UNHRC expected to announce Gaza flotilla probe: Haaretz
UN Human Rights Council’s draft resolution harshly condemns Israel, citing international law violations and Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The UN Human Rights Council is expected to vote on a draft resolution Wednesday afternoon, on whether to send an international committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding Israel’s operation on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
The draft resolution, sponsored by Arab states, harshly condemns Israel and says Israel violated international law when it took over the ships in the middle of the ocean. The resolution also calls on Israel to lift the blockade on Gaza and to supply immediate humanitarian aid to Gaza, in the forms of food, gas, and medications.
The last clause of the draft resolution calls for an independent fact-finding mission to investigate international law violations, as a result of an Israeli attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla.
The resolution is similar to the one the UNHRC decided upon after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead to establish the Goldstone committee, which ultimately published a damning report accusing Israel of war crimes.
Nicaragua suspends diplomatic ties with Israel: YNet
Managua slams ‘illegal nature of attack on Gaza aid flotilla, reiterates support for Palestinians
Nicaragua suspended diplomatic ties with Israel on Tuesday in protest at Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that killed nine people, President Daniel Ortega’s office said.
“Nicaragua suspends from today its diplomatic relations with the government of Israel,” communications chief Rosario Murillo said in a statement read on Radio Ya.
Managua “underscored the illegal nature of the attack on a humanitarian mission in clear violation of international and humanitarian law,” added Murillo, who doubles as poetess and first lady.
Nicaragua reiterated its support for the Palestinian people and urged an end to the blockade on the Gaza Strip.
US President Barack Obama spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday to express his condolences for those killed in an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza, the White House said.
Turkey, a key ally of the United States, has reacted angrily to Monday’s raid in which nine people were killed when Israeli commandos stormed the ship. It had been trying to break an Israeli blockade on Gaza.
The White House said in his telephone call with Erdogan, Obama had reiterated the United States’ support for “a credible, impartial, and transparent investigation of the facts surrounding this tragedy.”
“The president affirmed the importance of finding better ways to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza without undermining Israel’s security,” the White House said in a statement.
It’s up to us to lift the blockade: The Independent
The people of Gaza don’t need the West to send humanitarian aid. They need our leaders to take decisive action – after all, we have been complicit in this siege, writes Donald Macintyre
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
The bloody events which unfolded in the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean sea in the early hours of Monday morning and their diplomatic aftermath are likely to dominate news from the Middle East, perhaps for some time to come. The question is whether their true meaning will be buried in the wholly essential but narrow debate on exactly how and why the carnage unfolded when Israel’s naval commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara in international waters 75 miles off its coast. For beyond the issues of whether or not the killings were perpetrated in self defence, whether the pro-Palestinian activists were right to ignore the warnings issued by the Israeli military and steam ahead, or even who was or wasn’t justified in international law, is an issue about which high-level denial in the past three years has been all-too easy.
Amid all the expressions of outrage at the killings one of the most telling was that issued by the International Crisis Group in the name of Robert Malley, the director of its Middle East Programme and a member of President Bill Clinton’s team at the tragically abortive peace talks at Camp David in 2000. The assault on the flotilla was “but a symptom of an approach that has been implicitly endorsed by many”, Malley said in a statement which charged that it was also an “indictment of a much broader policy toward Gaza for which Israel does not bear sole responsibility”. Malley did not put it quite like this, but what he clearly had in mind was that the very same Western powers now wringing their hands have been complicit in a disastrous and counter-productive policy in Gaza itself over at least the past three years.
Perhaps too much of the argument about Gaza, on both sides, has used the word “humanitarian” as if the only question for the territory’s 1.5m inhabitants is whether they do or not have the essentials for bare physical survival. For while there is deep and corrosive world-class poverty in many parts of Gaza, people are not dying in the streets from hunger. There are traffic jams in Gaza City; the grocery stores are relatively full, as much thanks to smuggled – and therefore expensive – goods from Egypt through the tunnels as to the hundreds of truckloads of supplies a week which are indeed admitted from Israel. Yet the real crisis developing in Gaza beneath this veneer of semi-normality is something much less visible than famine, and much more dangerous than the mystery of why Israel’s opaque regime of permitted goods puts coriander but not cinnamon on its banned list. It is the gradual but systematic dismantling of a vital, historically well-educated, and in many respects self-reliant civilisation.
It is widely accepted internationally that the blockade is hurting the civilian population much more than Hamas, whose grip has tightened in the last three years. It has destroyed a once-entrepreneurial and productive economy, ensured that 80 per cent of its population now depend on food aid, left most of its water undrinkable, and prevented reconstruction of some 75 per cent of the buildings destroyed by Israel’s devastating military offensive in the winter of 2008-9, not to mention many, many thousands more destroyed since the beginning of the intifada in 2000; or the building of 100 new schools the UN refugee agency Unrwa desperately needs to meet its ever-soaring demands. It’s because world leaders understand this – at least on a theoretical basis since few ever enter Gaza – that the Quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN has repeatedly called for the siege to be lifted.
The results are unimpressive. Take the single example of cement. After nine months of negotiation Israel agreed to imports for a very limited number of internationally supervised infrastructure projects and to finish a derisory 150 houses in Khan Yunis that had been 85 per cent completed before the 2008-9 war. A consequence is that the UN, which is wholly dependent on Israel since it cannot patronise the “tunnels economy”, looks increasingly weak compared with the de facto Hamas government, which faces no such constraints. Similarly the bona fide private sector entrepreneurs – most have long had the Israeli security clearance which gave them the freedom to travel freely across the border in better times and sometimes still does – have lost out to a tunnels-based black economy controlled by Hamas and its handpicked middlemen, the new businessmen of Gaza.
