Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Looking back a year later

Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Looking back a year later


Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 08:00


A still from Iara Lee’s footage shows an Israeli Blackhawk helicopter as it drops troops onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara in the early morning of 31 May 2010.

In the early morning hours of 31 May 2010, Israeli forces carried out a violent, unprovoked assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it sailed in international waters in the eastern Mediterranean.

Israeli commandos in speed boats and helicopters commandeered the six ships killing nine people and injuring dozens more aboard the largest vessel, the Mavi Marmara.

The first alarming reports of the bloody Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara came via Turkish television and I was able to relay reports and screenshots via Twitter and on my Posterous blog.

Amid intense Israeli efforts to jam communications, any picture, such as this one showing a person with blood on their life vest, gave vital clues to the seriousness and violence of the Israeli assault.

Countering Israel’s propaganda

Israel not only attacked the ships but commandeered them with all their passengers and crew to the port of Ashdod, where they were held incommunicado for many days. All video and photographic footage was confiscated, and media were not allowed to speak to the hundreds of kidnapped passengers. Israel has still not returned the footage and other evidence it stole.

In the first hours and days, Israel’s propaganda – or hasbara – machine went into full swing, publishing false and distorted reports and images – such as the infamous ‘man with a dagger’ photo, and heavily edited and misleading video.

Independent reporting, using information from sources ignored by mainstream media, was key to countering Israel’s propaganda.

Lubna Masarwa, one of the first Mavi Marmara passengers to be released from Israeli custody provided a harrowing eyewitness account, published by The Electronic Intifada on 8 June.

And despite Israeli censorship, independent filmmaker Iara Lee who was aboard the Mavi Marmara managed to smuggle an hour of footage off the ship and past her Israeli kidnappers.

Analysis of this footage has provided vital corroboration of what happened during the Israeli assault, including: the use of European and American weapons and indiscriminate live fire by the Israeli attackers. Iara Lee’s footage also provided a poignant glimpse of the last moments of Turkish journalist Cevdet Kılıçlar, one of the nine people killed.

The flotilla was attacked even as it tried to flee

The Electronic Intifada was able to plot the known positions of the Mavi Marmara on a map and by comparing with other evidence demonstrate that the flotilla was not only in international waters, but heading away from the Israeli coast when it was attacked.

Coverage highlights

Here is a selection of some of the reporting on my Posterous blog, and other coverage, in the days and weeks after the attack:
1 June 2010 Video: Adam Shapiro, Amira Hass, Ali Abunimah, Richard Falk on Democracy Now.3 June 2010 “The day the world became Gaza” - op-ed on Aljazeera.net3 June 2010 Did Israel try to assassinate Sheikh Raed Salah on Mavi Marmara but kill a Turkish engineer instead?4 June 2010 Proof emerges IDF audio of radio communication with Mavi Marmara is fabricated6 June 2010 Israel hasbara fails again: Photos show Mavi Marmara passengers protecting, aiding Israeli soldiersHasbara comedy video further exposes IDF “knife-attacker” photo fraud7 June 2011 Did Israel press on with bloody attack on Mavi Marmara even as ship fled at full-speed?8 June 2011: “The crimes I saw on the Mavi Marmara,” Lubna Masarwa13 June 2010 Video reveals European, American weapons used in Israeli attack on Gaza FlotillaFootage proves indiscriminate Israeli live fire at Mavi Marmara passengers in Gaza Flotilla14 June 2010 The last moments of Cevdet Kılıçlar, a working journalist murdered on the Mavi Marmara15 June 2010 “Independent journalists dismantling Israel’s hold on media narrative,” Abraham Greenhouse and Nora Barrows-Friedman.
Israel’s propaganda and the efforts to counter it were immortalized in Minor Demographic Threat’s brilliant Internet Killed Israeli PR, a parody of the 1979 hit Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles.

Finally, as a new flotilla prepares to head to Gaza this summer, Israel’s propaganda campaign against it is already in full swing.

Should the 1967 borders guide Israeli-Palestinian peace plan?

Should the 1967 borders guide Israeli-Palestinian peace plan?

Yes. But the details matter: no conditions, no 'swaps,' no settlements.


May 31, 2011

By Mustafa Barghouthi

President Barack Obama was right to call for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. But he should have stopped there. Instead, he added a damaging proviso about "mutually agreed swaps" of land.

Conditions and stipulations trouble Palestinians greatly. Israel used the Oslo Accords not to finalize a peace deal with the Palestinians but to expand settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank -- talking peace while seizing our land. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was notorious for accepting what American Presidents asked of him. Yet in the next breath he would note his caveats.

Prime Minister Netanyahu imitated Sharon's approach two years ago -- and again last Tuesday in the U.S. Congress -- while reluctantly voicing support for a two-state solution. He said yes to a Palestinian state while simultaneously stripping it of meaningful sovereignty. Israel would maintain major settlement blocs, retain East Jerusalem and a military presence in the Jordan Valley, refuse the return of any Palestinian refugees to stolen homes and land, and ensure that a Palestinian "state" is a nonentity without real sovereignty.

Obama's political opponents and even some of his ostensible allies heavily criticized him by suggesting he was calling for the 1967 borders. In fact, he was merely restating long-standing U.S. policy that an agreement should be based on the 1967 borders, with land "swaps" (itself a euphemism for forcing a bad deal on Palestinian negotiators). Unfortunately he retreated even from this within a few days because of criticism from Israel and its defenders. In his address to AIPAC he went back to President Bush's position that borders will have to take into consideration new realities on the ground, which means acceptance of illegal Israeli settlement expansion.

