EDITOR: The flood of responses to Israel’s latest brutality
First, apologies to those of you who were trying to access the website yesterday. It was sabotaged and brought down, and you don’t need to be genius to know who has done it. Nonetheless, here it is again, and here it will remain.
The caricature above is by Carlos Latuff of Brazil, one of the leading cartoonists working today, and the most prolific. He has supported Palestine’s struggle for freedom for years, since the beginning of his career, and has sometimes frawn two cartoons a day on this topic. Please send as widely as possible, as his drawings are possibly the best means of ralying the relaties to people – they opearte beyond any specific language.
It has become impossible to follow the huge amount of responses, analyses and witness evidence now flooding the webways on this topic. I the interest of future research, I am trying my best to include the most important examples, but even that effort is fraught with difficulty, as many excellent pieces do not get a look in. The number of new website has also escalated; this is the clearest evidence that millions of people across the globe are now communicating every day about Israel’s iniquitous regime and its war crimes, and that the stage of isolation and pariahzation is now taking place.
‘Mad Dog’ Diplomacy: ICH
A cornered Israel is baring its teeth
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
June 04, 2010 “Information Clearing House” — Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most celebrated general, famously outlined the strategy he believed would keep Israel’s enemies at bay: “Israel must be a like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
Until now, most observers had assumed Dayan was referring to Israeli military or possibly nuclear strategy, an expression in his typically blunt fashion of the country’s familiar doctrine of deterrence.
But the Israeli commando attack on Monday on the Gaza-bound flotilla, in which nine activists have so far been confirmed killed and dozens were wounded as they tried to break Israel’s blockade of the enclave, proves beyond doubt that this is now a diplomatic strategy too. Israel is feeling cornered on every front it considers important – and like Dayan’s “mad dog”, it is likely to strike out in unpredictable ways.
Domestically, Israeli human rights activists have regrouped after the Zionist left’s dissolution in the wake of the outbreak of the second intfada. Now they are presenting clear-eyed – and extremely ugly – assessments of the occupation that are grabbing headlines around the world.
That move has been supported by the leadership of Israel’s large Palestinian minority, which has additionally started questioning the legitimacy of a Jewish state in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
Regionally, Hizbullah has progressively eroded Israel’s deterrence doctrine. It forced the Israeli army to exit south Lebanon in 2000 after a two-decade occupation; it stood firm in the face of both aerial bombardment and a ground invasion during the 2006 war; and now it is reported to have accumulated an even larger arsenal of rockets than it had four years ago.
Iran, too, has refused to be intimidated and is leaving Israel with an uncomfortable choice between conceding to Tehran the room to develop a nuclear bomb, thereby ending Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, and launching an attack that could unleash a global conflagration.
And internationally, nearly 18 months on from its attack on Gaza, Israel’s standing is at an all-time low. Boycott campaigns are gaining traction, reluctant support for Israel from European governments has set them in opposition to home-grown sentiment, and even traditional allies such as Turkey cannot hide their anger.
In the US, Israel’s most resolute ally, young American Jews are starting to question their unthinking loyalty to the Jewish state. Blogs and new kinds of Jewish groups are bypassing their elders and the American media to widen the scope of debate about Israel.
Israel has responded by characterising these “threats” all as falling within its ever-expanding definition of “support for terrorism”.
It was therefore hardly suprising that the first reaction from the Israeli government to the fact that its commandoes had opened fire on civilians in the flotilla of aid ships was to accuse the solidarity activists of being armed.
Similarly, Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister, accused the organisers of having “connections to international terrorism”, including al-Qaeda. Turkey, which assisted the flotilla, is widely being accused in Israel of supporting Hamas and trying to topple Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Palestinians are familiar with such tactics. Gaza’s entire population of 1.5 million is now regularly presented in the Israeli media in collective terms, as supporters of terror – for having voted in Hamas – and therefore legitimate targets for Israeli “retaliation”. Even the largely docile Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has rapidly been tarred with the same brush for its belated campaign to boycott the settlements and their products.
The leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens too are being cast in the role of abettors of terror. The minority is still reeling from the latest assault: the arrest and torture of two community leaders charged with spying for Hizbullah. In its wake, new laws are being drafted to require that Palestinian citizens prove their “loyalty” or have their citizenship revoked.
When false rumours briefly circulated on Monday that Sheikh Raed Salah, a leader of Israel’s Islamic Movement who was in the flotilla, had been gravely wounded, Israeli officials offered a depressingly predictable, and unfounded, response: commandoes had shot him after they came under fire from his cabin.
Israel’s Jewish human rights community is also under attack to a degree never before seen. Their leaders are now presented as traitors, and new legislation is designed to make their work much harder.
The few brave souls in the Israeli media who try to hold the system to account have been given a warning shot with the exile of Haaretz’s investigative journalist Uri Blau, who is threatened with trial on spying charges if he returns.
Finally, Israel’s treatment of those onboard the flotilla has demonstrated that the net against human rights activism is being cast much wider, to encompass the international community.
Foreigners, even high-profile figures such as Noam Chomsky, are now routinely refused entry to Israel and the occupied territories. Many foreign human rights workers face severe restrictions on their movement and efforts to deport them or ban their organisations. The Israeli government is agreed that Europe should be banned from “interfering” in the region by supporting local human rights organisations.
