By Ali Abunimah
Al Jazeera
Friday, Jun 4, 2010
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Feelings have run particularly high in Turkey, at least four of whose nationals are believed
to have been killed [AFP] |
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Since Israel's invasion and massacre of over 1,400 people in Gaza 18
months ago, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, global civil society movements
have stepped up their campaigns for justice and solidarity with
Palestinians.
Governments, by contrast, carried on with business as usual, maintaining a complicit silence.
Israel's
lethal attack on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza may change that, spurring
governments to follow the lead of their people and take unprecedented
action to check Israel's growing lawlessness.
Lip service
One of the bitterest images from Operation Cast Lead was that of
smiling European Union heads of government visiting Jerusalem and
patting Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, on the back as
white phosphorus still seared the flesh of Palestinian children a few
miles away.
Western countries sometimes expressed mild dismay at
Israel's "excessive" use of force, but still justified the Gaza
massacre as "self-defence" - even though Israel could easily have
stopped rocket fire from Gaza, if that was its goal, by returning to
the negotiated June 2008 ceasefire it egregiously violated the
following November.
When the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report
documented the extensive evidence of Israeli war crimes and crimes
against humanity, including the willful killings of unarmed civilians,
few governments paid more than lip service to seeing justice done.
Even
worse, after Cast Lead, EU countries and the US sent their navies to
help Israel enforce a blockade on Gaza which amounts to collective
punishment of the entire population and thus violates the Fourth Geneva
Convention governing Israel's ongoing occupation.
Not one
country sent a hospital ship to help treat or evacuate the thousands of
wounded, many with horrific injuries that overwhelmed Gaza's hospitals.
Carrot and stick
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The attack caused international outrage [AFP] |
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The blockade has never been - as Israel and its apologists claim - to stop the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.
Its
goal has always been political: to cause the civilian population as
much suffering as possible - while still politically excusable - in
order for the Palestinians in Gaza to reject and rise up against the
Hamas leadership elected in January 2006.
The withholding of
food, medicine, schoolbooks, building supplies, among thousands of
other items, as well as the right to enter and leave Gaza for any
purpose became a weapon to terrorise the civilian population.
At
the same time, Western aid was showered on the occupied West Bank -
whose ordinary people are still only barely better off than in Gaza -
in a "carrot and stick" policy calculated to shift support away from
Hamas and toward the Western-backed, unelected Palestinian Authority
leadership affiliated with the rival Fatah faction, who have repeatedly
demonstrated their unconditional willingness to collaborate with Israel
no matter what it does to their people.
"The idea is to put the
Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger," senior
Israeli government advisor Dov Weisglass notoriously explained in 2006.
By this standard the blockade - supported by several Arab governments
and the Quartet (the US, EU, UN secretary-general, and Russia) has been
a great success, as numerous studies document alarming increases in
child malnutrition as the vast majority of Gaza's population became
dependent on UN food handouts. Hundreds have died for lack of access to
proper medical care.
Filling the 'moral void'
While
inaction and complicity characterised the official response, global
civil society stepped in to fill the moral and legal void.
In
the year and a half since Cast Lead, the global, Palestinian-led
campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel (BDS) has been
racking up impressive victories.
From the decisions by Norway's
pension funds and several European banks to divest from certain Israeli
companies, to university divestment initiatives, the refusals by
international artists to perform in Israel, or the flashmobs that have
brought the consumer boycott to supermarkets around the world, Israel
sees BDS as a growing "existential threat".
At this point, the
effect may be more psychological than economic but it is exactly the
feeling of increasing isolation and pariah status that helped push
South Africa's apartheid rulers to recognise that their regime was
untenable and to seek peaceful change with the very people they had so
long demonised, dehumanised and oppressed.
Indeed, the BDS
movement is only likely to gather pace: world-best-selling Swedish
author Henning Mankell who was among the passengers on the Turkish ship
Mavi Marmara kidnapped and taken to Israel, said on being
freed: "I think we should use the experience of South Africa, where we
know that the sanctions had a great impact."
The Freedom
Flotilla represented the very best, and most courageous of this civil
society spirit and determination not to abandon fellow human beings to
the cruelty, indifference and self-interest of governments.
The
immediate response to Israel's attack on the Flotilla may indicate that
governments too are starting to come out of their slumber and shed the
paralysing fear of criticising Israel that has assured its impunity for
so long.
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The US administration is standing behind Israel, even if public opinion is not [AFP] |
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Growing gap
Indeed, the global reaction demonstrates the growing gap between the US
and Israel on one side and the rest of the world on the other.
While
Israeli officials scrambled to offer justifications from the ludicrous
(elite commandos armed with paint ball guns) to the benign (the attack
was an "inspection"), the US has once again stood behind its ally
unconditionally.
As the Obama administration forced a
watered-down presidential statement in the UN Security Council, Israeli
apologists in the mainstream US media repeatedly attempted to excuse
Israel's actions as lawful and legitimate.
Senior administration
officials, including Joe Biden, the vice president, openly began to
echo their Israeli counterparts that Israel's attack was not only
legitimate but justified by its security needs.
Despite the predictable and shameless US reaction, international condemnation has been unusually robust.
In
his speech to the Turkish parliament following the attack, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, denounced Israeli "state
terrorism" and demanded that the international community exact a price.
Erdogan
vowed that "Turkey will never turn its back on Gaza," and that it would
continue its campaign to lift the blockade and hold Israel accountable
even if it had to do so alone.
There are hopeful signs it may not have to.
European and other countries summoned Israeli ambassadors and several recalled their envoys from Tel Aviv.
Franco
Frattini, the Italian foreign minister and one of Israel's staunchest
apologists in Europe, said his country "absolutely deplored the slaying
of civilians" and demanded that Israel "must give an explanation to the
international community" of killings he deemed "absolutely
unacceptable, whatever the flotilla's aims".
Small countries
showed the greatest courage and clarity. Nicaragua suspended diplomatic
ties completely, citing Israel's "illegal attack". Brian Cowen,
Ireland's prime minister, told parliament in Dublin that his government
had "formally requested" of Israel that the vessel Rachel Corrie still
heading toward Gaza, be allowed to proceed, and warned of the "most
serious consequences" should Israel use violence against it.
The
boat - named after the young American peace activist killed by Israeli
occupation forces in Gaza in 2003 - is carrying Malaysian and Irish
activists and politicians including Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead
Maguire.
Crossed a threshold
These
are still small actions, but they indicate Israel may have crossed a
threshold where it can no longer take appeasement and complicity for
granted.
It is a cumulative process - each successive outrage has diminished the reserve of goodwill and forbearance Israel enjoyed.
Even
if most governments are not quite ready to go from words to effective
actions, growing public outrage will eventually push them to impose
official sanctions.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime
minister, may have hastened that day with his fulsome pride in, and
praise for, the slaughter at sea even after the outpouring of
international condemnation.
Despite its intensive efforts to hide and spin what happened aboard the Mavi Marmara
in the early hours of May 31, the world saw Israel use exactly the sort
of indiscriminate brutality documented in the Goldstone Report.
This
time, however, it was not just "expendable" Palestinians or Lebanese
who were Israel's victims - but people from 32 countries and every
continent. It was the day the whole world became Gaza. And like the
people of Gaza, the world is unlikely to take it lying down.
Ali Abunimah is author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
Al Jazeera
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