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ISRAEL, PALESTINE AFTER THE FLOTILLA, Part 1
Change is in the wind
By Jack A Smith
There are times in world politics when a relatively small incident can trigger a major chain of events, depending on circumstances. Another way of expressing this is contained in the ancient Chinese proverb, "A single spark can start a prairie fire" - particularly when conditions include a warm gusty wind and the grassland is dry.
This analogy comes to mind in the aftermath of the violent illegal interdiction by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) of the six ships and nearly 700 people in the humanitarian Gaza Freedom flotilla in the Mediterranean Sea over a month ago, killing nine Turkish supporters of Palestinian national rights and wounding about 50 other voyagers.
Is it possible this incident may represent the start of a transitional
moment leading toward substantial change for the Palestinians, Israelis and perhaps the Middle East in general? We think yes, and the process has already begun. How far it goes, nobody knows, but conditions are ripe for change.
After three years of increasingly tightened sanctions against the 1.5 million beleaguered Palestinians resident in the Gaza Strip, Israel has been forced to significantly ease its near-total blockade - not because of decisions by the UN and the several big powers that have been working with Israelis and Palestinians to achieve a settlement, but by the action of a people's movement.
Israel's use of brute force on the high seas against a boatload of civilians on a brave journey motivated by compassion for a suffering people swiftly sent a tidal wave of international criticism and anger crashing against Israel's shores. As always, the Jewish state sought to depict itself as the victim, but times have changed in recent years and the victim of yesterday, for whom humanity still mourns, is now perceived as an executioner of today, extracting 10, or 50, or 100 eyes for an eye.
Much of the anger directed at the Israeli government last month first began to coalesce when Israel attacked Lebanon and Gaza in the summer of 2006. It grew after Israel's vicious three-week invasion of defenseless Gaza starting in late December 2008. But it took the bungled flotilla attack for this gathering criticism to breach the levees.
Now what? In the wake of the flotilla fiasco and public disapproval, obdurate Israel is obliged to make some concessions to the so-called Quartet, which is composed of the UN, the European Union, the United States and Russia - a group formed eight years ago to resolve differences between Israel and Palestine leading to the establishment of two separate states.
The Barack Obama administration supports Israel politically and militarily, and has raised Washington's annual subsidy to Israel to $3 billion beginning in October. It believes, however, that the regime's disproportionate violence, illegal occupation of the West Bank (with a population of 2.8 million Palestinians) and foot-dragging on facilitating a Palestinian state undermines US hegemony in the Middle East and its imperial interests worldwide.
Obama refused to blame Israel for shooting unarmed civilians at sea, saying only that "the United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries". Nor has the White House used its decisive power to permanently halt the building of settlements on territory illegally seized from the Palestinians 43 years ago, much less to withdraw from the land it illegally occupies in the West Bank.
Netanyahu's governing extreme right-wing and ultra-orthodox religious coalition has no desire to curtail the establishment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, to end its occupation of the West Bank, or to work seriously toward the creation of a Palestinian state. Hardline religious sectors entertain the belief that Israel was "given to the Jews by God". (Were the Palestinians to make an identical claim based on equivalent evidence they would be dismissed as typical Islamic religious fanatics.)
In this two-part article, we will discuss all these matters in detail, report on the actions of Obama and and the US Congress, explore the role of Turkey and Iran, the split between Fatah and Hamas, the disunity within the Arab world, and anticipate possible geopolitical outcomes throughout the Middle East.
The people of the Gaza Strip are still suffering from sanctions and many other indignities, but the pain of a total blockade and virtual collective imprisonment is easing for now in this narrow 40-kilometer long territory on the Mediterranean coast set aside in 1949 to accommodate some of the Palestinian refugees displaced by the creation of the State of Israel.
The world's principal human rights organizations welcomed the partial lifting of the blockade, but called for it to be entirely ended. Said Amnesty International: "This announcement makes it clear that Israel is not intending to end its collective punishment of Gaza's civilian population, but only ease it. ... Israel must now comply with its obligations as the occupying power under international law and immediately lift the blockade."
The UN Relief and Works Agency, which oversees the Palestinian refugee community, declared June 20 through spokesperson Christopher Guinness: "We need to have the blockade fully lifted. ... The Israeli strategy is to make the international community talk about a bag of cement here, a project there. We need full unfettered access through all the crossings."
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which rarely speaks out on such matters, on June 14 called for a complete end to the blockade, noting that the embargo has destroyed the territory's economy and ruined its healthcare system.
This small concession on sanctions has not changed the political goals of the Israeli government. In general, it seeks the destruction of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) that governs Gaza; the domination and manipulation of the Palestine National Authority (PNA), which rules the larger occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, and Fatah (the Palestine Liberation Movement), which leads the PNA from the West Bank; the maintenance of Israeli occupation forces and illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land; and widening its control of Jerusalem.