The epitome of this process was Israel’s reception of the UN report last year into the attack on Gaza by Richard Goldstone, a respected judge and international law expert who suggested Israel had committed many war crimes during its three-week operation. Goldstone has faced savage personal attacks ever since.
But more significantly, Israel’s supporters have characterised the Goldstone report and the related legal campaigns against Israel as examples of “lawfare”, implying that those who uphold international law are waging a new kind of war of attrition on behalf of terror groups like Hamas and Hizbullah.
These trends are likely only to deepen in the coming months and years, making Israel an ever greater paraiah in the eyes of much of the world. The mad dog is baring his teeth, and it is high time the international community decided how to deal with him.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Israel arrests Free Gaza chief: Ma’an News
Published yesterday (updated) 05/06/2010 11:20
Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli forces arrested the chairwoman of the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla at Friday’s demonstration in Bil’in, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, supporters said.
EDITOR: As the MV Rachel Corrie is approaching Gaza, the daily brutalities are continued with special venom…
Bil’in Protest In Solidarity Protest With The Gaza Flotilla 04-06-2010 By Haitham Al Katib
Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American from Michigan, is a human rights activist who was on board the aid flotilla that came under attack Monday, in a raid that left nine dead.
Activists said two anti-wall protesters were also detained, one Palestinian and one Israeli.
An Israeli police spokesman said three foreign nationals were detained at the rally.
EDITOR: In between the massacres, other crimes are getting lost
For no crime at all, apart from the Orwellian Thought Crime, Israel is illegally deporting four of its own citizens, Palestinian Members of the national assembly, and not for the first time. Is there enough paper in the world to have the full list of Israel’s iniquities? One may think that this better than being killed, but actually it is all a matrix of evil and lawlessness, synchronised to harm the Palestinians beyond repair.
Hamas officials given one month to leave Israel: Haaretz
By Liel Kyzer, Haaretz – 4 June 2010
Jerusalem police confiscated the Israeli identity cards of four Hamas legislators overnight on Thursday and gave them until July to leave the country.
Mohammed Abu Tir, Mohammed Totach, Khaled Abu Arafa, and Ahmed Atoun are all Hamas legislators who refuse to give up their duties within the Hamas Legislative Council.
Detectives from the Jerusalem District Police Central Unit took their identity cards after The High Court of Justice ruled that they would not prevent the men’s expulsion from Jerusalem.
Hamas’ Mohammed Abu Tir at his East Jerusalem home after his release from an Israeli jail on Thursday, May 20, 2010
The four men were, in the past, warned by Israel that they must renounce their membership in Hamas or risk losing their residency rights in East Jerusalem.
Abu Tir was released from Israeli prison last month, after being jailed for the last four years, since his arrest along with 65 other senior Hamas men in response to the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006.
After his release, Abu Tir was prohibited from entering Jerusalem. Israel has so far released nine of the Hamas officials who were jailed after Shalit’s abduction convicted of belonging to an illegal organization. Israeli defense officials said those ministers had just completed their prison terms and their release was not connected to a prisoner swap deal for Shalit’s release.
Hamas won control of the Palestinian parliament in 2006 elections and then seized the Gaza Strip in 2007, leading to rival governments in the West Bank and Gaza.
Noam Chomsky: speaking of truth and power: Al Ahram Weekly
One of the world’s major intellectual voices and a leading critic of Israel, Noam Chomsky has sided with the powerless throughout his career, while at the same time reminding the powerful of the inconvenient truths they would rather forget. He spoke to David Tresilian in Paris
“Israel is becoming extremely paranoid, overtaken by ultra-nationalist sentiments, and is acting pretty irrationally, from its own point of view. They are harming their own interests. My own denial of entry was a minor example of that. If they had just let me in to give a talk at Bir Zeit, that would have been the end of the story. In fact I wasn’t even talking about the Middle East. I was talking about the United States, and they knew it of course.”
Known as much for his professional work in linguistics and philosophy as for his writings on politics and social issues, Professor Noam Chomsky was in Paris last weekend at the invitation of Le Monde diplomatique and the Collège de France. Divided between an academic seminar organised by Jacques Bouveresse, holder of the chair in the philosophy of language and knowledge at the Collège de France, and a series of interviews on political issues that culminated in a public meeting organised by Le Monde diplomatique , Chomsky’s schedule testified both to the range of his work and to the respect with which he is held in France.
Born in 1928 and now into his eighties, this schedule would have exhausted a man half his age. Chomsky nevertheless appeared to take it in his stride as he answered questions from the audience late into the evening at both events, speaking continuously for several hours in wide-ranging lectures on American foreign policy, contemporary world politics, and the situation in regions of the world of which he has made a special study, such as Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Both the seminar at the Collège de France, focusing on issues of truth and public rationality in a tradition associated with the English philosopher Bertrand Russell and writer George Orwell and simultaneously broadcast on the Web, and the later public meeting were heavily over-subscribed, and Chomsky’s appearance at both was greeted with enthusiasm and affection by those who had in some cases traveled from across Europe to be present.
Drawing on more than half a century of political activism and dozens of books and articles, among them his powerful works on the Vietnam War, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and For Reasons of State (1973), his works on the place of intellectuals in American life and the role played by the media, Manufacturing Consent (with Edward Herman, 1988), and his specialised works on Israel and Palestine, Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983 & 1999), on the Middle East, Perilous Power: the Middle East and US Foreign Policy (with Gilbert Achcar, 2007), and on American foreign policy, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), Chomsky spoke authoritatively on contemporary issues, indicating that his extraordinary intelligence and commitment to social change are as undimmed as ever.