Our best West Bank land and aquifers would go to Israeli settlements in exchange for sub-standard land elsewhere. Already, Israel uses 80 percent of West Bank water resources and on a per capita basis Israeli settlers use approximately 48 times more water than Palestinians. The current unjust water distribution is likely to be made permanent if Israel keeps settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.

Israel's retention of settlement blocs and a military presence in the Jordan Valley will make our state noncontiguous and nonviable. Our state would be little more than disconnected Bantustans. When the white South African government tried to foist such a plan on the world it was seen as repugnant. Palestinians are surely the holders of the same rights as black South Africans and can no more be expected to accept apartheid conditions than South Africans who rejected inferior rights.

Human Rights Watch recently lent credence to our apartheid concerns with a report detailing Israel's "two-tier" legal system in the occupied West Bank. Such discrimination in favor of settlers and against Palestinians ought to be regarded as reprehensible just as it eventually was viewed in the Jim Crow South. Tragically, it is visible every day in the West Bank.

Israeli threats to annex -- by dint of brute force -- West Bank land as a response to our nonviolent legal efforts this September at the United Nations are troubling. This would, however, highlight the apartheid nature of their policies as our "bantustanized" existence would become more visible. Denied statehood, our cause will eventually be transformed from pursuit of two states to a struggle within one state for one person, one vote.

It would be far wiser for Israel to recognize our state on the 1967 borders -- and the rights provided us under international law -- come September.

Mustafa Barghouthi, a doctor and a member of the Palestinian parliament, was a candidate for president in 2005. He is secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party.

The two speeches of Barack Obama

The two speeches of Barack Obama


By Josh Ruebner - 05/20/11 11

During his speech today at the State Department, President Obama rightfully noted the “hypocrisy of the Iranian regime, which says it stands for the rights of protesters abroad, yet suppresses its people at home.”

But President Obama’s bifurcated speech—the greater part of which centered on the human rights of people throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the lesser part of which re-trod perfunctorily on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” — points to an additional double standard that the United States must overcome if it is to have a coherent response to the Arab Spring.


The United States cannot continue to decry violent repression by governments against individuals acting to assert their fundamental human rights while continuing to provide Israel with the means—both weapons and diplomatic support — to continue its human rights abuses of Palestinians without mocking the values it claims to support universally.
President Obama asserted that “we will stand against attempts to single it [Israel] out for criticism in international forums.” Yet, by erasing Palestinians from the Arab Spring and trying to shoehorn Palestinian rights into a moribund and morally bankrupt “peace process” that, under the monopoly of U.S. brokerage, perpetually sublimates Palestinian desires for freedom, justice, and equality to Israel’s “security interests,” it is the President who singles out Israel for special treatment.

By placing Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and Palestinian efforts to undo those discriminatory policies through nonviolent struggle, outside the context of the changes buffeting repressive regimes throughout the region, President Obama signals that Israel need not abide by the standards to which the United States holds regimes like Libya and Bahrain.

In the President’s view, “We support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; equality for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.” But if you live in Gaza City, or Ramallah, or in the Palestinian refugee camps of Yarmouk in Syria, or Ein Al-Hilweh in Lebanon, then you need not apply apparently.

In his address to the Muslim world two years ago in Cairo, President Obama chastised Palestinians that they “must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed.” Yet, to this day, President Obama continues to overlook that Palestinians have preponderantly utilized nonviolent protest.

Events of the past week have demonstrated that even when Palestinians engage in the forms of popular, nonviolent protest championed by President Obama, they will still be met with Israeli brutality. And that Israeli repression will not only be tolerated by the United States, but underwritten by it as well.

Last Sunday, to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as Palestinians term the dispossession inflicted upon them by Israel in 1948, thousands of Palestinian refugees marched unarmed to assert their internationally-recognized, but long-denied, fundamental human right to return to their homes.
Israeli troops killed at least a dozen of these refugees, shooting them with live ammunition, providing a stark reminder of the extent to which Israel will go to maintain its apartheid policies toward Palestinian refugees and deny them their fundamental human rights.

President Obama only referred to the plight of Palestinian refugees as a “wrenching and emotional” issue, not one that should be resolved by compelling Israel to follow international law. Yet, even for Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, for whom the President showed a degree of empathy in acknowledging their “suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own,” the illegitimacy of Israel’s repression of their basic human rights never enters Obama’s lexicon.

Recently, Israel finally released from prison Abdallah Abu Rahmah, who was jailed for nearly one and a half years “for the crime of organizing peaceful demonstrations against the illegal construction of Israel's wall on lands belonging to my village – Bil'in.” The State Department was asked repeatedly about its position on his jailing, and refused to condemn it, mocking President Obama’s demand of Syria to “release political prisoners and stop unjust arrests.”

By lecturing Palestinians that “efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state,” President Obama evoked the supposedly sympathetic white pastors who counseled caution to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King wrote that the worst stumbling block to freedom’s advance is the person who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's [or woman’s] freedom.”

Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip have been denied their freedom from Israeli military occupation since 1967. Since 1948, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been denied equality, and Palestinian refugees have been denied justice.

Rather than relegate Palestinian rights to the background of an empty “peace process,” President Obama must take the “moment of opportunity” afforded by the Arab Spring to assert that Israel, like every other regime in the region, must respect the humanity, dignity, and rights of the peoples of the region.

Josh Ruebner is the national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of more than 350 organizations working to change U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine. He is a former analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research Service