While Israel says it cannot allow more cement in case Hamas seizes it for military bunkers, its clear the de facto government already has, thanks to the tunnels, all the cement it needs. It has, for example, just announced a plan to build 1,000 new homes in Jabalya. As every Western diplomat knows, the vast majority of tunnels exist solely because of the blockade. If the blockade was lifted, the authority of the international community’s institutions would increase. Yet this has done nothing to shift the paralysis of the western powers in the face of Israel’s opposition to easing the blockade.
If ever there was an opportunity to reverse that dismal record it is now, at the very moment when there should be the keenest focus on whether the policy which led up to Monday’s bloody climax can finally be changed. Which is why for all its messy mixture of political motives and the bloody finale in which the flotilla was halted, there may actually be lessons from this bleak story for the international community in how to close the increasingly embarrassing gap between its stated policy and the reality.
Ideally Israel would now rethink a policy which there is every reason for thinking is not only catastrophic for Gaza’s people, but also not in its own long-term interests. But if not, there may be ways in which the international community can shake off its passivity in the face of this unfolding tragedy. For if broadly friendly governments – preferably within the Quartet but if not outside it – were to confront Israel with the prospect of mounting their own, much more official and internationally sanctioned official maritime relief operation, it would be exponentially more difficult for the Netanyhau government to see it off than it has, however messily and lethally, this week’s flotilla.
Implausible as it may seem at first sight, the idea has been discussed at a high level in international diplomatic circles. The only senior UN figure brave enough to float the idea publicly, however, is Unrwa’s Gaza director of operations, John Ging, who mentioned sea access when he argued in an interview more than a month before Monday’s fiasco, that it was time for the international community “physically” to do something about “rescuing” Gaza. While the Israeli claim that an unchecked activist flotilla entering Gaza compromises its security may be understandable, it could hardly say the same about allied or UN ships.
A seaborne operation would also get round an Israeli security objection to reopening the big cargo land crossing at Karni – the perceived vulnerability of Israeli drivers and security personnel to Palestinian attack. And if Hamas seized the unloaded cargo, as it has not done in the case of limited shipments made for infrastructure projects, the operation could cease immediately. Of course it should be co-ordinated with Israel, which after all is already repeatedly making the point that it was prepared to take the goods brought by the flotilla into Gaza once they had been checked. It is a matter of conjecture whether Israel could be persuaded to offer such co-ordination without a clear threat to go ahead without it. But it is hard to imagine it would use force to stop the ships of a friendly state. And yet, up to this week, the idea was at risk of going into deep freeze, partly because of Israel’s resistance.
Unless Monday marks a turning point that will see the reversal of Israel’s blockade, as it certainly should, the relief idea should now be speedily revived. After all, the three dominant values which have permeated Western thinking over the last half century have been enterprise, freedom and democracy. Each one is violated on a daily basis in Gaza by the international community’s failure to act on its own regular calls for a lifting of the blockade.
Enterprise? It is difficult to see how the collapse of hundreds of companies, mostly owned by people with no love for Hamas, and many enjoying close relationship with Israeli customers, helped Israeli security. Let alone the consequential drift of the unemployed into jobs with Hamas, including its armed paramilitary wings. And that’s before mentioning agriculture or fishing. To take a single example, if security is the reason for the one-mile fishing limit, why were Gaza fishermen allowed to travel 12 miles offshore at the peak of the intifada in 2002?
Freedom? The trapping of civilians in Gaza was not only an outrage in the 2008-9 offensive, when it prevented them leaving the war zone as they would have done in almost any other part of the world. It is also – to take a single example – keeping thousands of young students, a generation ambitious to help their homeland, from the postgraduate education they crave in the pluralistic world of foreign, Israeli, and even West Bank universities.
Democracy? Are Gazans still being punished for voting for Hamas in 2006 in clearly free and fair elections? But in the West Bank – now favoured by a real, if still precarious, increase in economic growth – a majority also voted for Hamas. Nor can the Gazan public as a whole remotely be blamed for the armed seizure of Gaza by Hamas after the brief but bloody civil war with Fatah which broke the coalition between the factions – the very seizure which was the trigger for the blockade. Any more than it can be for the abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit four years ago.
And if Gazans would now prefer the leadership of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank – as they might – there is nothing they can do about it while Hamas has the guns and control of the streets (a control which paradoxically is currently maintaining a de facto, if far-from perfect, ceasefire with Israel). The idea that that a civilian population can somehow achieve what an armed and partially US-backed Fatah failed to do in June 2007 and topple Hamas is fantasy.
This week could and should indeed mark a turning point in which Israel will be urged to ease the blockade of Gaza. What is needed is not principally more “humanitarian” goods but a real opening of borders to the commercial imports and exports that can revive Gaza’s stricken economy – and hopes – once again and begin to reconstruct its war ravaged infrastructure, as the international community pledged an almost wholly unspent $5bn to do after the 2008-9 war.
And if Israel persists in the face of such urgings to maintain the blockade, it will be hard to escape the conclusion that it is comfortable with a policy which threatens to nurture groups more extreme than Hamas as no more than a useful example of what happens when it “abandons” territory (which in terms of control of its borders, airspace, and as we were painfully reminded this week, its coastal waters, it never really did when Ariel Sharon pulled the settlers out in 2005).
But blaming Israel – and Egypt, which repeatedly enforces closures on Gaza’s southern border – for the blockade is too easy. For just as the international ban on talking to Hamas isolated its more pragmatic elements, so the West’s tolerance of the siege has strengthened the Islamic faction’s more repressive ones, turning Gaza in on itself. A lawful naval relief operation – or even a threat of it that might produce a real easing of what the UN sees as an unlawful blockade – might help to restore international influence over a territory which remains crucial to any settlement in the Middle East. And it would certainly would go a long way to redeeming the West’s woeful inaction over the last three years.