A new book appeared in the same week as Chomsky’s Paris visit, this volume, entitled Hopes and Prospects , bringing together recent articles on Latin America, the United States and the Middle East and Israel.
Despite his heavy programme, Noam Chomsky found time to speak to Al-Ahram Weekly about his views on the present situation in the Middle East and on American policy towards Israel, Palestine and the region as a whole. The Weekly is honoured to be able to present this interview in the lightly edited version below.
Could I ask you for a statement on Israel’s attack on the Freedom Flotilla this week while it was in international waters on its way to Gaza?
Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime. The editors of the London Guardian are quite right to say that “If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO taskforce would today be heading for the Somali coast.”
It is worth bearing in mind that the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years. Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.
Much the same is true of Israel’s pretext for its latest crime: that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that could be used for bunkers for rockets. Putting aside the absurdity, if Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire. In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease- fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket.
Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force “in self-defense” unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although — or perhaps because — there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext, and the same is true of Israel’s current resort to force.
The siege of Gaza itself does not have the slightest credible pretext. It was imposed by the US and Israel in January 2006 to punish Palestinians because they voted “the wrong way” in a free election, and it was sharply intensified in July 2007 when Hamas blocked a US-Israeli attempt to overthrow the elected government in a military coup, installing Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. The siege is savage and cruel, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of long-standing Israeli plans, backed by the US, to separate Gaza from the West Bank.
These are only the bare outlines of very ugly policies.
You were also refused entry to Israel recently. How do you see the situation in the Occupied Territories and Gaza?
Well, just to make a small correction, I was denied entry to the Occupied Territories and not to Israel. In fact, if I had been going to Israel, they would have admitted me, and then I would have been able to go to the Occupied Territories. The reason they gave is that I was only going to Bir Zeit and not to an Israeli university.
Israel is becoming extremely paranoid, overtaken by ultra- nationalist sentiments, and is acting pretty irrationally, from its own point of view. They are harming their own interests. My own denial of entry was a minor example of that. If they had just let me in to give a talk at Bir Zeit, that would have been the end of the story. In fact I wasn’t even talking about the Middle East. I was talking about the United States, and they knew it of course.
In the case of Gaza, it’s just savage torture. They are keeping the population barely alive because they don’t want to be accused of genocide, but that’s it. It’s limited to survival. It’s not the worst atrocity in the world, but it is one of the most savage. Egypt is cooperating fully by building a wall and refusing to allow concrete to go in and things like that, so it’s an Israeli-Egyptian operation that is literally torturing the people of Gaza in a way that I can’t think of a precedent, and it’s getting worse.
In the West Bank, first of all it’s not Israel: it’s the United States and Israel. The United States sets the bounds of what they can do and cooperates with them. It’s a joint operation, just as the attack on Gaza was. But they’re continuing to impose their stranglehold, and they’re taking what they want. The land inside the separation wall, which is in fact an annexation wall, they’ll take that. They’ll take the Jordan Valley, and they’ll take what’s called Jerusalem, which is far larger than Jerusalem ever was, as it’s a huge area expanding into the West Bank.
And then they have these corridors going to the east, so there’s a corridor going from Jerusalem through Maal Adumim towards Jericho. If that’s ever fully developed, it’ll bisect the West Bank. Interestingly, the United States has so far blocked their efforts to fully develop this corridor.
About ten years ago, there was advice from Israeli industrialists to the government, saying that in the West Bank they should move, in their phrase, from ‘colonialism’ to ‘neo- colonialism’. That is, they should construct neo-colonial structures on the West Bank. Now, we know what those are. Take any former colony. Typically, they have a sector of extreme wealth and privilege that collaborates with the former colonial power, and then a mass of misery and horror surrounding it. And that’s what they suggest, and that’s what’s being done. So if you go to Ramallaha — I wanted to see it for myself, but I didn’t get there — it’s kind of like Paris, you live a nice life, there are elegant restaurants, and so on, but of course if you go into the countryside, it’s quite different, and there are checkpoints and life’s impossible. Well, that’s neo-colonialism. There’s only totally dependent development, and they will not allow independent development, and they’re trying to impose a permanent arrangement of this kind.
Salam Fayyad, who I had hoped to meet in Ramallah — we talk by telephone — has described his programmes, which sound sensible to me. First of all, calling for a boycott of settlement production, which I think is very sensible, and I think that should be done all over the world, while trying to arrange for Palestinians to have forms of employment other than working in the settlements so they don’t contribute to settlement growth: taking part in non-violent resistance to the expansion and doing whatever construction they can manage to do within the Israeli framework, maybe even in Area C, the Israeli- controlled area, and just taking small steps towards trying to lay the basis for a future independent Palestinian entity.
Then it becomes very delicate because Israel might very well accept it. In fact, the Israeli deputy prime minister I think he is, Silvan Shalom, had an interview about this in which he was asked how he would react to this, and he said it’s fine, if they want to call the cantons we leave to them a state, then that’s fine, but it’ll be a state without borders… and that’ll essentially implant the neo-colonial structure.
