30 January 09

Sydney café will be turned into exhibition gallery to collect “School Bags” for Gaza

Despite a massive imbalance in armaments, Israel declared a ceasefire after achieving only a minimal impact on the military capability of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions. This has to be seen as a shameful defeat of Israel – particularly when considering the horrific war crimes it committed in attempting to meet its military objectives.

This defeat must deflate the Israeli’s Middle East “Super Power Complex” – and the fear and destruction it brought in the Middle East for more than half a century.

We also believe that this victory would mean the end of any dream of creating New Middle East, based on ending any resistance to the aggression and occupation in a bid to facilitate looting the area’s resources and ending any Arab national dreams of freedom and sustainable development based on basis of social justice.

The result of the barbaric attacks on Gaza had reversed effects. It is widely believed now that this Palestinian resistance victory will indeed create a New Middle East – but one of a totally hue: a region free of occupation and religious extremists

In this instance the network condemn all who bet on the possibility of defeating the Palestinian resistance and the possibility of disarming it in less than a week. Those include the illegal Palestinian government in Ram Allah, regressive Arabic regimes and Westerners politicians who were dreaming of bringing back the era of colonisation to rob nations’ resources by direct military occupation. We saw how many of those politicians used the slogan of “Israel has the right to defend itself” to justify Israeli barbaric massacres.

Locally, we saw near total silence from Australian politicians – rather than unequivocal condemnation of Israeli barbaric massacres. Apart from Labor MP, Julia Irwin, all other Australian politicians were silent in one way or other. Some chose to side publicly with Israel. Other chose to hide behind “understanding the rights of Israel to defend itself against Hamas missiles”. It was up to one courageous Mrs Julia Irwin to condemn the occupation as the cause of the cycle of violence, instead of only condemning the Israeli use of “disproportionate force”.

We, in the SJN, had condemned from the first day the Israeli barbaric actions against Gazan. We also emphasise here that we will do all in our capacity to continue supporting Palestinians until they enjoy freedom and dignified life, as any other nation in this world

In this regard an exhibition about Israeli massacres against Palestinians and other people in the region has been orgainsed in coordination with Titanic Café, Sydney. During this exhibition we will collect donations to buy school bags for children of Gaza. These donations will be given to Australian international aid organisations to be delivered to Gaza.

The exhibition will be on Saturday 31 January 09 from 10 am – 6 pm. The official speeches will be at 2 pm. The address is: Titanic café, 49 Raymond St, Bankstown.

For any further information, you can contact Jamal Daoud, network’s convenor, on 0424 163 667