Israel begins deportation of activists seized on Gaza flotilla: Haaretz
All 680 activists to be released throughout the day; activists claim poor treatment by Israeli authorities; Nicaragua severs diplomatic ties with Israel.
Israel has begun deporting the first batch of foreign activists seized aboard a six-ship humanitarian aid flotilla seized in an Israel Navy raid en route to the Gaza Strip, the Foreign Ministry said early Wednesday, indicating that the rest of the activists will be escorted out of the country throughout the day.
The decision to deport the hundreds of foreign activists was announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided late Tuesday, in the face of mounting world criticism of Monday’s assault.
Israeli officials said all 680 activists held would be released, including two dozen Israel had threatened earlier to prosecute charging they had assaulted its troops.
According to a Foreign Ministry official, the first busload of Turkish activists had already left the Be’er Sheva jail, in which they were kept, en route to Ben Gurion International Airport, where three Turkish planes were already waiting. More buses were planned to leave Be’er Sheva during the morning hours, thus finalizing the deportation of the Turkish nationals.
In addition, 124 activists from 12 Muslim nations – most of them without diplomatic ties with Israel – crossed the Allenby Bridge aboard five Jordanian buses.
Jordanian government spokesman Nabil Al-Sharif said there were 30 Jordanians in the group. Jordan is one of two Arab nations with a signed peace treaty with Israel.
The bridge’s Jordanian chief, Brig. Mahmoud Abu Jumaa, said Jordan will help repatriate the activists – who include lawmakers and journalists – to their respective countries in coordination with their governments.
Kuwaiti ambassador Sheik Faisal Al Sabah said there were 16 Kuwaitis aboard the buses. They will be flown home aboard a Kuwaiti government-chartered plane later Wednesday, Al Sabah said.
He said the other activists came from Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Yemen, Oman and Bahrain.
Dozens of other activists remain in Israeli detention, but most are expected to be deported in the coming days.
“It was agreed that the detainees would be deported immediately,” Nir Hefez, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said in a written statement to reporters Tuesday. Netanyahu made the decision after consultations with his top ministers.
The activists arriving in Jordan said they had been treated poorly by Israel before being deported.
“The Israelis roughed up and humiliated all of us – women, men and children,” said Kuwaiti lawmaker Walid al-Tabtabai, who was on board one of the ships with other activists from Muslim countries.
“They were brutal and arrogant, but our message reached every corner of the world that the blockade on Gaza is unfair and should be lifted immediately,” he added.
The bearded lawmaker said there was not a single weapon with the passengers aboard all the ships.
Algerian Izzeddine Zahrour said Israeli authorities deprived the activists of food, water, sleep and use of toilet facilities.
“It was an ugly kidnapping and subsequently bad treatment in Israeli jail,” he said. “They handcuffed us, pushed us around and humiliated us”.
Mauritanian Mohammed Gholam said Israel wanted the detained to sign documents saying that we entered Israel illegally.
“We refused to sign anything and told our captors that we didn’t wish to go to Israel, but to Gaza and that their commandos kidnapped us from international waters,” he added.
The activists from Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa were processed in and around Israel’s port of Ashdod on Monday evening, where the six ships of the blockade-running convoy had been escorted after a raid on a Turkish-flagged vessel left nine people dead.
One hundred and twenty of the nearly 700 passengers were transferred Tuesday evening to the border crossing with Jordan, from where they will be returned to their home countries.
The Interior Ministry said 682 activists were ordered deported, and that 45 left on Tuesday, while others were jailed as they challenged the orders, or in hospital being treated for injuries.
Israel gave the following breakdown of countries and numbers of those activists ordered expelled, excluding the nine killed and the seriously wounded in Monday’s raid:
Australia 3; Azerbaijan 2; Italy 6; Indonesia 12; Ireland 9; Algeria 28; United States 11; Bulgaria 2; Bosnia 1; Bahrain 4; Belgium 5; Germany 11; South Africa 1; Holland 2; United Kingdom 31; Greece 38; Jordan 30; Kuwait 15; Lebanon 3; Mauritania 3; Malaysia 11; Egypt 3; Macedonia 3; Morocco 7; Norway 3; New Zealand 1; Syria 3; Serbia 1; Oman 1; Pakistan 3; Czech Republic 4; France 9; Kosovo 1; Canada 1; Sweden 11; Turkey 380; Yemen 4.
Nicaragua severs diplomatic ties with Israel over flotilla raid
Nicaragua has severed its diplomatic ties with Israel over the deadly raid on a Gaza humanitarian aid flotilla earlier in the week, a governmental statement said Wednesday.
In the announcement quoted by Army Radio, the Nicaraguan government said that the “attack on the Gaza-bound shipment is a clear violation of international and humanitarian law.”
Nicaragua’s statement comes two months after Mauritania’s foreign minister announced his country would sever ties with Israel, completing a process that began last year.
Mauritania, an Islamic nation that straddles black and Arab Africa, has stopped “completely and definitely its diplomatic relations with Israel,” Naha Mint Mouknass said in the desert capital Nouakchott.
At one time it was one of only three Arab countries to have full diplomatic relations with Israel, but in March last year Mauritania expelled Israeli representatives and closed the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott. The move came after it froze ties in response to Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
Israel orders return of diplomats’ families from Turkey: Haaretz
Diplomats fear for the safety of their families following Israel’s operation on the Gaza aid flotilla; four Turkish activists were among the nine killed during the raid.
The Foreign Ministry has ordered the families of its diplomats in Ankara and Istanbul to leave Turkey following the uproar over Israel’s deadly naval raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Some of the families have already arrived in Israel, and others are expected to land on Wednesday, after diplomats have asked the Foreign Ministry to help evacuate their families in light of the hostile atmosphere rising in Turkey.
