and political power came to be so closely interlinked, and whether they can ever be separated (ie. is it really possible to "get money out of politics," or is it impossible without fundamental change because the political system is set up by and for the economic elite and not "the people" as we're taught in Civics class?)  These debates will continue for a long time, as this is a new and growing movement.  But new manifestations of the Occupy spirit are popping up every day.

The challenge now will be to bring the defiance and creativity of Occupy to every struggle--against budget cuts, school closings, foreclosures and evictions, incidents of police brutality and racism, campus struggles, and most importantly to any strikes and labor struggles that emerge.  Things may quiet down in some places over the winter--or they may not.  I would not be surprised if we see another massive wave of struggle in the spring, perhaps culminating at the NATO/G8 meeting in Chicago in May--a meeting of the global 1% if there ever was one.  I would also not be surprised in the least if the next wave of struggle focuses on something no one could have ever predicted.  What we do know is that the US has finally--finally--joined the global revolt against neoliberalism in a serious way.

We also know that a true mass movement in the US would involve not just thousands or tens of thousands of people, but millions.  What we have seen in the past two months is just a small taste of the struggles to come.  But (to steal from Sherry Wolf) it tastes good.

the night they killed troy davis

The American justice system murdered Troy Davis on Wednesday, September 21, at 11:08pm.

Many of us have been following Troy's case for years.  I won't repeat all the facts--you can read them here and here if you don't know--but suffice to say that in the state of Georgia, a Black man accused of killing a white cop can be sentenced to death despite the fact that there is not a shred of physical evidence linking him to the crime and seven of the nine witnesses who originally implicated him have since recanted their testimony, declaring in sworn affidavits that they were coerced and threatened by police into naming Troy Davis as the killer.

The racism and cruelty at work in Troy Davis's case were so blatant, the barbarity of the system so obvious, that it struck a chord with many people.  In the past few years Amnesty International and the NAACP took up the case as well, and the number of people who knew about Troy Davis skyrocketed.  He was almost put to death three times--once coming within 90 minutes of execution.  Each time, a mass movement saved his life.

The week before the execution date was a frantic flurry of calls, emails, faxes to anyone who could be pressured to stop the execution.  Troy's life had been saved by public pressure before.  This time awareness of the case was bigger than ever, and it was his last chance.  If ever a movement needed to do its job, the time was now.  We appealed to the DA, the judge, the Georgia Board of Paroles, the governor, the Supreme Court, Obama.  In London and Paris, people rallied outside US embassies.  A Georgia state senator called on the prison workers who carry out the execution to strike and refuse to kill an innocent man.  We know they all must have heard us.  But Wednesday came and there was silence in response.

The night they killed Troy Davis, we canceled all other political plans and marched through Harlem, from the state office building to St. Mary's Church.  As we marched down 125th St. chanting "We are all Troy Davis" and "They say death row, we say hell no!", we couldn't hand out flyers about Troy's case fast enough.

Some two hundred people packed into the main sanctuary at St. Mary's.  Luckily this is Harlem and you don't need to be quiet in church.  We chanted, shaking the rafters.  As we lit candles and waited for a screen to be set up in front of the altar to watch the Democracy Now! livestream from outside the prison in Georgia, the pastor spoke and rang the church bell, over and over, for what must have been at least a minute.  We all fell silent, listening to the bell toll.  It wasn't a joyful sound.  It was mourning and distress.

Then the livestream was up and we were connected, connected to all those people, hundreds of people, outside the remote prison where Georgia does its killing.  Troy's family--his sisters Kim Davis and Martina Correia (who has battled breast cancer and the racist criminal justice system simultaneously for the past ten years), his teenage nephew DeJuan, who speaks with the maturity of a man twice his age--were all outside the prison with us.  They were not allowed inside to watch the state of Georgia kill their loved one, although the family of the dead cop was.

We waited.  As the 7pm execution time drew near, everyone held their breath.  Many people in the church were crying, all united in grief for someone most of us had never met.