There’s another element to it, which is the military force. There is an army run by an American general, Keith Dayton, which is trained by Jordan with Israeli cooperation, and has caused a lot of enthusiasm in the United States. John Kerry, who is head of the Senate foreign relations committee, gave an important speech on Israel-Palestine — he’s kind of Obama’s point man for the Middle East — he said that for the first time Israel has a legitimate negotiating partner. Why? Because during the Gaza attack, the Dayton army was able to prevent any protests, and Kerry thought that was very good, and the press thought that was very good, and now they are a legitimate partner. If you read Dayton himself, he says that they were so effective during the Gaza attack that Israel was able to shift forces from the West Bank to Gaza to extend the attack, and Kerry and Obama think that’s a fine thing, so that’s more of the traditional neo-colonial pattern, with para-military forces controlled by the colonial power that keep the population under control.
These are very ambivalent steps… Unless the United States changes its position and joins the world on a political settlement, then I think it looks very grim, and I don’t think the Egyptian position is helpful at all.
To read the whole article, use link
Gaza Flotilla: protesters’ story: The Guardian
They have been shot at, imprisoned, deported and threatened – what makes somebody prepared to risk their lives to go into the occupied territories?
Emine Saner
The Guardian, Saturday 5 June 2010
As the British activists aboard the aid flotilla to Gaza return to the UK, it becomes clear that the majority of them are people who have devoted years to campaigning against the Israeli occupation. They have been shot at, imprisoned, deported and threatened over the years and still they go back. What makes somebody prepared to risk their lives to go into the occupied territories? Ewa Jasiewicz, an activist and journalist, had been involved in anti-capitalist and social justice campaigns in Britain when friends returned from the West Bank where they had been volunteers with the newly formed International Solidarity Movement in 2002. “They said it was something that everyone should do, because you could prevent someone getting killed or injured,” she says, on the phone from Istanbul, where she had been deported after being arrested along with the other activists on the aid flotilla to Gaza.
She saw Israeli soldiers mount a raid on the Mavi Marmara, killing at least nine activists and wounding many more, before soldiers came after her boat. “Our engines failed and we stopped,” she says. “[The Israeli soldiers] were incredibly aggressive. They were saying ‘fuck you, fucking bitch, I’ll kill you’.”
Sarah Colborne, 43, director of campaigns and operations at the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, was on the Mavi Marmara. She says the experience hasn’t scared her from going to the occupied territories in the future. “People went because they felt they had to do something to challenge Israel and the blockade of Gaza. We didn’t actually think we would be murdered doing that. But Palestinians get killed every day and I hope that what we did does change the situation and force the world to end Israel’s violations of international law.” She has been involved in campaigning since being at university in the late 80s. “I suppose it came from a deep-rooted sense that my life was not worth anything unless I was challenging injustice.”
When Alex Harrison, 31, first went to the West Bank in 2003, she thought it would be a one-off, but it immediately became clear that she wouldn’t be able to forget it. “It’s one of those rare times in life when you feel you really can make a change and once you have that sense, you can’t turn your back on it,” she says. She spent two years in the West Bank. The chance that she might be killed isn’t something that frightens her, she says. “I’m frightened more about being wounded and being a burden on other people.” Her mother, Sandra Law, admits it was always worrying when her daughter was away, “but I’m one of the lucky ones because she has come back safely”.
Of all the activists I speak to, none has been scared off by their experiences. Jasiewicz was standing next to Brian Avery, an American activist, when he was shot in the face in 2003; another friend Caoimhe Butterly was shot in the thigh as she stood between an Israel Defence Force (IDF) tank and three young boys the year before. The tight-knit nature of the international group means that many of them met and became friends with fellow activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, both fatally wounded by the IDF. In 2002, on her first trip to Gaza, Sharyn Lock, one of the founders of the Free Gaza Movement, was shot in the stomach and would have died had she not been so close to a hospital. “In a way it made me realise what occupation is,” she says. “It was also the first time I realised that Israel had a policy of preventing the wounded getting treatment. I was in a hospital that was virtually empty, because every time the ambulances tried to answer calls they would be shot at or turned back by the Israeli army. That wasn’t something I could come home and forget.” She returned several times, before being banned by Israel, which was when a group of them came up with the idea of getting around this with the aid flotilla. Although she wasn’t travelling on this one, she has done several trips in the past. “We knew we were doing something dangerous, but human rights overrides that fear for me.”
“We’re just like anybody else,” insists Lock. “If you were on the street and you saw a car about to knock down a child, I think most of us would step in and try to get that child to safety. What motivates us is the same.”
Hedy Epstein, 85, says her activism “came with my genes. My parents [both German Jews] were anti-Zionists so I grew up with that..” Epstein left Germany in 1939 on the kindertransport to England; her parents, and many other relatives, were killed in the Holocaust. She has always been involved in human rights campaigning, she says on the phone from Cyprus, where officials prevented her and other activists boarding one of the boats to Gaza. “In 1982 when I learned about the massacre in two refugee camps in Shabra and Shatila, I needed to find out what that was about. The more I learned, the more deeply troubled I was by the policies and practices of the Israeli government and military. In 2003, I went to the West Bank for the first time time to witness what was really happening there.” She has been back five times, and spends the rest of the time in the US giving lectures about what she witnessed. “Each time I’ve gone back it was worse than the time before.” She says she always goes to the West Bank knowing that she might not come back, “but it has never stopped me. If the Palestinians can put up with it, I certainly should be able to. They cannot escape it, I always have the opportunity to leave whenever I want.”
