Second Day of Action against Israeli Company Importing Valentine’s Day Flowers, a press release from the International Solidarity Movement on February 11th, 2007, reported.
CARMEL-AGREXCO BLOCKADED
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/02/11/valentine-blockade/
When it comes to fighting against injustice, the British are no slouches, at least not for the few Brits, and it is always the few, who got up off their armchairs to take up the cause. In this case, the cause is the plight of the Palestinian people, whose life and liberties have been stolen from them in a slow but inexorable theft of their homes and lands through a long military occupation, Israel’s, one that is intended to accomplish nothing less than their dispossession, which, from the look at ground level, can mean their containment in a few walled-in Bantustans. Their centuries old attachment to this land will be over.
Isn’t it always the few who lead the rest of us, who wake us up and draw our attention to ongoing injustices around the world. The John Browns and Rosa Parks, the few called Freedom Riders who conquered their fear and mounted buses en route to Mississippi in the sixties, the Berrigans and the Cantonsville Nine, who risked imprisonment to halt a vile war, and now the few who have involved themselves in the Palestinian tragedy, like the Jewish boys and girls staging die-ins in Boston, or the Women in Black protesting an Israel Philharmonic concert in LA, and the volunteers from Jewish Voices for Peace and ISM from America and around the world, who venture into the Palestinian territories.
Here, I bring you just another episode in the lives of another group who belong to the few, thirteen British activists, as described in the press release from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM):
Thirteen Palestine solidarity protesters from London and Brighton are blockading the UK base of an Israeli agricultural export company Agrexco (UK) Ltd, Swallowfield Way, Hayes, Middlesex.
This is the second day of action against Agrexco on one of their busiest weekends of the year. Agrexco are dealing with large amounts of Israeli flowers in the build up to Valentine’s Day. On Saturday over a hundred protesters stood in front of the gates of the depot and deliveries had to be rescheduled.
Agrexco is Israel’s largest exporter of agricultural produce into the European Union, and is 50% Israeli state owned. It imports produce from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
This morning activists locked themselves to both gates of the Hayes depot. They were met with violence by private security guards from First Class Protection. The blockade is currently stopping all motor vehicle traffic in and out of the building.
Before taking part in this action many of the defendants had witnessed first hand the suffering of Palestinian communities under the brutal Israeli occupation. They do not accept the UK’s complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine and see the presence of this company as a violation of human rights.
BACKGROUND
Carmel-Agrexco is 50% owned by the state of Israel, and imports produce from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. At the same time Israeli forces have blocked Palestinian exports on grounds of `security’.
Israeli state sponsored settlements have appropriated land and water resources by military force from Palestinian farmers in a deliberate policy of colonial settlement.
In a hearing in September the judge ruled that Agrexco (UK) must prove that their business is lawful.
Watch a short video of the demonstration here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfQTbf80t9c
