"Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor on hunger strike to protest the Egyptian government's refusal to let us travel to Gaza, chose not to board the bus and gave a beautiful, emotional and painful speech explaining her decision...

"Accepting these buses [to Gaza on December 30] and boarding them was
in effect changing our political goal to a weak humanitarian goal. The
Gaza Freedom March was supposed to stand as a testament of a global
voice yelling, 'Enough is enough, break the siege.' These buses turned
us into a small delegation of people carrying humanitarian aid into a
land under siege. That is simply not who we are. Or even worse, these
buses had turned us into a disconnected group of people with
individual reasons for going to Gaza. Again, this is not at all who we
were. Of course I am not saying that I was not ambivalent about
wanting to go as an individual; all I have ever wanted to do is go to
Gaza and walk into the pictures of our home that hang on walls and sit
on mantles in our house in Chicago. But as a part of a political
group, neither my sister nor I could board that bus with a clear
conscience.

"It was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, but in the end
I was sure: it was either all of us go or none of us. If only 100
went, the news story would have changed from 1,400 protest against the
siege in Gaza to Egypt allows 100 activists into Gaza. I did not want
to be used as a pawn by the Egyptian government to save their face in
the Arab world, nor did I want to weaken the political message of the
Gaza Freedom March."

The full story:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10986.shtml