Then, suddenly, a few minutes after seven, people in Georgia began cheering. There was confusion, hoping-against-hope excitement, Amy Goodman trying to figure out what was going on, then someone from somewhere yelled, "He got a stay!"  The church erupted, everyone was on their feet, people cheering, crying, chanting "The people united will never be defeated!"  Ben Jealous of the NAACP says the American justice system has worked.  For one brief moment--maybe two or three minutes--we believed we had saved him.  Then we found out it wasn't true.

Troy had not received a stay of execution, we learned.  It was just a reprieve--a temporary order to hold the needle while the Supreme Court deliberated.

The momentary elation turned into anxiety.  Everyone is waiting, waiting.  If the uncertainty is unbearable for us, what must it be like for Troy's family?  What must it be like for Troy?  Is he already strapped to the table where a doctor from Rainbow Medical Associates will pump three kinds of poison into his veins--the first to put him in a coma, the second to paralyze him, and the third to stop his heart?  He is only forty-two.  He's spent half his life in prison.  Despite all the calming words to friends and family and supporters about being at peace and right with God, can you ever really be ready to die?

We waited and waited.  Democracy Now! kept broadcasting, even though they were scheduled to end at eight.  There was a rumor news would come at 8:30.  No news came.  We learned this temporary state of being held between life and death can last up to a week.  If the Supreme Court is deliberating it must be good, right?  It must mean we are having an impact, that he still has a chance.  Right?

It had been a long night and most of us had come straight from work to the protest.  Around 9:30, when it seemed like no news will come that night, some of us left the church to get something to eat and drink.  We were sitting in the bar around 10:30 when the text messages and Twitter updates hit.  With no dissenting opinions, the Supreme Court had rejected Troy's appeal.  He would be killed tonight.  And half an hour later, he was.

Now the momentary delay seemed not like a victory at all but premeditated sadism, four hours of torture added on to a coldblooded murder.  Did they plan it like this, waiting until it was late at night so there wouldn't be a riot?  The American justice system had worked, all right--exactly the way it was designed to.  To reinforce the idea that they're stronger, they're in control, and they can kill you--especially if you are Black, brown, or poor.

The next day there was an emergency response protest at Union Square.  It was scheduled to start at 5.  By 5:05 when I arrived, there were already 200 people gathered, and they were angry.  The murder hit a deep nerve and you can feel, suddenly, how all the buried rage at every injustice and brutality the system inflicts on us can come to the surface very quickly.  You begin to understand how urban rebellions start--people reach a point where they just can't take it anymore.  The atmosphere is explosive.  Before anything at all happens, you can just tell--if the cops decide to start something, people will fight back.

It's clear people were not going to be satisfied with just hanging around Union Square.  At some point people take to the streets.  The crowd had swollen to between 500 and 1,000 at this point.  Unsurprisingly, the cops were not happy--Troy Davis is a cop killer to them.  They boxed people in on a side street and attacked, hitting and shoving people, trying to cut the march in half.  At first people panicked and fled, but then enough people held their ground, too angry to be scared, others found their courage, and the march pushed through police lines chanting "We are all Sean Bell, NYPD go to hell!"  They marched for two hours, in the street, blocking traffic, all the way down Broadway.  Some video is posted below.

I've been involved, on and off, in protests against the death penalty and the criminal injustice system for ten years now.  These struggles often become very emotional, because they're built around individual cases; you get to know the person you're trying to save, their family, their friends, and the stakes for winning or losing are quite literally life and death.  But something felt different this time around.  People were not just devastated when Troy was killed.  They were furious, and they were ready to fight back.  Not just against the death penalty but against the whole racist system of mass incarceration--what people are increasingly calling the New Jim Crow.  Against cops who can get away with murder and rape.  It's too early to say if this will be a turning point, and toward what exactly.  But something is smoldering, under the surface, and it's only going to take a few sparks to set it off.

video evidence

Two of my comrades on the Welcome to Palestine fly-in were D Murphy and Fiona Williams, who are Irish and English but live in Swansea, Wales.  Because D is a badass, she brought a hidden camera and filmed a bunch of our detention and prison experience, which has now been edited into a great 10-minute video.  So you can now have a look at everything I was trying to describe in the various reports I've written about the experience.