Netanyahu's objective is to keep the Palestinians in a condition of neocolonial subjugation as long as possible. The real desire of the right-wing government coalition is to permanently absorb as much Palestinian land as possible. The Quartet some time ago encouraged Israel to work toward establishing a two-state solution in 2012, but the current regime poses innumerable obstacles to an equitable settlement, seeking to delay an agreement for many years or forever if possible.
On June 29, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced there was "no chance" of meeting a 2012 deadline. Lieberman indicated some time ago that he would consider the idea of two states if Israel's 1.3 million Arab inhabitants - second-class citizens in their own land - would be uprooted and "transferred" to the Palestinian side of the border, which is hardly likely. Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party already suggests that most Israeli Arabs are "disloyal" and should have their citizenship revoked. "No loyalty, no citizenship" was its election slogan in what Israel's supporters term "the only democracy in the Middle East".
PNA President Mahmoud Abbas conducted a rare meeting with reporters from the Hebrew press last week in Ramallah, for three hours no less. The Jerusalem Post editorialized July 1 that the event "can be seen as an attempt - quite possibly with heavy US encouragement - to reach out to the Israeli public. There was nothing particularly new in what Abbas had to say. But the general impression that the PNA head will most likely have succeeded in conveying to the Americans is that he is showing a readiness to push ahead with negotiations on the final-status issues of security and borders, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proffered nothing but a wall of silence. 'We have yet to receive a sign from Netanyahu on progress,' Abbas said."
Two more moderate political parties - Kadima, which calls itself "centrist" but functions on the right, is the largest party in the Knesset (parliament); and the Labor Party, which still sports a "center-left" label but is center-right at best and rightist when it comes to the Palestinians - are more amenable to the two-state proposition. But neither has evidenced an interest in anything more than a weak, virtually dependent Palestinian state. And no mainstream Israeli party gives credence to the left idea advocated by some of transforming Israel-Palestine into a single progressive multi-ethnic, multi-religious state based on true equality and mutual benefit.
Obama is said to be considering the idea of proposing "an independent, democratic and contiguous" Palestinian state that - "for Israel's security" - would not be allowed to have an army or enter into a mutual security pact with another country. Given the recent history of Israel's violent military incursions into neighboring states, it seems logical to inquire, what about Palestinian security?
For his part, Netanyahu evidently has learned nothing from the international criticism of Israel's harsh blockade and the attack on the flotilla. He told the Knesset recently that "they want to strip us of the natural right to defend ourselves. When we defend ourselves against rocket attack, we are accused of war crimes. We cannot board sea vessels when our soldiers are being attacked and fired upon, because that is a war crime."
Uri Avnery, the leader of the Israeli Peace Bloc, Gush Shalom, sees things differently, as he wrote on June 19: "For years, now, the world sees the State of Israel every day on the TV screen and on the front pages in the image of heavily armed soldiers shooting at stone-throwing children, guns firing phosphorus shells into residential quarters, helicopters executing 'targeted eliminations', and now pirates attacking civilian ships on the open seas. Terrified women with wounded babies in their arms, men with amputated limbs, demolished homes. When one sees a hundred pictures like that for every picture that shows another Israel, Israel becomes a monster."
Commenting on the Israeli government's actions, the conservative weekly The Economist declared June 5: "Israel is caught in a vicious circle. The more its hawks think the outside world will always hate it, the more it tends to shoot opponents first and ask questions later, and the more it finds that the world is indeed full of enemies.... He [Netanyahu] does not give the impression of being willing to give ground in the interests of peace."
Time Magazine put it this way June 21: "Besides fracturing the Jewish state's relations with Turkey, its most important Muslim ally, and undermining a nascent rapprochement with the Obama Administration in Washington, its most important ally of all, the flotilla fiasco also invited fresh judgment of the kind of democracy Israel has become: a conspicuously belligerent one, reflexively disposed toward the military option whatever the problem at hand - and apt to look bad doing it."
Breaking the blockade
Israel's blockade is an act of collectively punishing an entire people - outlawed in international jurisprudence - initially launched as sanctions against the inhabitants of Gaza for democratically electing the Islamic party Hamas in the legislative voting of January 2006. Both Israel and the US had supported the candidates of the Palestinian National Authority, which is guided by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a coalition of political parties of which Fatah is the leading component.
Sanctions were transformed into a stultifying siege a year later after Hamas won a virtual civil war against Fatah in Gaza, despite Washington's gift of US$60 million to Fatah for training and weapons with which to crush Hamas. Since that time, Hamas has ruled Gaza, and the PNA has ruled the larger occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, with partial and occasionally coercive support from Washington and Tel Aviv.
