Aloha Palestine

Since June 2007, Israel has imposed a near total closure on the Gaza Strip. This violates the right to freedom of movement for 1.5 million Palestinian residents - including hundreds of students, who lose their chance to study abroad.  It also means that people in Gaza die of medical ailments that cannot be treated in Gaza but are readily available elsewhere in the world.  Aloha Palestine intends to change this reality by transporting these people as our top priority.

Others in Gaza are struggling to survive under this siege, which amounts to ‘collective punishment’ under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The border closures by Israel and more recently Egypt have effectively created the largest concentration camp in the world; understanding the fact that prisons hold convicted criminals whereas concentration camps hold people who belong to national, ethnic or religious groups deemed enemies of the state. As a result, Palestinian citizens in Gaza, the majority of whom are children, receive only the most basic humanitarian items through their land borders. Virtually no exports are permitted to leave, paralyzing the economy; all this whilst reduced fuel supplies and the lack of spare parts for machinery have impacted on sewage treatment, waste collection, water supply and medical facilities.  

More than three-quarters of Gaza’s residents are forced by the illegal closures to rely on food aid. Aid agencies report that transporting even these basic supplies is becoming increasingly difficult due to the bureaucratic demands made by the Israeli government. Even the United Nations has been unable to deliver food aid because of the siege and thus hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who rely on this food aid are going hungry. Former American president, Jimmy Carter has said that Palestinians in Gaza are being “starved to death,” receiving fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa.

“It’s an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. It’s a crime… I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on.” Jimmy Carter

The people of Gaza are being suffocated, unable to breathe the oxygen of freedom.

University students are among roughly 6,400 Gazans who possess foreign citizenship, permanent residency, work permits, student visas or university admissions abroad, who have been trapped in Gaza since June, 2007 when Hamas took control of the territory and Israel and Egypt sealed their borders.

Every aspect of life is affected by this restriction of movement on goods and people. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) say the health system is “collapsing” and has suffered a “severe deterioration” under the pressure of shortages of equipment and spare parts, fuel and trained staff. Since the siege began, 200 patients have died waiting for travel permits that would have allowed them life saving treatment outside Gaza. The very first Aloha Palestine voyage will mark the beginning of the end of this reality; we will save lives from the outset, we will create justice in the face of great injustice.

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for someone else’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” - Martin Luther King Jr.