Fantastic news!

Palestinian student Haneen Wishah has been granted a visa by the Israeli government, allowing her to travel from Palestine to Egypt, and she is now in Ireland preparing to start her course at the University of Ulster in Coleraine.

SDLP Youth urged everyone to sign a Trócaire petition to the Israeli ambassador earlier this month so we are delighted to hear that Haneen can now begin her Masters in Business Innovation scholarship.

Here’s what Haneen had to say:

Dear friend,

I want to address you like that because to me you are indeed a friend. You are somebody who helped to bring about something that I thought was impossible - as of almost one week ago I am out of Gaza!

I want to express my heartfelt thanks for all the efforts you made on my behalf - emails, phonecalls, faxes, meetings, letters, media interviews; everything that was done contributed to the decision by the Israeli military to let me out of Gaza to pursue my studies in the University of Ulster.

I am so grateful.

My Dad, who works for the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, has always said to me that we are made stronger because of the support of people all around the world.  Now I appreciate how true this really is.  You helped me to keep hope even in the darkest of times.

So I am grateful personally.  But I am also grateful as a Palestinian. All the actions which you took helped to highlight my plight but also the plight of 1.5 million other Palestinians trapped in Gaza.  So, thanks to you, and to Trócaire for arranging this wonderful campaign on my behalf.

Because I am one of the lucky ones.  Even though it took over one year and the efforts of countless numbers of people - I got out.  There are still hundreds of students stuck in Gaza, unable to fulfill their dreams and their potential.  That is not to mention the cancer patients who can’t get access to radiography machines or the farmers who can not export their figs or their strawberries.

Gaza is still under siege.  The work to free it, and the people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, must continue.

Some of you may have heard that Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, died recently.  One of my favourite poems of his was called ‘Under Siege’.  I always find this verse inspirational:

“Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope.”

This is our job as Palestinians, as people living under 41 years of occupation, 60 years of nakba and refugee status - to ‘cultivate hope’.  I want to thank you again for helping us to do this.

Yours sincerely,

Haneen Wishah

PS. And, who knows, perhaps as I start my studies in Coleraine we may bump into each other on the streets there to talk about how to free the other 1.5 million Gazans living under siege.:)

Tags: Gaza Strip, Israel, Palestine, Petition, Trócaire

This entry was posted on Tuesday 23rd September 2008 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Blog Entries, Civil Rights, International, University & Colleges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.