Category: Israel 2010

Flotilla murders: The Turkish/NATO angle

The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler reported this about Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu , who’s been in Washington today:

    With anger and sarcasm, … Davutoglu lashed out Tuesday at Israel’s attack on a Gaza aid flotilla and by extension the Obama administration’s reluctance to immediately condemn the assault that left at least nine civilians dead.
    “Psychologically, this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey,” Davutoglu told reporters over breakfast in Washington before going to the State Department to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton…
    Davutoglu displayed a map showing that the attack took place 72 nautical miles off the coast of Israel, far beyond the 12-mile sovereign border.
    … he said that in Turkey’s view, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has full authority under [last night’s UNSC presidential statement] to order an international probe. He noted that the incident took place in international waters so Israel has no right to declare it can conduct its own inquiry.
    “We will not be silent about this,” he said. “We expect the United States to show solidarity with us. . . . I am not very happy with the statements from the United States yesterday.”

More from his meeting with Clinton soon, presumably.
Turkey is of course the only majority-Muslim member of NATO, and therefore plays an important role in the counsels of the military alliance, which is currently engaged in a complicated and dangerous shooting war in Afghanistan. Israel is notably not a member of NATO.
NATO this morning held an emergency meeting at its Brussels headquarters to discuss the raid, at Turkey’s request. Afterwards, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussens said in a statement that

    he condemns the acts “which have led to this tragedy” and offered condolence to families of the victims killed in the incident.
    “I add my voice to the calls by the United Nations and the European Union for a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation into the incident,” he added.
    Rasmussen also called for “the immediate release of the detained civilians and ships held by Israel”.

In Turkey meanwhile, the excellent Turkish daily Today’s Zaman has lots of good reporting about the raid and its political fallout.
One Turkish woman who was on the Mavi Marmara, Nilüfer Çetin, was released and speedily returned to Turkey because she had a young child with her. (She’s the wife of the ship’s engineer.)
TZ reported that,

    “I was one of the first victims to be released because I had a child,” she told reporters, but “they confiscated everything, our telephones, laptops are all gone.” Her husband… is still being held by Israeli authorities.

That same article contains this:

    Greek peace activist Dimitris Gielalis, who had been with the flotilla, said: “They came up and used plastic bullets. We had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method you can think of, they used.” He said the boat’s captain was beaten for refusing to leave the wheel and had sustained non-life-threatening injuries, while a cameraman filming the raid was hit with a rifle butt in the eye.
    Mihalis Grigoropoulos told reporters at Athens International Airport that Israelis rappelled from helicopters and threw ropes from inflatable boats, climbing aboard, adding that there was teargas and live ammunition.
    “We did not resist at all; we couldn’t, even if we had wanted to. What could we have done against the commandos who climbed aboard? The only thing some people tried was to delay them from getting to the bridge, forming a human shield. They were fired upon with plastic bullets and were stunned with electric devices,” he said.

Interesting to have had Turkish and Greek activists working alongside each other on the Freedom Flotilla project, eh?
This TZ article is also really interesting. It contains a lot of excellent commentary from leading Turkish intellectuals into the political fallout the murders can be expected to have. Its headline? “Turkish Israeli-relations will never be the same.”
Among many significant quotes it contains are these:

    Soli Özel from Bilgi University says the worst-case scenario has come to pass and will lead to a revision of Turkish-Israeli relations, which were already strained by Israeli actions in Palestine over the years.
    “The power balances in the Middle East will never be the same again. Israel’s legitimacy was very weak anyway and now this legitimacy will be discussed even more. The world will react to that,” he told Today’s Zaman.

Fwiw, Ozel is one of Turkey’s most prominent Jewish intellectuals.
The piece ends with this:

    Professor İlter Turan from Bilgi University says Israel is in a panic and that this is why it has been engaging in controversial acts which are against international law. “Israel is most likely to tell the world that it was right. But, it is certain that there will be sharp international reactions directed at Israel. I think it will be hard for Israel to find support around the world,” he told Today’s Zaman.
    However, according to political scientist Doğu Ergil from Ankara University, so long as the US continues to see Israel’s acts as legitimate, Israel will continue to carry out such bloody acts. “Israel is now over in moral terms in the eyes of the people of the world. The world should oppose Israel’s inhumane acts,” he noted.
    İnal Batu, a retired ambassador, also questions the US’s stance on Israeli acts. “I wonder what kind of warnings the US delivered to Israel before this incident. Turkey should have influence on the US when it comes to this issue,” he said.