The Foreign Ministry has said this was a routine procedure in cases of a looming security threat to Israelis and to government representatives.
At least four Turkish activists were among the nine killed by Israeli naval commandos in the raid Sunday on an international flotilla bringing aid to Gaza.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of a bloody massacre and thousands of Turks have protested across the country.
Global Condemnation of Israeli Armed Attack on Gaza-Bound Freedom Flotilla: At Least 10 Dead, Hundreds Remain in Detention: Democracy Now
It was early Monday morning as Israeli soldiers stormed the Gaza-bound international aid convoy called the Freedom Flotilla in international waters about forty miles off the coast of Gaza. The six ships had nearly 700 international activists on board and 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid. They were aiming to break the three-year-long siege of the Gaza Strip. Israeli commandos landed on the lead ship in the convoy, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, which had about 600 activists on board. At least ten and as many as nineteen civilians on board the ship have been reported to have died in the attack. Israeli troops proceeded to seize the Mavi Marmara and the five other ships and take them to the port of Ashdod. Hundreds of activists are being detained in an Israeli prison, and nearly fifty others have been deported. The United Nations Security Council has condemned the attack and called for the immediate release of the ships and the civilians held by Israel and called for an impartial investigation. All the permanent members of the Security Council except for the United States explicitly called for Israel’s three-year blockade of the Gaza Strip to be lifted. Turkey has compared Israel’s actions to state terrorism. We speak to Adam Shapiro, Amira Hass, Ali Abunimah and Richard Falk. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Adam Shapiro, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a board member of the Free Gaza Movement.
Ali Abunimah, co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories.
Amira Hass, columnist with Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper and the only Israeli journalist to have spent several years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been here in Louisiana going through southern Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta since last Friday, and our intention today was to bring you a special for the hour, but because of events in the Middle East, we are switching gears. And we’ll bring you many of the voices, we’ll introduce you to many of the people we met, in the coming days. Right now we turn, though, to the Middle East. Anjali?
ANJALI KAMAT: That’s right, Amy. We turn now to the Middle East. It was early Monday morning as Israeli soldiers stormed the Gaza-bound international aid convoy called the Freedom Flotilla in international waters about forty miles off the coast of Gaza. The six ships had nearly 700 international activists on board and 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid. They were aiming to break the three-year-long siege of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli commandos landed on the lead ship in the convoy, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, which had about 600 activists on board. These are excerpts from the raw video captured by an Al Jazeera producer on the ship minutes before the ship lost satellite contact with the world. It features two of the journalists on board.
HASSAN GHANI: This is the MV Marmara. This is Hassan Ghani reporting for Press TV. We have had several injuries here. One is critical. He has been injured in the head. We think he may die if he does not receive medical treatment immediately. Another person being taken past in front of me right now has been seriously injured. We are being hit by tear gas, stun grenades. We have navy ships on either side and helicopters overhead. We are being attacked from every single side. This is in international waters, not Israeli waters, not in the sixty-eight-mile exclusion zone. We are being attacked in international waters, completely illegally.
JAMAL ELSHAYYAL: To confirm and update you, the Israeli navy has now boarded the Mavi Marmara, where 600 civilians have been trying to deliver aid to Gaza. Live munition has been fired. There are reports that one person has been killed. Several, I have seen with my eyes, have been injured. We’ve seen them. Doctors trying to work to heal the injured. The organizers onboard the Mavi Marmara, after two people have been confirmed killed by the Israeli army, have now asked all the passengers to go inside. They’ve raised the white flag, this after Israeli commandos descended upon the ship in international water from a helicopter, as well as surrounded it by vessels from all sides. Tens of people, civilians, have been injured. There are still sounds of live fire, despite the white flag being raised. Tens of people have been injured, two people have been killed, onboard the ship which holds 600 activists, parliamentarians, women, children and the elderly, all of whom are civilians. Organizers have asked everyone to go inside, so this is where we shall head. Jamal Elshayyal, Al Jazeera, onboard the Mavi Marmara in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
ANJALI KAMAT: That was the last bits of video from an Al Jazeera producer onboard the Mavi Marmara before losing satellite contact with the world early Monday morning. At least ten and as many, according to some reports, as nineteen civilians onboard the ship have been reported to have died in the attack. There has been a near-complete blackout of information.
Israeli troops proceeded to seize the Mavi Marmara and the five other ships and take them to the port of Ashdod. Hundreds of activists are being detained in an Israeli prison, and nearly fifty others have been deported. Israel has still not released the names of the dead, the injured, and the detained international civilians.
Three Turkish activists who were deported back to Istanbul late Monday night spoke to journalists. This is Mutlu Tiryaki described the ordeal onboard the Mavi Marmara.
MUTLU TIRYAKI: [translated] When we stepped on the board, they emerged from helicopters and military boats and attacked us. They approached our vessel with military ships after issuing a military warning. We told them we were unarmed. Our sole weapon was water.
ANJALI KAMAT: The United Nations Security Council has condemned the attack and called for the immediate release of the ships and the civilians held by Israel and also called for an impartial investigation. All of the permanent member of the Security Council except for the United States explicitly called for Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip to be lifted.
Turkey has compared Israel’s actions to state terrorism. At the emergency Security Council meeting Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu described the incident as murder and piracy.
AHMET DAVUTOGLU: This action was uncalled for. Israeli actions constitute a grave breach of international law. In simplest terms, this is tantamount to banditry and piracy. It is murder conducted by a state. It has no excuses, no justification whatsoever. A nation state that follows this path has lost its legitimacy as a respectful member of the international community.
AMY GOODMAN: But Israel insists that its troops had acted in self-defense after being attacked by those onboard. Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Daniel Carmon, said the civilians on the ship were not peace activists.
