Champion of the Week: Gali Agnon

Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

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A Young Israeli Who Refuses to Be Silent and Insists She Must Personally Help Palestinians

Among the many wonderful young Israelis I met during my trip to Israel and occupied Palestine, Gali Agnon stands out as a bright spot on many levels. After serving in the Israeli army, this 20-year-old Israeli felt it her obligation to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian people and to do what she could to help them.

A dedicated peace activist committed to forging a solution in her conflicted part of the world, she takes a multi-faceted approach to her mission – bringing people together for cooperative assistance and support on farms, building awareness for the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank, and organizing meetings and gatherings that bring Israelis and Palestinians together in common purpose.

Clearly one of the most tangible contributions she
makes is in her role in helping Palestinian farmers take their produce to market. The Israeli Government does not allow Palestinians to come into Israel to sell their produce, so she has devised a system, where she creates a market for them – offering their vegetables and fruits for sale to the people in Israel, and then transferring the money from her sales to the Palestinian farmers.

In fact, the extensive Israeli military roadblocks and restrictions that I saw for myself make it next to impossible to effectively get from one place to another.

Gali and Citizen Paul at Israeli settlement

Palestinians are prisoners in their own land, facing constant threats and interrogations at every turn — apartheid revisited.*

On Saturday, June 21, Gali asked some of her Israeli and Palestinian friends to spend that Sabbath day helping those Palestinians whose homes were being demolished by the Israeli Government.

Just 10 days later – July 2, a Palestinian worker went on what has been called a killing rampage in Jerusalem. Not affiliated with any Palestinian organization and acting completely on his own, this 30-year old Palestinian, who fathered a child with a Jewish Israeli woman, and drove the tractor he normally used for his job constructing Israeli projects, to kill Israeli Jews – A PERPETUATING TRAGEDY THAT SPRINGS FROM HOPELESSNESS AND DESPERATION.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

(Text from Gali’s Invitation Below)

What would you do if you found a note posted on your door that
Within the next ten days your house will be destroyed?
To build and expand a house, it is required to have a building permit.
These permits are virtually never granted to Palestinians on the basis of various pretexts.
The result is that most Palestinian homes are illegally built, and have standing
Demolition orders against them.

Abed Raba from Wallaje is one of these thousands of people who have received
An order stating that the house he is living in is illegal, and he must present himself
Before the Office of Interior in order to explain why he has built illegally.
Otherwise, judicial and/or administrative measures will be taken against him –
Read: they will demolish his house. The cave where he lives is hundreds of years
Older and is located on his own lands in Wallaje, above the checkpoint near Ein Yal.

The place is a beautiful orchard of fruit trees, also used as
A meeting point for Israeli and Palestinians who have resolved
to meet in spite of racist and segregationist policies.

Obviously, this place does serve the political and economical interest of Israel –
Lands in Jewish hands – and so they are exploiting legal measures as if desiring
to build a neighborhood in order to force him out.