Keep watching Egypt

Egypt’s compliance with Israel in maintaining the siege of Gaza has been an essential element in the siege’s inhumane “success” until now.
But as Issandr el-Amrani blogged yesterday, Israel’s lethal raid against the Turkish-flagged siege-busting boat Mavi Marmara provoked broad, spontaneous protest demonstrations in Cairo.
Amrani:

    this is the biggest protest about Palestine since the Gaza war, in an atmosphere in which such protests have not been tolerated. We might see more in the next few days, including on Friday after prayers.

The regime led by the ageing, ailing, US-backed president Hosni Mubarak evidently decided to respond to this new pressure by opening up Egypt’s short border with Gaza a little bit. Well, that’s what the Egyptian government reportedly announced– though there are no reports yet that any people or goods have actually passed through the vast transit halls at Rafah, which are nearly always– except at Muslim-pilgrimage time– cavernously empty.
I imagine Mubarak and all the contenders to the power of his throne would like nothing better than to have the whole Gaza crisis simply disappear from the diplomatic radar screen. As I have blogged here quite frequently over the past few years, Mubarak and his country’s other powerful security bosses have worked hard to keep the lid on the Gaza issue by (1) monopolizing the mediating role in all the international/diplomatic negotiations related to Gaza, with the apparent goal of blocking any progress in them; and (2) keeping a very tight lid on any Gaza-related public activity at home in Egypt.
Might one or both those efforts now– in good part thanks to the Israeli government’s never-ending addiction to excessive violence– be headed for chaotic failure?
Keep watching. Gaza may be a “big” issue. But in world affairs, and in the maintenance of the Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, Egypt is gigantic.

C. Murray: Raid not piracy but war

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray makes a strong argument here that the Israeli commandos’ assault on a Turkish-flagged civilian vessel in the high seas was an act not of piracy but of war. (HT Issandr el-Amrani.)
Murray writes:

    To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.
    Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody’s territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.
    There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.
    Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.
    Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.
    In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.

Murray also notes, interestingly, that the new (Conservative) British Foreign Minister, William Hague, has issued a statement on the massacre that is considerably stronger and better than anything one would ever have heard from “New” Labour.

Haaretz on Israel’s chaotic decisionmaking

Barak Ravid has an informative piece in Haaretz today, underlining the chaos in Israel’s top strategic decisionmaking circles over the flotilla raid.
It seems like the same old story– from Defense Minister Ariel Sharon dragging PM Begin into the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, through the Olmert/Peretz team’s mega-lethal clownishness in the 2006 assault against Lebanon, to the Olmert/Barak/Livni team’s still-chaotic leadership “performance” during the late-2008 assault against Gaza… through… through… and right through to today.
Ravid:

    Senior ministers have noted that … the inner cabinet did not discuss issues related to the flotilla, receive operational briefings or approve the operation. The forum of seven, which did consider and approve the plan, … held just two meetings on the flotilla, the latest on Wednesday. They approved the operation and the continuation of the Israeli policy of barring ships from docking in Gaza.
    Much of the session was devoted not to the military operation but rather to media and public relations issues surrounding the issue. “The ministers who attended the meeting didn’t get the impression from the defense establishment that a violent confrontation of this scope was likely,” one senior Jerusalem official said. “The sense during the discussion was that the navy would come and the organizers would take fright, do an about-face and flee,” he said.

No wonder PM Netanyahu had to nix his planned victory lap in the Oval Office and rush back to try to “take charge” at home.
According to Ravid,

    One of the most vocal participants in Wednesday’s session was Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser. He was against the raid and said the ships should be allowed to dock in Gaza in order to avoid a diplomatic and public relations crisis as well as the embarrassment to Israel that a violent confrontation with demonstrators on the ships could cause. After senior defense officials expressed their opposition to Hauser’s views, his position was rejected.

Maybe Hauser was the source for Ravid’s story? Anyway, it looks as though there’s some high-level butt-covering and finger-pointing going on in Israel today. Good.
By the way, the “forum of seven” includes the following: Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Intelligence and Atomic Affairs Minister Dan Meridor, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Minster without Portfolio Benny Begin.
“Intelligence and Atomic Affairs Minister”, huh?
This does remind me that, as we know, Israel has an extremely potent and lethal nuclear arsenal. Do we have any reason to think that it will be any more “responsible” in its stewardship of that fatal capability than it has been in its use of conventional military power?

Flotilla: U.S. supports a U.N. enquiry (oops, no?)