For Epstein, the threats don’t stop once she is safely home. Last year, she was assaulted in her street and feels she was probably targeted. “The mainstream American Jewish community almost speak in one voice and if you dare to criticise Israel you are called anti-Semitic and if you are Jewish you’re called self-hating, a traitor. I get nasty emails. I’ve been told I should be ashamed of myself and so on.”
Fighting for human rights in Palestine might start as principle or ideology, but it quickly becomes an emotional issue, says Jasiewicz. “We have friends who feel like family there and it feels a very personal issue now.” For Epstein, it’s about taking responsibility. “I don’t think I can change the world, but I can maybe contribute one small piece towards that goal of making it possible for the Palestinian people to be free and to live a normal human life,” she says. “If you stand by and do nothing, you become part of the problem, you become complicit with what is happening.”
Alex Salmond hits out at Israel over raid on flotilla bound for Gaza: Daily Record
Jun 3 2010
THE First Minister said today that Israel’s actions were “insupportable” as he expressed concern for a Scottish captain on a ship bound for Gaza.
Israeli commandos left nine civilians dead when they raided a flotilla of aid ships in the Mediterranean on Monday.
At least four Scots were caught up in the incident which has sparked international outrage.
Alex Salmond said the SNP’s opposition to Israel’s blockade of Gaza has the support of an overwhelming majority of MSPs.
He said: “It is particularly important at the present moment, perhaps for the wider international community for responding to the atrocity in the high seas, but also for the fact that we believe that a ship currently bound for Gaza with a Scottish captain who’s piloting the ship, is obviously at risk if the Israeli government were to continue their blockade and their actions in international waters.
“Therefore I think this Parliament should speak with, certainly the overwhelming majority, in saying that the Israeli action is unacceptable, is insupportable and should stop forthwith.”
The First Minister said that of the four Scots on the flotilla, one has arrived home and the other three are due home soon.
He told MSPs at First Minister’s Questions: “The Scottish Government strongly condemns the actions taken by the Israeli authorities.
“We’ve added our voice to the wider international community and called for the immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
“I’ve written to the Israeli ambassador in the strongest possible terms.”
Mr Salmond was responding to a question from Labour’s Pauline McNeill.
The Glasgow Kelvin MSP said she would support him if he went ahead with a review of trading relations with Israel.
She said her constituent Hassan Ghani, who was on the aid flotilla, “is traumatised but is at least safe”.
Other Scots on board include Ali El-Awaisi, 21, from Dundee; postal worker Theresa McDermott, from Edinburgh; and Hasan Nowarah from Glasgow.
Mr Nowarah returned home yesterday. The others are still believed to be in Istanbul.
Ms McDermott helped set up the group Free Gaza Scotland last year. Mr Nowarah is chair of the Justice for Palestine Centre in Glasgow.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the blockade is essential to prevent missiles reaching the Hamas-controlled territory.
You will have no protection: The Electronic Intifada
Alice Walker, 4 June 2010
“You will have no protection”
— Medgar Evers to Civil Rights Activists in Mississippi, shortly before he was assassinated, 12 June, 1963
My heart is breaking; but I do not mind.
For one thing, as soon as I wrote those words I was able to weep. Which I had not been able to do since learning of the attack by armed Israeli commandos on defenseless peace activists carrying aid to Gaza who tried to fend them off using chairs and sticks. I am thankful to know what it means to be good; I know that the people of the Freedom Flotilla are/were in some cases, some of the best people on earth. They have not stood silently by and watched the destruction of others, brutally, sustained, without offering themselves, weaponless except for their bodies, to the situation. I am thankful to have a long history of knowing people like this from my earliest years, beginning in my student days of marches and demonstrations: for peace, for non-separation among peoples, for justice for Women, for People of Color, for Cubans, for Animals, for Indians, and for Her, the planet.
I am weeping for the truth of Medgar’s statement; so brave and so true. I weep for him gunned down in his carport, not far from where I would eventually live in Mississippi, with a box of t-shirts in his arms that said: “Jim Crow Must Go.” Though trained in the United States Military under racist treatment one cringes to imagine, he remained a peaceful soldier in the army of liberation to the end. I weep and will always weep, even through the widest smiles, for the beautiful young wife, Myrlie Evers, he left behind, herself still strong and focused on the truth of struggle; and for their children, who lost their father to a fate they could not possibly, at the time, understand. I don’t think any of us could imagine during that particular phase of the struggle for justice, that we risked losing not just our lives, which we were prepared to give, but also our children, who we were not.
Nothing protected Medgar, nor will anything protect any of us; nothing but our love for ourselves and for others whom we recognize unfailingly as also ourselves. Nothing can protect us but our lives. How we have lived them; what battles, with love and compassion our only shield, we have engaged. And yet, the moment of realizing we are truly alone, that in the ultimate crisis of our existence our government is not there for us, is one of shock. Especially if we have had the illusion of a system behind us to which we truly belong. Thankfully I have never had opportunity to have this illusion. And so, every peaceful witnessing, every non-violent confrontation has been a pure offering. I do not regret this at all.