DANIEL CARMON: What kind of peace activists use knives, clubs, fire from weapons stolen from soldiers and other weapons to attack soldiers who boarded the ship in accordance with international law? What kind of humanitarian activists, some with known terrorist history, embrace Hamas, a terrorist organization that openly shuns a two-state solution and calls for Israel’s destruction, defying conditions set by the international community and the Quartet? The answer is clear: there are not peace activists.
AMY GOODMAN: Although governments across the world have strongly condemned Israel’s attack, the United States says it’s still gathering the facts and regrets the loss of life. This is the US deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Alejandro Wolff.
ALEJANDRO WOLFF: We are working to ascertain the facts. We expect a credible and transparent investigation and strongly urge the Israeli government to investigate the incident fully. As I stated in the council chamber in December 2008, when we were confronted with a similar situation, mechanisms exist for the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza by member states and groups that want to do so. These non-provocative and non-confrontational mechanisms should be the ones used for the benefit of all those in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, thousands of people in cities across the world, from Turkey to Europe to the United States to Pakistan, have come out on the streets to protest the bloody attack on the humanitarian aid convoy.
PROTESTER: [translated] This is totally inhumane. None can defend this inhumane violence.
PROTESTERS: Free, free Gaza! Free, free Gaza! Stop Israeli war crimes!
PROTESTER: I’m here today because I’m an American Jew and I totally am opposed to what Israel is doing. Killing those people on the boat who were trying to bring material aid to a starving, imprisoned people is an insane crime, and it doesn’t represent the values of Jews and all people around the world.
PROTESTER: [translated] The truth is that Israel is not the only one responsible. All the official Arab regimes are responsible for this crime. Obama is responsible. The international community is responsible. The International Criminal Court, they became responsible when they remained silent about the crimes being committed against the people of Gaza.
PROTESTER: Continuously breaking international law, and it has never lived up to any United Nation resolution. And we have seen a lot of times that both the European Union and the United States have told Israel that they went too far.
PROTESTER: [translated] It depends on people. We have to force our governments to react. We have to force Europe to react, because this is a humiliation to Europe. A cocky mobster who dares to do what Israel has done in the Mediterranean, in international waters—what kind of security do we have in the Mediterranean? That’s the question we should ask ourselves.
PROTESTER: I know the people onboard. They are people from all walks of life. There are teachers. There are professors. There are journalists. There are politicians. There are cleaners. These are people like you and me who believe in taking aid to poor people. And these are the people that are being gunned down in cold blood by Israel today.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices of shock and outrage from around the world over the Israeli commando attack on the Gaza peace flotilla. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be joined by a number of guests. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re in New Orleans, Louisiana, here to cover BP and the geyser that continues to gush from the bottom of the sea. But because of events in the Middle East, we have switched gears today to cover what happened, the Israeli commando attack on the Free Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
We’re joined by a number of guests, but we’re going to begin in New York with Adam Shapiro. He’s the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a board member of the Free Gaza Movement, one of the groups that coordinated the Freedom Flotilla. His wife Huwaida Arraf, the chair of the Free Gaza Movement, was on the flotilla.
Adam, can you explain to us what you understand happened on—well, it was early Sunday morning in the—what happened to the flotilla?
ADAM SHAPIRO: The boats were making their way, the six ships, in international waters, far in international waters. They were still at least fifty miles offshore, and so well off the coasts of Israel and Gaza. And as they were making their way, Israeli warships surrounded the flotilla, all the ships, and the first ship to come under attack by helicopter, with commandos coming down from helicopter, as we’ve seen on the media, on the footage, was this big Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara. And soldiers, as they came down, started opening fire immediately, as was reported by the Al Jazeera correspondence on live stream that we have. And the soldiers injured and eventually killed at least one person, before other passengers decided at that point to try to act in self-defense and to try to stop soldiers, more soldiers, from coming onto the ship.
What needs to be acknowledged here is that Israel acted violently by attacking our ships, to begin with. And under international law, under the law of the seas, our people, as the people on that ship coming under such an attack, an illegal attack on the high seas, do have a right to defend themselves. Now, we don’t necessarily encourage people to take up any kind of weapons against the Israelis, and certainly our activists train in nonviolence, but given the kind of scenario that was unfolding on that boat, I certainly do understand the desire of people to try to protect themselves and try to protect others who were already injured.
The other ships, including the one that my wife Huwaida was on, also came under attack. We don’t know, because we didn’t have satellite feeds on those ships, the kinds of attacks that they suffered. And we still don’t know, because all of the detainees are being kept from any kind of communication with media, with their families, even up until now with their lawyers and with their embassies.
ANJALI KAMAT: Adam Shapiro, do you know how many people died? And do you know how many people are being detained by Israel?
ADAM SHAPIRO: Until now, we still don’t know the exact number of dead. Israel refuses to release the names of the people that it killed, despite numerous requests from various embassies, some governments and, of course, the media. And the exact number of dead, the exact number of injured, and the exact number of who are in detention, we do not know, because, again, we are completely—this is becoming a major coverup by Israel to keep all information blocked, blanketed from getting out.
ANJALI KAMAT: Have you heard from your wife, Huwaida Arraf?
ADAM SHAPIRO: Literally just now, as I came on this program, I received confirmation that she has been released. She is without phones and without any money. They took all of her stuff from her. But she’s been released from prison and should be on her way to Jerusalem hopefully right now.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go to Israel and the West Bank. I want to see right now if Amira Hass is on the line. She is the reporter for Ha’aretz.
Amira, we wanted to get the response to what has taken place in Israel and the Occupied Territories and what you understand, because this is the big issue right now, that the Israeli government has spoken out about what has happened, but very few people understand actually, outside of what the Israeli government has said, what took place on these ships. Certainly in the United States, the news media is quoting the Israeli government, the prime minister, various military spokespeople. But since hundreds of people have been detained, and we don’t know the names of the dead or the injured, we are not hearing any other part of the story.
