NEWS

Sacramento WILPF member Esther Franklin before her arrest at the August 6, 2019, protest at Livermore Lab. Photo by Francisco Dominguez.

By Ellen Schwartz
Sacramento WILPF 

On August 6, 2019, 94-year-old Sacramento WILPF member Esther Franklin joined 200 Bay Area peace and justice advocates, capping a day of speeches, dance, and somber reflection by offering herself for arrest on the 74th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The event, sponsored by the Livermore Conversion Project, Tri-Valley CAREs, and others, took place outside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where today the Trump Administration is spending billions to create new nuclear warheads.

Click here to view a slideshow of images taken by professional photographer Francisco Dominguez before, during, and after Esther’s arrest.

Participants gathered at 8 am to hear the keynote address by Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst and whistleblower who shone a bright light on U.S. policy and helped end the Vietnam War when he released the Pentagon Papers.

Nobuaki Hanaoka, an atomic bomb survivor, was the rally’s special guest speaker. Hanaoka, now living in the Bay Area, was an infant when the bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. His mother and sister died from illnesses linked to radiation poisoning and his brother died at age 39 from premature aging associated with fallout from the bomb.

Following the program, the participants, wearing signs with the names of bombing victims, marched to the Livermore Lab West Gate. At the gate, Japanese activists led a traditional bon dance, followed by a commemorative “die-in” and symbolic chalking of the bodies to mimic the “shadows” left by men, women and children vaporized by the A-bomb blast.

In the final action of the day, 42 people, several using wheelchairs and walkers—Esther among them—stepped or rolled inside the gate and were arrested, while others provided legal witness and support.

Photo: Esther Franklin after her arrest. Photo by Francisco Dominguez.

As has been the case for many years now, the arrests were conducted without roughness or fuss; the arrestees searched and issued citations and promptly returned to the main group. However, the police were decked out in full riot gear, a sign that the so far symbolic nature of these arrests was entirely at the discretion of the authorities. Congratulations, Esther Franklin, on putting your beliefs into action!

Palestinian children hold candles as they sit on the rubble of a house destroyed during Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on May 7, 2019. Photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib / Shutterstock.com.

By Ellen Rosser
WILPF US Middle East Committee

The situation in Gaza is almost unlivable. Indeed, the UN predicts it will be totally unlivable by 2020. Already, ninety percent of the water is not drinkable due to sewage and ocean seepage. Babies therefore are dying of diarrhea, and a disease called “blue baby Syndrome” is increasingly being seen due to contaminated water. Many older children are also sick with diarrhea.

More than 500,000 Gazans are children, more than 50% of that area’s population. Between 2000 and 2013, Gaza’s population grew by over 687,000. By 2020, the region is projected to have 2.1 million people who will increasingly be attempting to survive without food and safe water (watch a PBS News Hour report about this dire situation).

Since Egypt destroyed the tunnels through which Gaza got its food and other supplies, people have been unable to rebuild houses destroyed in Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza. Building materials are in short supply. And there are only about four hours of electricity a day, since the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not paying for electricity in Gaza since the split between the PA and Hamas.
    
As a result, some hospitals have had to close, and the remaining ones have been overwhelmed by the number of wounded. Israeli soldiers shoot across the border and kill or wound Palestinian demonstrators weekly at their Friday demonstrations. Indeed, at least 252 Gazans have been killed by Israeli sharpshooters, including 31 children, the youngest aged four. Three medics and two journalists have been killed, while 25,522 people have been injured, many of them intentionally shot in the knee. Due to the overwhelming number of injuries and the closure of many hospitals, the leg ends up requiring amputation in many of these cases.   

Moreover, recently the PA announced it would no longer send drugs to Gaza hospitals. And access to medical care outside Gaza is very restricted; Israel denies 40% of those applying for medical visas to enter Israel for treatment, and Egypt also restricts entry.

The US facilitates these atrocities by giving Israel $3.8 billion a year in aid while eliminating aid to Palestinian refugees. In Gaza, 70% of the people (1.4 million) are refugees, and since the US cut its funding for UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was established to provide aid to Palestinian refugees), Palestinian refugees in Gaza and elsewhere have been hurt.

What can we do? Call your representative and ask that she/he support H.R. 2839, a bill that would restore US funding for UNRWA and that will also provide necessary appropriations to the State Department and support other needed programs such as the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Israeli Arab Scholarship Program.

For more information, contact ellen.rosser@gmail.com

At a July 2 MoveOn demonstration in Palo Alto, Judy Adams spoke about the inhumane conditions at immigration detention camps and about WILPF’s involvement in peace and justice issues. Photo by Jack Owicki.

By Judy Adams
Peninsula/Palo Alto Branch

I have been organizing small (5-15 participants) weekly Friday noontime “peaceful sidewalk protests” at a busy street corner in Palo Alto since WILPF became a partner with the Poor People’s Campaign in 2018. And, of course, Peninsula/Palo Alto branch members also participate in other larger local demonstrations and rallies in coalition with other groups.