I just read the report of the consultations the UNSC held yesterday and in the wee hours of this morning into the flotilla massacre.
The presidential statement and most of the recorded comments from SC members noted correctly that the flotilla would never have been necessary if Israel had responded to earlier SC resolutions that called on it to ease the siege against Gaza considerably– and called on it once again, with more urgency, to do so.
I think that was excellent.
The presidential statement also committed the the UNSC to undertaking its own enquiry into what happened, noting that Israel’s confiscation of the documentary materials held by flotilla participants meant that no-one could currently be clear as to what actually occurred.
The U.S. rep there, Alejandro Wolff, went on the record expressing support for the UNSC enquiry.* That was excellent.
Of course, we should also remember the extremely hostile and ill-informed campaign the U.S. delegation mounted against the last investigatory report the UNSC produced into affairs related to Gaza: the Goldstone Report.
—
* Update Tuesday 1:45 pm:
In the UN’s record of the discussion, the rapporteur said this of Wolff statement during the UNSC session:

    He expected a credible and transparent investigation and urged the Council to conduct one fully.

However, I just looked at CNN’s video clip, available here, that includes a record of a statement Wolff made after the UNSC session. He was explicit there that he thought Israel could conduct a thorough and credible investigation on its own.

Israel’s flotilla violence changing everything, Part 2

A.
The fact that PM Netanyahu has decided that fallout from the IDF’s gratuitously violent flotilla assault requires him to cancel his planned meeting in Washington Wednesday and return to Israel is extremely important. The Wednesday meeting was supposed to be a rapacious (date-raping) consummation of his new “love affair” with Obama. So it was important.
But clearly, trying to get a handle on what’s been happening back home regarding the flotilla assault is more important. Ynet is already reporting that because the IDF general staff and the political leadership both recognize that the assault was a massive net negative for Israel, they are already blaming each other.
Good. Let them try to start to sort it out. Preferably by recognizing that the entire policy of imposing a lengthy tight siege is just plain wrong— under international law, under Jewish ethics, under any notion of respect of human rights!
Let them lift the siege of Gaza. Period.
B.
By underlining the continuing tragedy (and crime) of Israel’s siege of Gaza, the IDF completely bulldozed any pretense that Israel’s sputtering “proximity talks” with the PLO had any hope, relevance, or meaning at all. Over there in Ramallah the PA/PLO leadership reportedly agreed to a six-point plan as follows:

    1) Send a delegation of PA and PLO officials to Gaza to discuss situation
    2) Demand the UN Security Council order an end to the siege on Gaza and initiate an investigation into the attack
    3) Coordinate with states whose nationals were killed in the attack to seek justice
    4) Meet with the Arab League’s secretary-general, Amr Mousa, in an urgent session called for by Abbas
    5) Ask the EU to freeze relations with Israel
    6) Call on officials in the West Bank including ambassadors, to organize events to mourn the loss of so many supporters of Palestine, and listen to calls from the public to press forward with an inquiry.

Of course, at one level this is still merely political theater, as with everything “Fateh” does. But significantly, Fateh/PLO pol Mohamed Dahlan was the one who reported these results out of an meeting held by the Central Committee of Fateh, the movement that dominates both the PLO and the Ramallah-based PA.
Dahlan, of course, is the guy who was the lynchpin of Condi Rice’s plan to dislodge Hamas’s democratically leadership of the PA legislature by force, back in 2006-07.
How credible should we take his new appearance as one seeking to lead the effort to coordinate or perhaps even reconcile with Hamas? Perhaps not terribly credibly. But if he is the one individual whom the rest of the Fateh CC sends out to make the announcement about the six points, then it strikes me they think that Fateh is in big, big trouble.
C.
Further afield, all of NATO except for the U.S. has now come out with some acknowledgment that Turkey, a vital fellow NATO member has had its civilian ship wantonly attacked by Israel on the high seas.
What is NATO good for?
Why would any other NATO member ignore this grievous attack against Turkish shipping– especially given that (a) Turkey is a substantial country, well respected in the world and currently a member of the U.N. Security Council; (b) Turkey is NATO’s only majority-Muslim member nation; and (c) NATO is currently waging a difficult war in a distant Muslim country, Afghanistan?
D.
Issandr el- Amrani has had good reporting about the popular outrage expressed against th Israeli assault in Egypt. Egypt, which is a key U.S. military ally in the Arab and Muslim worlds, is currently entering a very sensitive succession crisis. Watch Issandr’s blog for updates.