AMIRA HASS: Exactly, Amy. The details cannot be told yet, because we don’t—other than the soldiers and the few people who returned to their homes, in Turkey mostly or in Greece, we don’t have details yet, because we depend only on the official versions of the Israel—of the Israeli army and the Israeli government. I’m here in Ramallah, and so I don’t know—I only follow on the news and what my friends tell me in Israel.
On the one hand, there have been quite a few demonstrations, as I understand, against the attack and against the decision to stop the flotilla. There is a strike in Palestinian communities in Israel proper. There is a strike in Gaza, I think. But also in the West Bank, the police cleared a strike and three days of mourning. In the West Bank, I’ve seen that the Palestinian police is trying very hard to prevent people from clashing with the Israeli army, feeling more—feeling deterioration. So what I’ve noticed is there is—there are many, many security vehicles of the Palestinian Authority near junctions, near areas where the Israeli army is located. They opened, as I read—I haven’t seen it—they opened wake houses in several municipalities all over the West Bank. But people—there were a few demonstrations yesterday in the West Bank, demanding actually the Palestinian Authority to stop all negotiations with Israel and to stop the military coordination with Israel, which is a very—it’s a sore wound in Palestinian life, this military security coordination. So far, as I understand, the PA of course has condemned, but has not—is not reacting to this demand, to the public demand. We don’t know what will happen next.
But I think that beyond those details, what’s becoming clearer and clearer—and I think that’s also to many Israelis—is that who is really under blockade is not Gaza and not the Palestinians, but Israel, under a self-imposed blockade, because they think they could continue to violate our—not only international law or concepts, but also common sense. It’s all reacting against the common sense of every normal person in this world, you know, like if you think about Noam Chomsky not allowed to enter the country. So this is the main thing we can see. From the very beginning, the decision to not allow this ship from entering Gaza, from reaching Gaza, then this attack on civilian ships and then expecting the people will accept this attack, as Adam said, in international water. So it’s a complete act of piracy. And then these soldiers expect to be received as if they were, I don’t know, guests. So this shows about a certain—and unfortunately, the Israeli society is behind the government in that sense, still behind the government. So it is under blockade. The Israeli society is under self-imposed siege.
ANJALI KAMAT: Amira Hass, you were supposed to be on one of the boats in the flotilla?
AMIRA HASS: Yes, I registered, as I—as you know, we are not—Israeli journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza through Erez, and I did enter—over the past year and a half, I did enter three times, so-called illegally. And the first time was with a boat. And I registered to enter, and I was supposed to be on the boat with Dror Feiler, the Israeli Swedish activist and musician. But unfortunately, because they kept postponing the date, I had something I could not cancel in Jerusalem at the end of last week, so, unfortunately, I did not join it. Or fortunately.
AMY GOODMAN: Amira Hass, you talked about the protests in the Palestinian territories. What about in the Israeli Jewish community? What has been the response? And what are you seeing on Israeli television? What kind of video? What is the story, the narrative, you’re getting?
AMIRA HASS: There were. Israeli activists has been—has had several demonstrations since yesterday, as I could tell by emails and by what friends told me, and Palestinians in Israel, as well, of course. There are all sorts of condemnations by Israeli organizations and organizations for human rights organizations. So there is an activity, as an—adding to the quite rejectivity of Israeli Jews against the occupation, which we see permanently. But it’s an activity of a minority. There are, of course, publicists and some public personalities who are alarmed by Israeli blindness, I think, as I can tell by the reports.
Now, the Israeli version, as is seen and is almost the only version that is shown to the Israeli public, is that once they went down the ropes, the soldiers, they were immediately attacked by some people, who had with them knives and sticks or whatever, and were beating them. The official—the video, the photos. And you can hear also on the voice—you can hear that the soldiers are surprised or shocked. And so are their officers, their commanders, which watch everything through the—whatever equipment they have. I tend to believe that they were indeed surprised. They did not expect resistance. They did not expect to be challenged. I cannot tell if it was after—by what we are shown, if it was after some shots were—that they shot and killed some people, or was it simultaneously when they slid down from the helicopters. But this is what is seen on the Israeli—on Israeli TV. And this is also what—I read some testimonies of soldiers, and this is also what soldiers tell, told from a military correspondent of ours who of course got the permission to speak to them. We don’t get any detailed account of anyone of those who were on the ship.
ANJALI KAMAT: I want to bring Ali Abuninah, the co-founder of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, into the discussion. He’s joining us from Chicago.
Ali, can you talk about the reaction from the United States from the Obama administration and also at the Security Council?
ALI ABUNIMAH: Yes. Good morning.
Among the more than 700 people on the ship from about thirty-two countries are thirteen United States citizens, including a former ambassador, Ed Peck, who has been released and is reported to be on his way back to the United States. But as in the previous Israeli acts of piracy and war against ships heading to Gaza—you remember when Cynthia McKinney was kidnapped and jailed in Israel for trying to reach Gaza—once again, the United States government is saying and doing nothing publicly that suggests any great concern for its citizens who have been kidnapped by Israel.
And the statements from the Obama administration, particularly that by the US representative at the United Nations, Alejandro Wolff, were really quite shocking and astonishing. You played a clip during the news, where he suggests really that the flotilla were themselves to blame, talking about using non-confrontational and non-provocational methods rather than going by ship—in other words, suggesting—agreeing with the outrageous Israeli claims that trying to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid is somehow a provocation or a confrontation. And Ambassador Wolff also reaffirmed Israel’s so-called right to self-defense in this context, which suggests that the United States, unless it makes clear otherwise, believes that attacking a civilian ship on the high seas and massacring an unknown number of its passengers is somehow self-defense.
