Freedom Summer Palestine Begins

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT

July 1, 2003
For Immediate Release

FREEDOM SUMMER PALESTINE 2003
Stop the Wall!

[Occupied Palestine] Training for Campaign Freedom Summer Palestine 2003 began today in Ramallah with twenty-three foreign civilians from the United States and the UK attending sessions given by a combination of Palestinian and international trainers. Currently 30 international ISM volunteers are already located throughout the West Bank and Gaza, and hundreds more are expected to join in the weeks to come.

In this 6 week campaign - July 1 through August 15, 2003, Palestinians are demanding their basic right to freedom of movement and will utilize nonviolent, direct-action to highlight, confront and challenge Israeli's brutal occupation policies that lock them in their homes, denying them the right to travel freely to home, work and school. Campaign Freedom Summer Palestine will specifically focus on the "security fence" that the Israeli government is building, which is actually an 8 meter high concrete wall that is to extend 360 kilometers, encircling Palestinian towns and villages, turning their ghettos into prisons. The path of the wall and the first phase of its construction have already led to the destruction of tens of thousands of olive and fruit trees, and the isolation and de facto confiscation of tens of thousands of dunams of Palestinian agricultural land, hundreds of greenhouses and dozens of underground water wells. While leaders talk about a "road map to peace" the Israeli government continues to draw a road map for the destruction of a future for Palestine.

Join the ISM, the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces and the Apartheid Wall Defense Committee on Thursday July 3 to block construction of the Apartheid Wall that will completely isolate three villages in the Tulkarem region: Nazlit Issa, Baqa Sharqiya, and Nazlit Abu Nar from the rest of the Palestinian villages.

Please meet at Baqa Sharqiya Municipality at 10:30am on Thursday, July 3. For more information contact: Arabic: 055 474 066 and 059 836 783 English: 067 361 708 or 064 309 753

For more information on the Freedom Summer Campaign, contact: Huwaida: 067-473-308 Ghassan: 052-595-319 ISM Office: 02-277-4602

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INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
http://www.palsolidarity.org

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." Robert F. Kennedy

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