Arabist and others on the flotilla massacre

Issandr el-Amrani of the Arabist has been doing some of the best blogging on today’s IDF flotilla massacre.
Among his great posts have been these: How Israel sets the TV agenda and The flotilla crisis seen from Cairo.
In the latter post he writes:

    this is the biggest protest about Palestine since the Gaza war, in an atmosphere in which such protests have not been tolerated. We might see more in the next few days, including on Friday after prayers. This may revive local activism on Gaza as well as linkages made between the situation there and the situation in Egypt — notably the Mubarak regime’s collaboration with Israel on the blockade. Expect a fierce fight in the media over this in the next few days, and more opportunities to express all sorts of grievances. But when Turkey expels its ambassador and Egypt is seen to be doing nothing, it looks very, very bad for Cairo.

Egypt is of course a central ally for the U.S. military in the Arab world. Plus, its leadership is now in the throes of a long-drawn-out succession crisis. (Has anyone actually seen the elderly Pres. Mubarak in public any times recently?)
I watched ABC News here in the U.S. this evening. They had Jim Sciutto reporting from London on the international fallout from Israel’s thuggish act of piracy today. He and the other reporters made these two centrally important points:

    1. Israel’s assault on the ship took place in international waters and is thus considered by many to be an outright act of piracy, and
    2. The anti-Israeli feeling engendered by the Israeli assault is also spilling over in many places into anti-U.S. sentiment– and this has direct consequences for the many U.S. service members now serving in vulnerable places in Muslim countries.

Good for ABC News! Let’s hear those very salient facts from a few more members of the U.S. political elite.

Chilling reports on prisoner of conscience A. Makhoul

JNews, out of London, is reporting that Palestinian-Israeli civil society organizer Ameer Makhoul was finally allowed to see his lawyers on May 17, after his first eleven days of being imprisoned at the orders of the Shin Bet ‘security’ agency.
The lawyers reported that Makhoul “was trembling and apathetic throughout their meeting with him, and his skin showed patches of discolouration.”
JNews noted that the lawyers were unable to say any more about his condition because of “the gag order in force regarding both conditions of detention and interrogation methods used.”
Makhoul, JNews writes,

    has provided [his lawyers] with testimony regarding the methods of his interrogation and conditions of detention. According to the lawyers, these may amount to torture or ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ under the UN Convention Against Torture.

Makhoul is the head of the civil-society organization Ittijah. (More about him, here.) He was detained on May 9 and no charges have been brought against him since then.
JNews– which seems like an excellent new initiative– adds this:

    Prison authorities confirmed to the legal team that Makhoul had been seen by a doctor twice in the course of his interrogation.
    Despite requests by both the legal team and rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) to see his medical documents these have not been disclosed. Nor has permission to send an independent doctor to visit Makhoul been granted. The Israel Prisons Service (IPS) claims that permission can only be given by the shabac [Shin Bet], which has failed so far to respond to these requests.
    …No formal charge has been laid against Makhoul…
    Meanwhile, he remains defined as a ‘security detainee’ and as such he is held in isolation and subject to an interrogation which the police and shabac are exempt from recording fully. He is still prohibited from meeting his family and has no right to make a telephone call or send a letter.
    In a related case, the Court has extended the detention of Dr. Omar Sa’id until Thursday, 27 May, when he is expected to be indicted on the charge of contact with a foreign agent. The gag order on both cases is scheduled to be lifted at noon the same day.

These gag orders– very similar to what the Apartheid regime in South Africa used to achieve with its “banning” orders– make it an offense for Israeli media even to write about the case. Of course, in the era of globalized communications that doesn’t make much sense. (But it makes it even more important for those of us outside Israel to continue to make this news available.)
In related news, JNews reported yesterday that,

    Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill Sunday to revoke citizenship of Israelis convicted of terrorist activity or of espionage for terrorist organisations.
    The bill has been passed on to the Knesset for a first vote slated to take place on Wednesday.

Ah, that old canard, accusations of “terrorism”! And this time being used to take away the citizenship of people like, for example, Ameer Makhoul or [Balad Party head] Omar Sa’id, if they should be convicted.
Does no-one in the Israeli Jewish community have any folk memory about the history of states taking away the citizenship of vulnerable groups of citizens??