This summer, I joined forces with Ruth Robertson, organizer of the Palo Alto Raging Grannies Action League (not formally affiliated with WILPF, but it includes some our branch members). Together we took on co-sponsorship of a July 2 MoveOn National Action Day event (#ClosetheCamps) to protest immigrant family detention and deportation, and to call for inhumane detention camps to be closed. The event brought nearly 300 participants to the same street corner where we have our small Friday demonstrations, our biggest turnout so far! 

We had hoped that our local peace and justice center might join us as co-sponsors, but at an earlier peace center planning meeting, I learned that MoveOn didn’t consider the center’s sponsorship sufficiently “grassroots.” So Ruth and I decided to forge ahead and we organized a very successful grassroots effort.

Photo: Raging Grannies Action League members at the July 2 event. Photo by Jack Owicki.

The event was spirited and peaceful. We made sure that the participants stayed on the public sidewalk, didn’t block crossings, and crossed safely at intersections. The marchers filled both sides of the streets at the busy intersection for more than an hour, and were welcomed by waves, thumbs-up signals, peace signs from bicyclists, and enthusiastic honks from drivers. Protesters held signs that included messages such as “Families Belong Together,” “Stop Torturing Children,” and “No Cages, No Walls.”
 
The event got good press in The Stanford Daily, since many Stanford students participated in the demonstration.

Jack Owicki took several photos at the event and posted them on probonophoto.org. The Pro Bono website contains more images from the event including some that provide a sense of the size of the crowd.

In other news, while on a road trip I participated in a parade in Silverton, OR, near Hiroshima Day. Local peace group participants included WILPFers and members of Veterans for Peace and Fellowship of Reconciliation. In the photo, I’m in the center flashing the peace sign in front of the FOR sign and the Dove.

Bart Bolger from VFP took this picture on August 7 at the Van Buren Street Bridge in Corvallis, OR, at the end of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Never Again vigil.

By Maegan Prentice
Corvallis WILPF

On August 7, 2019, Corvallis (OR) WILPF, along with Corvallis Veterans for Peace (VFP), hosted the 38th Hiroshima/Nagasaki Never Again memorial, a moment each year when our community affirms its intention that nuclear weapons will never be used again. This year’s event was one of the largest.

Before the formalities, people moved through the displays of photos and information that have been collected over the last decade. This year a woman from Japan performed on the koto helping to create a deeper sense of the culture that had been so deeply impacted. Once people were seated, four speakers delivered their messages and the evening ended with a candlelight procession.

The speakers represented several different views of the nuclear issue and explained why nuclear weapons must never be allowed to be used again. Fred Schafer of the National Associate of Atomic Veterans shared the experience of witnessing an actual explosion from a ship full of sailors in the Pacific. For decades these men were forbidden to talk about their experience and kept the horror buried deep inside. Pat Harwood is one of the Downwinders who spoke to the physical problems of the people who grew up downwind and down river from the Hanford Nuclear facility. Russ Yamada shared a very personal story of his grandmother and the beautiful city of Hiroshima that she grew up in that disappeared in a moment. The last speaker was the mayor of Corvallis, Biff Trager, who spoke of the power of people working together to create peace. “We have to eliminate nuclear weapons so we can survive to build a world of peace,” he said.

As in many years past, the ceremony ended with everyone reading the Community Affirmation, a communal commitment to peace. No one knows for sure who wrote the Community Affirmation or when it was used for the first time, but the words convey the heartfelt intentions of all the people who have read it over the years.

After the ceremony candles were lit and a procession formed to walk to the Van Buren Street Bridge over the Willamette River. A flotilla of kayaks with lanterns came down river under the bridge, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of sending lanterns down river to the ocean. This quiet procession and flotilla gave every person an opportunity to reflect on the experience and to realize they were not alone in their concerns.

Many people were involved in making this event a success. A special acknowledgement must go to Leah Bolger who took over the leadership of this year’s project. When asked why the evening was so important, she responded, “We have this ceremony to recommit ourselves to working against these weapons so they are never used again…We are the majority, we just need to make our congresspeople realize it.”

Everyone appreciated being in the presence of a community of people who hold the same vision. Different moments touched different people more intensely. Some of these intense moments related to a specific speaker’s story, and some moments related to the visuals and the music.

For me, personally, the moment that reflected the power of the whole evening came when Masumi Timson, the koto player, returned from the procession. I looked at her face and listened as she tried to express her feelings in English. She had been deeply moved and glad to have been invited to assist in the powerful experience of the evening.

If you’d like to know more about the event or the Community Affirmation please contact Leah Bolger at leahbolger@comcast.net.

Inset photo credit: Bart Bolger.