I think we also have to keep our eye on the context here, Anjali. Just a week or so ago, the United States Congress voted by 410-to-four—I’ll repeat that, 410-to-four—to a request from the Obama administration for additional military aid, another $205 million. This was clearly a political move by the Obama administration to fund the rather useless Iron Dome rocket defense as a way to appease Israel politically. But the message Israel got from this, as it has gotten from US and international complicity and complacency, the failure to hold Israel accountable for the war crimes documented in the Goldstone report; the failure to hold Israel accountable for the act of international terrorism and murder in a hotel room in Dubai; the failure to hold Israel accountable for four years of murderous siege on Gaza that has killed, by itself, 400 Palestinians for lack of access to medical aid and other needed supplies. The failure to hold Israel accountable in all these ways has sent Israel the message: do what you like, get away with whatever you want to, until people hold Israel accountable.
And so, what the Freedom Flotilla was, was it was a peaceful, unarmed people’s navy, assembled to fill the void and the vacuum where the Obama administration should be, where the UN Security Council should be, where the Arab governments should be, where the European Union should be. And it is a shocking outrage and a crime that will live in infamy, along with the bombing of the King David Hotel, along with the attack on the USS Liberty, along with so many other appalling crimes, that international humanitarian workers bringing aid were attacked on the high seas.
I spoke to you a few months ago when I was in Cairo with the Gaza Freedom March. By now, people have tried to reach Gaza to break the siege by land. They have tried by sea. And they have lost their lives. They have given their lives in the cause of breaking this siege on Gaza. And we have to ask, we have to ask, for what crime are 1.5 million people in Gaza being held prisoner? There is a museum in Berlin, which I visited as a schoolboy, to those who were killed trying to cross, those who were machine-gunned trying to cross over the Berlin Wall. Well, an unknown number of people, because Israel won’t tell us, were machine-gunned for trying to break this blockade. When will there be accountability? And when will the Obama administration stop this outrageous complicity, this enabling, this acting as an accomplice with these crimes against people in Palestine and now against Americans, Turks, Greeks, Jordanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Swedes, French people, German people, members of Parliament, doctors, retired people, trying to bring medicine to people in Gaza? That our government has not stood up and condemned this in the clearest possible terms is a sign that something is sick in the United States’ system when it comes to speaking about and dealing with Israel. There is a sickness that has to be addressed.
AMY GOODMAN: Ali Abunimah is speaking to us from Chicago. He’s the founder of the Electronic Intifada. Adam Shapiro in the studio with—in New York at Democracy Now!. Amira Hass is with us from Ramallah in the West Bank. When we come back from break, we’re going to Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, to talk about international law.
I’m Amy Goodman with Anjali Kamat, and we’re broadcasting from New Orleans, from New Orleans, Louisiana, where the BP oil catastrophe continues to unfold. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Anjali Kamat. We’re in New Orleans; our guests are around the world. We’re going to turn right now to Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories.
This issue of international law, of international waters, Richard Falk, talk about your reaction to what took place. I had originally said on Sunday morning; in fact, it was 4:00 Monday morning on the waters, on the high seas, when the Israeli commandos raided the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
RICHARD FALK: Good morning, Amy. This was a shocking incident that involved, as your other guests have said, a complete disregard of international law, in several respects. It was an act of naked aggression. It was done on the high seas. It was done in defiance of elementary humanitarian standards. It was known that this flotilla had no weapons. It was not a security issue by the remotest stretch of the imagination. If there was a right of self-defense, it belonged to the people onboard these ships. Israel, as the aggressing state and political actor, had no claim whatsoever of self-defense. It’s an absurdity. And one can only imagine if another country that the United States didn’t like had engaged in this kind of behavior, we would have been denouncing them or, worse, using force. One can only imagine what would happen if Iran had done something of this comparably outrageous character and sought to provide some kind of legal cover for it, while silencing those that actually experienced the incident.
So I feel that we’ve almost never seen such a direct confrontation with the most elementary principles of international law. And it is a disgrace that our government has decided to stand apart from all other countries in the world, including our normal European friends, and withheld a denunciation and a call for lifting the blockade, because one needs to appreciate that underneath this criminal act, which amounts to a crime against humanity, underneath this has been the almost three years of criminal blockade of the people of Gaza. The blockade is a direct violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that prohibits collective punishment. And this is one of the first examples where a civilian population has been locked inside a zone that has been subjected to this kind of mental and physical threat to subsistence and survival.
ANJALI KAMAT: Richard Falk, given the international of outcry over this incident, do you think there will be enough pressure to implement the recommendations of the Goldstone report to finally lift the siege on Gaza?
RICHARD FALK: It is hard to tell at this point. What is clear is that the United States continues in its role as the protector of Israeli impunity in circumstances that are so extreme that it will build additional anti-US attitudes throughout the world, not only in the Islamic world. And it is probably a matter that will be determined in large part by how sustained the civil society reaction to these events are. I’ve said for some time that the best hope for the Palestinians is not at a governmental level or through reliance on the United Nations, but rather through the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, which has increasingly come to resemble the anti-apartheid campaign that was so successful in delegitimizing the racist regime in South Africa. I think this legitimacy war is being waged now as the primary arena of struggle. And it has shown the immoral failure of established governments to do what should have been done years ago and insisted that this blockade be lifted and used nonviolent coercion by way of sanctions in the event that Israel continued to refuse to end the blockade. It is a crime that has no borders at this point. And it’s only the peoples of the world, really, that represent the conscience of humanity in a circumstance of this kind.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories and the Occupied Territories. The countries that have called in the Israeli ambassador for an explanation are Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Jordan, New Zealand, among others.