IDF takes Obama aide, family to occupied Golan

There has been a longstanding policy in the U.S. that serving government officials should not take private visits to Israeli-occupied territories.
So why has Pres. Obama’s highest ranking adviser, Rahm Emanuel, been taking his family to the Israeli-occupied Golan? (HT: Didi Remez, here.)
What’s more, as if to underline the military character of Israel’s rule over this territory, the Emanuel family was conveyed there by an Israeli military helicopter.
As JWN readers should be well aware, Israel occupied the whole area of the Golan in the war of 1967, and it has been under military occupation since then. The Israeli Knesset annexed it in 1981– an act of outright aggrandizement that has received recognition from neither the U.S. nor any other government or inter-governmental organization in the world.
Why are Pres. Obama and his principal policy aide being so flagrant about flouting international law, international convention, and the rules of the U.S. government itself in this case? Just to try to keep on escalating their campaign of hostility against Syria?
Indeed, we U.S. citizens should also be asking why the president’s top policy aide feels the need to go to Israel to hold the religious ceremonies marking his son’s coming of age. The vast majority of Jewish Americans hold those ceremonies in their home synagogues here in the U.S.
Emanuel is also reportedly scheduled to meet with PM Netanyahu while he’s in Israel today.
Who is running Obama’s policy in the region, we might ask? No previous Secretary of State or National Security Adviser would have ever allowed the prez’s chief of staff to be playing such a prominent role in an arena of such intense diplomatic sensitivity and also, given the U.S.’s military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, such great centrality for the wellbeing and survival of U.S. troops.
—
Update 9:35 a.m.:
Here is a translation of a portion of the Maariv report on Emanuel’s visit:

    The IDF Spokesperson’s Office: “Rahm Emanuel and his family were hosted today by the IDF, visited an outpost on the northern border and an Air Force base. All components of the visit were approved by authorized officials.”
    In the afternoon, they returned to northern Israel and spent the second half of the day on a tour of sites, some of which serve as a symbol of Israel’s control of the Golan Heights land. They first visited Mt. Bental, near Kibbutz Merom Golan, where they looked over at the Syrian city of Kuneitra. From there they continued to Elrom Studios, and viewed “Oz 77,” an audiovisual presentation that depicts the heroic and bloody battle over the “Vale of Tears” in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
    …
    “Emanuel has a very warm spot in his heart for the Golan Heights, because he volunteered there for two weeks in the Northern Command during the Gulf War. Presumably, he is opposed to giving back the Golan Heights,” a source in Washington said yesterday.
    …
    Today, Emanuel’s visit to Israel will take on a slightly more official nature. He will meet this evening with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for a visit that was defined as unofficial. During the meeting, as stated by the White House, the two will discuss the bilateral relations between the two states. On Thursday, Emanuel and his family are scheduled to meet with President Peres.

New docs on Israel’s nuke deal with apartheid SA

Kudos to the Guardian’s Chris McGreal for having published and interpreted a series of official agreements concluded between Israel and South Africa in the mid-1970s, when the government in South Africa was at the height of its pursuit of apartheid. (HT: omop.)
In 1974, the U.N. General Assembly formally determined that apartheid constituted a crime against humanity. Ah, but that didn’t prevent Israel’s then defense minister (and current president) Shimon Peres from sending a fawning letter to South Africa’s Information Minister in November 1974 saying that the two countries share a “common hatred of injustice,” and urging a “close identity of aspirations and interests.”
McGreal writes that the new documents were uncovered by U.S. researcher Sasha Polakow-Suransky, as part of his research for his soon-to-be-published book on the relationship between the two countries while South Africa was still in its apartheid phase. Officials in the present South African government apparently felt little need to continue to keep the documents secret.
McGreal writes that the newly revealed “top secret” minutes of meetings held by officials from the two countries in 1975 “show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them ‘in three sizes’.” The ‘three sizes’ can be understood, from other documents in the collection, to refer to warheads that could be conventional, chemical, or nuclear.
McGreal wrote,

    Botha did not go ahead with the deal in part because of the cost. In addition, any deal would have to have had final approval by Israel’s prime minister and it is uncertain it would have been forthcoming.
    South Africa eventually built its own nuclear bombs, albeit possibly with Israeli assistance. But the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years. South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.
    The documents confirm accounts by a former South African naval commander, Dieter Gerhardt – jailed in 1983 for spying for the Soviet Union. After his release with the collapse of apartheid, Gerhardt said there was an agreement between Israel and South Africa called Chalet which involved an offer by the Jewish state to arm eight Jericho missiles with “special warheads”. Gerhardt said these were atomic bombs. But until now there has been no documentary evidence of the offer.

It was in September 1979 that a U.S. satellite, the “Vela Hotel”, detected a double flash of light over the South Atlantic that many specialists thought was an emission from a nuclear test conducted from a South African naval vessel, quite likely in coordination with Israeli specialists.