When I was in Cairo last December to support CODEPINK’s efforts to carry aid into Gaza I was unfortunately ill with the flu and could not offer very much. I lay in bed in the hotel room and listened to other activists report on what was happening around the city as Egypt refused entry to Gaza to the 1,400 people who had come for the accompanying Freedom march. I heard many distressing things, but only one made me feel, not exactly envy, but something close; it was that the French activists had shown up, en masse, in front of their embassy and that their ambassador had come out to talk to them and to try to make them comfortable as they set up camp outside the building. This small gesture of compassion for his country’s activists in a strange land touched me profoundly, as I was touched decades ago when someone in John Kennedy’s White House (maybe the cook) sent out cups of hot coffee to our line of freezing student and teacher demonstrators as we tried, with our signs and slogans and
songs, to protect a vulnerable neighbor, Cuba.
Where have the Israelis put our friends? I thought about this all night. Those whom they assassinated on the ship and those they injured? Is “my” government capable of insisting on respect for their dead bodies? Can it demand that those who are injured but alive be treated with care? Not only with care, but the tenderness and honor they deserve? If it cannot do this, such a simple, decent thing, of what use is it to the protection and healing of the planet? I heard a spokesman for the United States opine at the United Nations (not an exact quote) that the Freedom Flotilla activists should have gone through other, more proper, channels, not been confrontational with their attempt to bring aid to the distressed. This is almost exactly what college administrators advised half a century ago when students were trying to bring down apartheid in the South and getting bullets, nooses, bombings and burnings for our efforts. I felt embarrassed (to the degree one can permit embarrassment by
another) to be even vaguely represented by this man: a useless voice from the far past. One had hoped.
The Israeli spin on the massacre: that the commandos were under attack by the peace activists and that the whole thing was like “a lynching” of the armed attackers, reminds me of a Redd Foxx joke. I loved Redd Foxx, for all his vulgarity. A wife caught her husband in bed with another woman, flagrant, in the act, skin to skin. The husband said, probably through pants of aroused sexual exertion: All right, go ahead and believe your lying eyes! It would be fun, were it not tragic, to compare the various ways the Israeli government and our media will attempt to blame the victims of this unconscionable attack for their own imprisonment, wounds and deaths.
So what to do? Rosa Parks sat down in the front of the bus. Martin Luther King followed her act of courage with many of his own, and using his ringing, compassionate voice he aroused the people of Montgomery, Alabama to commit to a sustained boycott of the bus company; a company that refused to allow people of color to sit in the front of the bus, even if it was empty. It is time for us, en masse, to show up in front of our conscience, and sit down in the front of the only bus we have: our very lives.
What would that look like, be like, today, in this situation between Palestine and Israel? This “impasse” that has dragged on for decades. This “conflict” that would have ended in a week if humanity as a whole had acted in defense of justice everywhere on the globe. Which maybe we are learning! It would look like the granddaughter of Rosa Parks, the grandson of Martin Luther King. It would look like spending our money only where we can spend our lives in peace and happiness; freely sharing whatever we have with our friends.
It would be to support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel to End the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and by this effort begin to soothe the pain and attend the sorrows of a people wrongly treated for generations. This action would also remind Israel that we have seen it lose its way and have called to it, often with love, and we have not been heard. In fact, we have reached out to it only to encounter slander, insult and, too frequently, bodily harm.
Disengage, avoid, and withhold support from whatever abuses, degrades and humiliates humanity.
This we can do. We the people; who ultimately hold all the power. We the people, who must never forget to believe we can win.
We the people.
It has always been about us; as we watch governments come and go. It always will be.
Alice Walker is a poet, novelist, feminist and activist whose award-winning works have sold over ten million copies.
Flotilla raid diary: ‘A man is shot. I am seeing it happen’: The Guardian
The prize-winning writer and creator of Wallander was among those on board the Gaza flotilla. Here he shares his private diary of the events leading to his capture
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Henning Mankell
The Guardian, Saturday 5 June 2010
Article history
On board the Mavi Marmara: ‘The Israelis have behaved like pirates.’ Photograph: Kate Geraghty/Sydney Morning Her/Getty Images
Tuesday 25 May, Nice
It is five o’clock in the morning and I’m standing in the street waiting for the taxi that will take me to the airport in Nice. It’s the first time in ages E and I have had some time off together. Initially we thought we’d be able to stretch it to two weeks. It turned out to be five days. Ship to Gaza finally seems to be ready to set off and I’m to travel to Cyprus to join it, as arranged.
As instructed, I’ve limited my luggage to a rucksack weighing no more than 10 kilos. Ship to Gaza has a clearly defined goal: to break Israel’s illegal blockade. After the war a year ago, life has become more and more unbearable for the Palestinians who live in Gaza. There is a huge shortage of the bare necessities for living any sort of decent life.
But the aim of the voyage is of course more explicit. Deeds, not words, I think. It’s easy to say you support or defend or oppose this, that and the other. But only action can provide proof of your words.
The Palestinians who have been forced by the Israelis to live in this misery need to know that they are not alone, not forgotten. The world has to be reminded of their existence. And we can do that by loading some ships with what they need most of all: medicines, desalination plants for drinking water, cement.
The taxi arrives, we agree a price – extortionate! – and drive to the airport through empty, early morning streets. It comes to me now that I made my first note, there in the taxi. I don’t remember the exact words, but I’m suddenly disconcerted by a sense of not quite having managed to register that this is a project so hated by the Israelis that they might try to stop the convoy by violent means.
By the time I get to the airport, the thought has gone. On this point, too, the project is very clearly defined. We are to use non-violent tactics; there are no weapons, no intention of physical confrontation. If we’re stopped, it ought to happen in a way that doesn’t put our lives at risk.