Ali Abunimah, can you talk about the videotape? And again, we have to stress, in the brief coverage that we see in US media right now, because we do not even know the names of the dead or the injured, not to mention hundreds of people who are now in jail in Israel, we’re only getting one side here. But the videotape that the Israeli government is showing of what happened on the lead ship, on the Turkish ship, Ali?
ALI ABUNIMAH: Yes. I mean, what we have to do is put all this in the context of Israel’s propaganda strategy. What they’ve done is imposed a total news block-out—blackout. Hundreds of people are detained. They’ve had no access to lawyers, certainly no access to media. It was reported there was one Al Jazeera cameraman, of the six Al Jazeera staff who were kidnapped with the ships, who was released. And what he said is that all the passengers were allowed to leave the ships only with their passports, with no other personal belongings. He was personally attacked by Israeli soldiers while he was filming, and his camera smashed. In any case, no journalists were allowed to leave the ships with any film or any recordings whatsoever. We don’t know the names of the dead. The families of all those passengers are anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones. Why is this? So that the Israeli narrative can get a long head start. This is all about the Israeli propaganda strategy to give the Israeli propagandists, like Mark Regev, a free run. They’ve had more than twenty-four hours. And, Amy, it’s working in the mainstream media, because they’re only reporting, you know, the atrocious reporting on National Public Radio and on the BBC, which is taking mostly the Israeli version.
Even the videos the Israelis received, what they do confirm to us is that Israel attacked a civilian ship with attack helicopters, speedboats and commandos. Now, they show people fending off the soldiers. I mean, in this country, in the United States, people lionize the passengers on Flight 93 who tried to fight off the hijackers to no avail. So there was a natural reaction there. What we don’t know is when that happened. The Al Jazeera footage, which came out before the feed was cut by Israel, showed people—or there was evidence of people being shot at and killed as soon as the Israelis attacked. Hanin Zoabi, the member of Parliament in the Knesset, the Palestinian who was released and gave a press conference today, talked about the sudden attack with sound bombs, tear gas, explosions. The same—the Al Jazeera journalist who was released said the same thing. Because the Israelis are obscuring or removing the time stamps from the videos they are releasing, we have no idea when those videos were taken, and they’re showing very short clips. But what is not in doubt and what nobody disputes, not even the Israelis, is that an Israeli military force carried out an unprovoked attack on the high seas against a civilian vessel, and people have been killed, people who were on a humanitarian mission. And there is no justification for that.
AMY GOODMAN: Adam Shapiro, we want to bring you in before the end.
ADAM SHAPIRO: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Adam, we want to bring you in before the end, because in addition to what happened on the high seas, you have the West Bank attack on a young Cooper Union art student, a student in New York who was in the West Bank. Can you explain who she is and what happened?
ADAM SHAPIRO: As you said, Emily [Henochowicz] is a twenty-one-year-old Cooper Union art student who was there in the West Bank joining the International Solidarity Movement as an activist protesting what’s going on in the West bank. I mean, obviously, Gaza is very bad, but there continues to be land confiscation, home demolitions, the building of the wall in the West Bank. Emily was attending a protest at Qalandia checkpoint, demonstrating against what happened to our flotilla. The Israelis opened a barrage of tear-gas canisters, fired at very close range, at her specifically. Eyewitness accounts talk about two tear-gas canisters being shot right at her feet and then a third being shot at her head, hitting her in the left eye, I believe. And we have received word from the doctors that she has lost her left eye.
This is yet another attack on an unarmed international civilian coming to join the Palestinians in protest, coming to stand up for human rights. There is a war. There is a war now. Israel has launched this war. It launched it earlier with attacks on Rachel Corrie, on Tom Hurndall and other internationals, but this is now an open war Israel has launched on foreigners. There is no citizen. There should be travel warnings issued now to all foreigners trying to enter Israel or the Occupied Territories. You are targeted by Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you all for being with us. I want to thank Adam Shapiro in New York; also Amira Hass of Ha’aretz, speaking to us from Ramallah; Ali Abunimah in Chicago; Richard Falk, speaking to us, UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. Two more boats are headed to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. Mairead Maguire is on one of them, among many. She is the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
EDITOR: It Has to Be Read in Order to Believe it Has Been Written!
Peres, War Criminal with more experience than any other in Israel, explains what happened. This is beyond the bizarre! No wonder Israelis are so denuded if they are fed on this diet of lies, propaganda, and damn lies! This is the man with a Nobel Peace prize, who is responsible for more wars than anyone alive!
Peres: Soldiers were beaten for being humane: YNet
President expresses support for IDF actions during takeover of Gaza-bound ship, commends ‘troops who preferred getting hurt over hurting someone else’
President Shimon Peres said Tuesday that he was proud of operation and conduct of the Israel Navy Commandoes who participated in the raid of the aid flotilla heading to Gaza Strip, Monday.
Speaking at a Haifa University ceremony Tuesday, where he was given the Haifa University Board of Trustees Leadership Award Ceremony, Peres said that “the soldiers were beaten just because they did not want to kill anyone.
“Any other army would have immediately used their guns. What we saw was an exemplar of troops who preferred getting hurt over hurting someone else.
“If there is one humane thing, it is this kind of trial by fire – to stand there, being shot at, and do nothing. I do not wish that on anyone.”
Peres laid blame for the bloody maritime incident with Hamas, saying the militant group was solely to blame: “In stead of sailing and demonstrating, these people should have been talking to Hamas.
“Gazans are not burdened by us, but by Hamas. They should convince Hamas to stop its terrorism and resume negotiations, in stead of resisting peace. If that happens Gaza would thrive.”
Commenting on recent rocket fire from Gaza on Israel, Peres wondered, “Why are they firing? Gaza is not occupied. We gave it back freely, there are no Israelis there, nor will there be.
“I hope those who aspire for peace and are not trigger-happy, would be the ones to prevail.”