- The first thing you need to know about the Gaza flotilla disaster is that the intention of the activists on board the ships was to break the Israeli blockade. Delivering the embargoed goods was incidental.
In other words, the activists were like the civil rights demonstrators who sat down at segregated lunch counters throughout the South and refused to leave until they were served. Their goal was not really to get breakfast. It was to end segregation.
That fact is so obvious that it is hard to believe that the “pro-Israel” lobby is using it as an indictment.
Of course the goal of the flotilla was to break the blockade. Of course Martin Luther King provoked the civil authorities of the South to break segregation. Of course the Solidarity movement used workers’ rights as a pretext to break Soviet-imposed Communism.
The bottom line is that the men and women of the flotilla had every right to attempt to destroy an illegal blockade that Israel had no legal standing to impose and which was designed to inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza…
Go read the whole thing.
Not particularly relevant to Rosenberg’s insightful piece..
But it’s interesting what one of the main things that Israel is interdicting in its blockade as “military material”: Cement, aboard the Rachel Corrie, still en route to Gaza. Way back when before 1956 that was the main thing that Israel was importing through the Straits of Tiran, in order to build its port at Eilat. (See Fred Khouri’s fine old book, the Arab Israeli Dilemma) And Israel used Egypt’s often half-hearted blockade as an excuse to start a war of aggression, the 1956 Suez War.
So when Israel wants cement, a blockade is a good justification for launching a war and killing thousands. But when Palestinians want it, it is just for evil terrorism, and blockading cement is self-defense. 🙂
The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza announced on Wednesday that they received funding for three more ships to be part of a new Gaza-bound flotilla dubbed “Freedom 2”.
Dr. Arafat Madi, the head of the group, based in Brussels, said that they are planning a new Gaza flotilla comprised of many more ships and pro-Palestinian activists than the first one.
By Avi Issacharoff and Reuters
The analogy with the Bloody Sunday in Selma, AL is starting to take real shape. “The first march took place on March 7, 1965 — “Bloody Sunday” — when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge…
On March 9, Dr. King led about 2,500 marchers out to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and held a short prayer session before turning the marchers back around…That evening, three white ministers who had come for the march were attacked and beaten with clubs in front of the Silver Moon CafĂ©, a hangout for segregationist whites. The worst injured was James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston. Selma’s public hospital refused to treat Rev. Reeb, who had to be taken to University Hospital in Birmingham, two hours away. Reeb died on Thursday, March 11 at University Hospital with his wife by his side….
On March 21, close to 8,000 people assembled at Brown Chapel to commence the trek to Montgomery. Most of the participants were black, but many were white and some were Asian and Latino…
On Thursday, March 25, 25,000 people marched from St. Jude to the steps of the State Capitol Building where King delivered the speech “How Long, Not Long.” “The end we seek,” King told the crowd, “is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. … I know you are asking today, How long will it take? I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long.
Later that night, Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit who had come to Alabama to support voting rights for blacks, was assassinated by Ku Klux Klan members while she was ferrying marchers back to Selma from Montgomery…
The marches drastically shifted public opinion about the Civil Rights movement as a whole. The images of Alabama law enforcement beating the nonviolent protesters were shown all over the country and the world by the television networks and newspapers. The visuals of such brutality being carried out by the state of Alabama helped shift the image of the segregationist movement from one of a movement trying to preserve the social order of the South to a system of state endorsed terrorism against those non-whites.
The marches also had a powerful effect in Washington. After witnessing TV coverage of “Bloody Sunday,” President Lyndon Baines Johnson met with Governor George Wallace in Washington to discuss with him the civil rights situation in his state. He tried to persuade Wallace to stop the state harassment of the protesters. Two nights later, on March 15, 1965, Johnson presented a bill to a joint session of Congress. The bill itself would later pass and become the Voting Rights Act. Johnson’s speech in front of Congress was considered to be a watershed moment for the civil rights movement; Johnson even used the movement’s most famous slogan ‘We shall overcome’.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_%281965%29#First_march
It’s going to be a long, hot summer for Israel. Bibi and his petty apartheid regime should be quaking in their shikh. But they’re too myopic to realize that they are falling right into the same trap that racist White Southerners fell into.
Interestingly, the number of deaths have already exceeded those of the Selma marches, which says something about the relative brutality of Southern Whites and Israeli armed forces.
‘The activists expelled to Jordan included nationals from Kuwait, Algeria, Lebanon, Malaysia and Indonesia. They were among 682 detained during the Israeli operation.
Abdul Rahman Failakawee, a Kuwaiti, said the Israelis had used an array of weaponry to subdue those on board the convoy.
“The attack was totally barbaric,” he said by telephone from a bus taking the freed activists to Amman. “They used legitimate and maybe illegitimate weapons: rubber bullets, live ammunition, sound bombs and tear gas bombs. They also used batons as they landed to beat those on board to control the ship.”
Archbishop Hilarian Capucci, a Greek Catholic prelate from Jerusalem who was imprisoned by Israel in 1974 and later deported, said the maritime attack was unwarranted.
“Our trip to Gaza was a trip of love and God was with us. Israel by its actions had rightly drawn world outrage over its brutality against unarmed people carrying a message of love to an innocent occupied people under siege,” Capucci said.
“They humiliated us,” said Ahmed Brahimi, an Algerian who said he was on board the Mavi Marmara.
“We were not armed. We did not go there to fight,” Brahimi, who said he was the co-ordinator of the Algerian contingent on board the convoy’s ships, said.
“We used sticks and all what we could find to defend ourselves to stop the assault. During the second assault, they succeeded in kidnapping the young son of the captain, and then we found ourselves obliged to give up.”’
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=365727&version=1&template_id=37&parent_id=17