Helena Cobban / Just World Educational – 2017-07-07 01:20:32
Gaza-51-Days Campaign to Run from July 7 to August 27
Helena Cobban / Just World Educational
(July 7, 2017) — This is a reminder that Just World Educational’s #Gaza51days campaign will be launching on Friday (July 7.) We’ve decided on a launch-time of 10 am Eastern (NYC) time, 5pm Palestine time.
This web-based campaign — carried out on social media and blogs — will continue for the full 51 days that memorialize Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza. It will have a narrative “arc” that ends by focusing on nonviolent political actions that people can take to help to #EndTheBlockade.
From July 7 through August 27, Just World Educational will be running a broad campaign of public information about the situation of the two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza. We aim to increase the understanding of world publics about these people’s plight and its causes, and to bolster the efforts that Palestinians and their allies around the world are making to end Gaza’s suffering.
This campaign will mark the anniversary of the 51-day military assault that Israel launched against Gaza three years ago, in July and August 2014. We will pursue it largely online and through social media. It will have one major hashtag: #Gaza51days, but we’ll also use other hashtags along the way, including #EndTheBlockade, #GazaUnlocked, #RememberAndAct, and so on…
We invite you to contribute to and amplify the #Gaza51days campaign in any way that feels comfortable to you!
The campaign will be divided into three phases, each lasting about 17 days:
In the first phase, we will expose the many levels of suffering that continue to be inflicted on Gaza’s residents to this day — from the current, draconian power cuts, through the limitations on rebuilding after the string of assaults Israel has launched against Gaza since 2006… through the deeply anti-family restrictions on travel… and back to the Nakba of 1948 which sent/concentrated so many Palestinians from elsewhere as refugees into Gaza…
In the second phase, we will point to humanitarian types of actions that concerned people around the world might take to ease Gazans’ suffering. This part of the campaign will also look at the limits on how useful any purely “humanitarian” action can be in a situation in which the Israeli occupation forces control every basic aspect of life in Gaza — and Israeli entities even profit handsomely from aid shipments sent into their totally captive market in Gaza.
In the third phase, we will explore nonviolent political actions people can take to help end the sufferings of the Gaza Palestinians once and for all. This phase of the campaign will require a clear-eyed and informed understanding of the political forces that cause the catastrophe in Gaza, so we’ll also be providing and pointing to strong analysis of the politics of the Gaza crisis throughout the whole of the #Gaza51days campaign.
We’re also hoping to stimulate (and host) vigorous discussions, both online and “in real life”, of which kinds of campaigns, coalitions, and organizing slogans can be most effective.
Here’s how we’ll be organizing the #Gaza51days campaign, and how you can join with it:
Here on the Just World Educational blog: We’ll have a regular series of posts on the campaign’s themes, here in this stream on the blog.
What you can do with/at our blog:
* Check back in with the blog frequently to see what’s new (or add the RSS feed to your feedreader.)
* Send in your comments and reactions to these posts. We are eager to hear everyone else’s ideas!
* Send us links to any resources you’d like us to feature in the blog — we know there’s a lot of thoughtful and informative content out there, and we’re eager to share it, too.
* Share any of the blog posts you find particularly informative with your friends “in real life”, or via social media.
Over at our Just World Educational Facebook page:
We’ll be sharing content and resources broadly (our own and other people’s — with due attribution, naturally!)… and interacting with all the Facebook “community” to build momentum for the campaign and have some great discussions about the best way forward.
* “Like” our Just World Educational page on FB, if you haven’t done so already.
* Actively check back with it and contribute to the great discussions we’ll be having there.
* Send us links to resources that you find particularly helpful or informative and tell us what is distinctive about them — or, how they could be yet further improved.
* Share the posts on the FB page widely with your own followers.
Over at our @JustWorldEd Twitter feed: We’ll be keeping a lively conversation going, sharing content and resources broadly (our own and other people’s — with due attribution, naturally!)… and generally building momentum for the campaign. We will also use the Twitter space to do as much as we can to memorialize those killed in the 2014 assault.
What you can do:
* Follow our “@JustWorldEd” account on Twitter, and check back with it frequently.
* Tweet your own ideas, reactions, and great content along with an @JustWorldEd tag so we can see, retweet, respond, and otherwise amplify them.
* Use our #Gaza51days hashtag as much as you can — and explain to anyone who asks what those 51 days signify.
* Send us other ideas for hashtags, as well.
We look forward to joining with a powerful coalition of friends around the world in renewing our commitment to #RememberAndActduring this #Gaza51days campaign. Please join us!
See more details about the campaign and how you can contribute to it, here. (Whether you’re active on the relevant social media or not, we invite you to support this campaign of pubic information by making a donation to Just World Ed. Learn how to do so, (a href=”http://justworldeducational.org/donate/”>here.)
In the #Gaza51days campaign we will actively synergize with and amplify all voices from Gaza and the voices of those working worldwide to #EndTheBlockade. Please share any relevant web-based materials with us via our Facebook page, our @JustWorldEd Twitter account, and our JWE blog . . . and we will be very happy to reshare/retweet them with full attribution to their creators!
We’re lucky that our sister organization Just World Books has lots of fine materials that we can use in this campaign. Plus, JWB is running a special 60%-off deal on their “Little Gaza Library” that will run for the whole 51 days of the campaign. (Check it out!)
We know that lots of other NGOs and Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGO’s), inside Palestine and worldwide, have been doing great work on Gaza, and we plan to create an annotated list of common resources that everyone can use and share during and after our campaign.
Organizations producing great content include:
* The Palestinian Center for Human Rights
* The Obliterated Families project (English and French)
* Gaza Unlocked
* CPDS-Gaza
* Gaza in Context
* We Are Not Numbers
* Gisha
* UN-OCHA
If your organization is not on this list, please forgive me — and send me a note or tag us at @JustWorldEdon Twitter, so we can add its website details and Twitter handle to our growing list of resources!
Here are some of our resources we’d love for you to share as the campaign launches:
Other Resources:
We will start releasing some specially produced short videos on Friday: Check for their release on our Twitterand Facebook accounts.
We’ll be releasing additional pieces of analysis of the Gaza situation at this stream on the JWE blog throughout the coming 51 days . . . along with new audio and video from and about Gaza.
Also: At the end of last week, I was part of a great conference at the UN on the Palestine Question. There was a very informative panel on Gaza there, featuring Noura Erakat, Nouriya Oswald, and others.
The video of that panel is now on the UN’s website, and can be accessed here (starting at 00:54:00).
We’ll be hoping to post some video-clips from that conference during the #Gaza51days campaign. In the meantime, you can get some flavor of the conference proceedings via these two posts on the JWE blog: 1, 2.
We’re all looking forward to a great campaign. Please join and support us!