I have to say, there is something pretty incredible about video evidence, about being able to show people a photographic image of things that have only existed in your head as memories up until this point.  It makes what was a pretty surreal experience seem actually real.

the long version

of the detention story is up at Socialist Worker here.  I was also honored to have a short interview up on Ma'an News, conducted by independent journalist par excellence Mya Guarnieri.

I am hoping to have time to write some more reflective, less strictly journalistic stuff here soon, but as I'm heading out of the US again on Friday night--to Beirut for the Viva Palestina Summer University of Palestine--it may have to wait until I come back.

out of israeli detention

There have been no updates here because I have been traveling, in prison, and then traveling again.

I am now back in the US and will post a detailed report shortly.  Here is the short version.

Despite fears about a no-fly list created by the Israeli government (which did keep several hundred mostly French activists from boarding their planes to Palestine), our group of about 15 Brits, Irish and Americans successfully boarded our flight at Luton airport on July 8, with one exception: American Michael Rabb was kept off the plane by security at the last minute.

We arrived at Ben Gurion Airport and were pulled aside for detention almost immediately upon arriving at passport control--I was pulled aside after I simply stated my destination as Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem.  We were detained for 4 hours in a basement immigration holding area, then for another 3 hours on a very hot, poorly ventilated and roach-infested prison bus with no toilet access and no water until we pounded on the doors to demand it.  While we were waiting with about 40 French, Belgian, American and UK citizens in the immigration holding area, a large number of police and Border Patrol officers entered and provoked a confrontation by trying to remove a French man of Arab descent from the room by himself, against his will.  When his comrades tried to nonviolently prevent him from being removed, the police used it as an excuse to attack us, hitting a few people and shoving around many others.  A small solidarity demonstration of brave Israeli activists at the airport was also viciously attacked by police and bystanders.

At about 11pm Friday night we were driven to the Givon immigration detention center in Ramla, 30km from Tel Aviv.  At 1am, after having been detained for 9 hours, we finally received food, which prison guards filmed us eating so they could show how well they were treating us.  I was processed and put in a six-woman cell around 2:30am.

We were held in Givon prison for 4 nights and 4 days, until we were finally deported around 8pm Tuesday.  Throughout the whole process--100 hours of detention--we were never told the legal basis for our detention or shown any deportation paperwork.  We did not get our passports back until we were sitting on the plane about to depart.  Most people's passports were stamped ENTRY DENIED; mine and a few others were stamped with nothing at all.  It's as if I never entered the country, except for the fact that I was in prison for 4 days and now most certainly have a big fat Shabak file.  We were not given any information on our legal status or ability to enter Palestine in the future; we are still trying to get definitive answers on whether we have been banned from re-entering.

Throughout it all we had wonderful lawyers from Addameer, who put up with intimidation, humiliation and harassment from the prison guards in order to advise us pro bono.  Elf shukran to Anan and Samer for their determined help.

The spirit of solidarity and cooperation among the prisoners on the womens' block was incredible.  I am also deeply humbled by the many messages of concern and support I have received via email, Facebook, Twitter and phone, many from people I do not know personally.  I believe everyone has come out of the experience empowered and more determined to continue fighting for justice for Palestinians.

While we were detained, the Israeli government passed a repressive anti-boycott law, the Israeli navy attacked an unarmed ship accompanying fishermen in Gaza, and the reports are that Gaza was heavily shelled tonight.  The night after we were deported, this was the scene in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.

I will write more soon, but just posting this brief update to let everyone know I am safe and well.  Free Palestine!