Wednesday 26 May, Nicosia
It’s warmer than in Nice. Those who are to board the ships somewhere off the coast of Cyprus are gathering at Hotel Centrum in Nicosia. It’s like being in an old Graham Greene novel. A collection of odd people assembling in some godforsaken place to set off on a journey together. We’re going to break an illegal blockade. The words are repeated in a variety of languages. But suddenly there’s a great sense of uncertainty.
The ships are late, various problems have arisen, the coordinates still haven’t been set for the actual rendezvous. The only thing that’s certain is that it will be out at sea. Cyprus doesn’t want our six ships putting in here. Presumably Israel has applied pressure.
Now and then I also note tensions between the various groups that make up the leadership of this unwieldy project. The breakfast room has been pressed into service as a secretive meeting room. We are called in to write details of our next of kin, in case of the worst. Everyone writes away busily. Then we are told to wait. Watch and wait. Those are the words that will be used most often, like a mantra, in the coming days. Wait. Watch and wait.
Thursday 27 May, Nicosia
Wait. Watch and wait. Oppressive heat.
Friday 28 May, Nicosia
I suddenly start to wonder whether I may have to leave the island without getting onto a ship. There seems to be a shortage of places. There are apparently waiting lists for this project of solidarity. But K, the friendly Swedish MP, and S, the Swedish female doctor, who are travelling with me help keep my spirits up. Travel by ship always involves some kind of bother, I think. We carry on with our task. Of waiting. Watching and waiting.
Saturday 29 May, Nicosia
Suddenly everything happens very quickly. We are now, but of course still only maybe, to travel sometime today on a different, faster ship to the point out at sea where the coordinates meet, and there we will join the convoy of five other vessels that will then head as a single flotilla for the Gaza Strip.
We carry on waiting. But at about 5pm the port authorities finally give us permission to board a ship called the Challenge, which will take us at a speed of 15 knots to the rendezvous point, where we will transfer to the cargo ship Sophia. There are already lots of people aboard the Challenge.
They seem a bit disappointed to see the three of us turn up. They had been hoping for some Irish campaigners who have, however, suddenly given up the idea and gone home. We climb aboard, say hello, quickly learn the rules. It’s very cramped, plastic bags full of shoes everywhere, but the mood is good, calm. All the question marks seem to have been ironed out now. Soon after the two diesel engines rumble into life. We’re finally underway.
23.00
I’ve found a chair on the rear deck. The wind is not blowing hard, but enough to make a lot of the passengers seasick. I have wrapped myself up in blankets, and watch the moon cast an illuminated trail across the sea. I think to myself that solidarity actions can take many forms. The rumbling means there is not a lot of conversation. Just now, the journey feels very peaceful. But deceptively so.
Sunday 30 May, at sea, south-east of Cyprus, 01.00
I can see the glimmer of lights in various directions. The captain, whose name I never manage to learn, has slowed his speed. The lights flickering in the distance are the navigation lights of two of the other ships in the convoy. We are going to lie here until daylight, when people can be transferred to other vessels. But I still can’t find anywhere to sleep. I stay in my wet chair and doze.
Solidarity is born in dampness and waiting; but we are helping others to get roofs over their heads.
08.00
The sea is calmer. We are approaching the largest vessel in the flotilla. It’s a passenger ferry, the “queen” of the ships in the convoy. There are hundreds of people on board. There has been much discussion of the likelihood of the Israelis focusing their efforts on this particular ship.
What efforts? We’ve naturally been chewing that over ever since the start of the project. Nothing can be known with any certainty. Will the Israeli navy sink the ships? Or repel them by some other means? Is there any chance the Israelis will let us through, and repair their tarnished reputation? Nobody knows. But it seems most likely that we’ll be challenged at the border with Israeli territorial waters by threatening voices from loudspeakers on naval vessels. If we fail to stop, they will probably knock out our propellers or rudders, then tow us somewhere for repair.
13.00
The three of us transfer to the Sophia by rope ladder. She is a limping old cargo ship, with plenty of rust and an affectionate crew. I calculate that we are about 25 people in all. The cargo includes cement, reinforcement bars and prefabricated wooden houses. I am given a cabin to share with the MP, whom I view after the long days in Nicosia more and more as a very old friend. We find it has no electric light. We’ll have to catch up on our reading some other time.
16.00
The convoy has assembled. We head for Gaza.
18.00
We gather in the improvised dining area between the cargo hatches and the ship’s superstructure. The grey-haired Greek who is responsible for security and organisation on board, apart from the nautical aspects, speaks softly and immediately inspires confidence. Words like “wait” and “watch” no longer exist. Now we are getting close. The only question is: what are we getting close to?
Nobody knows what the Israelis will come up with. We only know that their statements have been menacing, announcing that the convoy will be repelled with all the means at their disposal. But what does that mean? Torpedoes? Hawsers? Soldiers let down from helicopters? We can’t know. But violence will not be met with violence from our side.
Only elementary self-defence. We can, on the other hand, make things harder for our attackers. Barbed wire is to be strung all round the ship’s rail. In addition, we are all to get used to wearing life jackets, lookouts are to be posted and we will be told where to assemble if foreign soldiers come aboard. Our last bastion will be the bridge.
Then we eat. The cook is from Egypt, and suffers with a bad leg. But he cooks great food.
Monday 31 May, midnight
I share the watch on the port side from midnight to 3am. The moon is still big, though occasionally obscured by cloud. The sea is calm. The navigation lights gleam. The three hours pass quickly. I notice I am tired when someone else takes over. It’s still a long way to anything like a territorial boundary the Israelis could legitimately defend. I should try to snatch a few hours’ sleep.
I drink tea, chat to a Greek crewman whose English is very poor but who insists he wants to know what my books are about. It’s almost four before I get to lie down.
04.30
I’ve just dropped off when I am woken again. Out on deck I see that the big passenger ferry is floodlit. Suddenly there is the sound of gunfire. So now I know that Israel has chosen the route of brutal confrontation. In international waters.
It takes exactly an hour for the speeding black rubber dinghies with the masked soldiers to reach us and start to board. We gather, up on the bridge. The soldiers are impatient and want us down on deck. Someone who is going too slowly immediately gets a stun device fired into his arm. He falls. Another man who is not moving fast enough is shot with a rubber bullet. I think: I am seeing this happen right beside me. It is an absolute reality. People who have done nothing being driven like animals, being punished for their slowness.
We are put in a group down on the deck. Where we will then stay for 11 hours, until the ship docks in Israel. Every so often we are filmed. When I jot down a few notes, a soldier comes over at once and asks what I am writing. That’s the only time I lose my temper, and tell him it’s none of his business. I can only see his eyes; don’t know what he is thinking. But he turns and goes.
Eleven hours, unable to move, packed together in the heat. If we want to go for a pee, we have to ask permission. The food they give us is biscuits, rusks and apples. We’re not allowed to make coffee, even though we could do it where we are sitting. We take a collective decision: not to ask if we can cook food.
Then they would film us. It would be presented as showing how generously the soldiers had treated us. We stick to the biscuits and rusks. It is degradation beyond compare. (Meanwhile, the soldiers who are off-duty have dragged mattresses out of the cabins and are sleeping at the back of the deck.)
So in those 11 hours, I have time to take stock. We have been attacked while in international waters. That means the Israelis have behaved like pirates, no better than those who operate off the coast of Somalia. The moment they start to steer this ship towards Israel, we have also been kidnapped. The whole action is illegal.We try to talk among ourselves, work out what might happen, and not least how the Israelis could opt for a course of action that means painting themselves into a corner.
The soldiers watch us. Some pretend not to understand English. But they all do. There are a couple of girls among the soldiers. They look the most embarrassed. Maybe they are the sort who will escape to Goa and fall into drug addiction when their military service is over? It happens all the time.
18.00
Quayside somewhere in Israel. I don’t know where. We are taken ashore and forced to run the gauntlet of rows of soldiers while military TV films us. It suddenly hits me that this is something I shall never forgive them. At that moment they are nothing more to my mind than pigs and bastards.
We are split up, no one is allowed to talk to anyone else. Suddenly a man from the Israeli ministry for foreign affairs appears at my side. I realise he is there to make sure I am not treated too harshly. I am, after all, known as a writer in Israel. I’ve been translated into Hebrew. He asks if I need anything.
‘My freedom and everybody else’s,’ I say. He doesn’t answer. I ask him to go. He takes one step back. But he stays.
I admit to nothing, of course, and am told I am to be deported. The man who says this also says he rates my books highly. That makes me consider ensuring nothing I write is ever translated into Hebrew again.
Agitation and chaos reign in this “asylum-seekers’ reception centre”. Every so often, someone is knocked to the ground, tied up and handcuffed. I think several times that no one will believe me when I tell them about this. But there are many eyes to see it. Many people will be obliged to admit that I am telling the truth. There are a lot of us who can bear witness.
A single example will do. Right beside me, a man suddenly refuses to have his fingerprints taken. He accepts being photographed. But fingerprints? He doesn’t consider he has done anything wrong. He resists. And is beaten to the ground. They drag him off. I don’t know where. What word can I use? Loathsome? Inhuman? There are plenty to choose from.
23.00
We, the MP, the doctor and I, are taken to a prison for those refused right of entry. There we are split up. We are thrown a few sandwiches that taste like old dishcloths. It’s a long night. I use my trainers as a pillow.
Tuesday 1 June, afternoon
Without any warning, the MP and I are taken to a Lufthansa plane. We are to be deported. We refuse to go until we know what is happening to S Once we have assured ourselves that she, too, is on her way, we leave our cell.
On board the plane, the air hostess gives me a pair of socks. Because mine were stolen by one of the commandos who attacked the boat I was on.
The myth of the brave and utterly infallible Israeli soldier is shattered. Now we can add: they are common thieves. For I was not the only one to be robbed of my money, credit card, clothes, MP3 player, laptop; the same happened to many others on the same ship as me, which was attacked early one morning by masked Israeli soldiers, who were thus in fact nothing other than lying pirates.
By late evening we are back in Sweden. I talk to some journalists. Then I sit for a while in the darkness outside the house where I live. E doesn’t say much.
Wednesday 2 June, afternoon
I listen to the blackbird. A song for those who died.
Now it is still all left to do. So as not to lose sight of the goal, which is to lift the brutal blockade of Gaza. That will happen.
Beyond that goal, others are waiting. Demolishing a system of apartheid takes time. But not an eternity.
Copyright Henning Mankell. This article was translated by Sarah Death