The blockade was so severe that the entire population of the Gaza Strip was in effect incarcerated within the small territory for the last two years. Though many foods were not allowed into Gaza, and the caloric intake lowered, no one starved to death. That was the blockade's single saving grace. Paper and soap, cement, mattresses, machinery, toys and thousands of other goods have been denied the people of Gaza. Cement is especially important if the territory is ever to rebuild after the IDF has reduced many of its homes, commercial buildings, industrial plants, and government offices to rubble.
The Associated Press reported that Israel announced on July 5 it was lifting the ban on nearly all consumer goods and other items but will "continue to ban most travel and exports and restrict the import of desperately needed construction materials. The new rules are unlikely to restore the territory's devastated economy or allow rebuilding of all that was destroyed in last year's war." Hamas denounced the new regulations.
Israel, the military superpower of the Middle East, launched a brief and punishing war against Lebanon and Gaza in the summer of 2006, generating international criticism. World opinion was outraged again in December 2008 when the Israel Defense Force returned to unprotected Gaza, ostensibly in retaliation for rocket attacks, and slaughtered 1,417 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, and wounded another 5,500. Israel lost 14 people, nearly all soldiers. (Hamas was carrying out a cease-fire for months before the attack until Israel broke the truce, which is why Tel Aviv's justifying cry of "the rockets, the rockets" rang hollow in anti-colonial quarters.
The plight of the people of Gaza generated support for them from around the world. The Free Gaza Movement coalition of pro-Palestine groups organized nine attempts to challenge the Israeli blockade by sending ships with humanitarian supplies toward Gaza from August 2008 to May 31, 2010. None carried weapons of any kind. All were repelled by Israel to maintain the sanctity of mass privation as an instrument of state coercion.
This May, the Free Gaza Movement was joined by the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) in sending six ships and 663 pro-Palestinian passengers from 37 different countries to challenge the blockade. The ships, loaded with non-military supplies, combined to form a flotilla near the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and set a course for Gaza May 30. Many of the passengers had received training in nonviolence. They had no guns or bombs.
Israeli military vessels and helicopters interdicted the flotilla on the high seas about 100km from the coast of the Gaza Strip. Even if the ships managed to enter territorial waters, it would have been Palestinian, not Israeli, territory, it should be noted. Heavily armed IDF Special Forces troops illegally boarded the vessels and took command. Five of the ships were subdued quickly without deaths to passengers.
The sixth and by far largest ship, the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara, purchased earlier this year by the IHH charity, was boarded by commandoes rappelling menacingly from hovering helicopters as navy speedboats circled the ship. A few passengers resisted the intruders, as they - in the opinion of many - had every right to do in international seas. They were brave and paid with their lives.
The commandoes shot and killed nine people - some at such close range as to suggest they were murdered. One of the slain was a US citizen, Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American youth of 19. It is probable that some of the dead and wounded were unresisting when bullets entered their bodies. One IDF sergeant, who claimed he shot six civilians, said they were all "terrorists".
The Israeli government did not plan to kill members of the humanitarian flotilla. But it created a situation where if one element of its elaborately staged act of aggression went wrong all hell would, and did, break lose.
Why didn't Defense Secretary Ehud Barak, author of the famous embellishment that the IDF was "the most moral army in the world", insist that the commandoes be instructed beforehand in how to respond rationally to the possibility of encountering non-armed resistance from a few passengers?
News of the shootings immediately subjected Israel - with its already existing human rights violations toward the Palestinians - to intense international opprobrium. In return, the Netanyahu government's propaganda apparatus subjected the world to a plethora of self-justifications - almost all untrue or at least gross exaggerations, but evidently good enough for the White House and Congress.
The world was told that the well-armed commandoes were "lynched". They were pummeled with "bats". There were 50 "Turkish soldiers" aboard the Mavi Marmara. Later, this was changed to "75 al-Qaeda mercenaries". The ship, said Netanyahu, was a "hate boat". Many defenders of Israel in the US still prefer to believe these and other tall tales. One would think that if there were 75 members of al-Qaeda aboard the big Turkish ship that they would have been arrested and punished when they were brought to Israel. How odd, then, no one was arrested - not those who "lynched" the innocent commandoes, the "bat" wielders, the "Turkish soldiers", or the "terrorist mercenaries".
Perhaps the lowest blow in this entire propaganda charade is the information from Time magazine that "the stuttering official response to the flotilla fiasco" included "among the many videos featuring radio traffic that the IDF posted online, the most obviously inflammatory - in which a voice, allegedly from a flotilla radio transmission, can be heard snarling, 'Go back to Auschwitz'." It was, according to Time and several other sources, an "obviously edited" remark, interpolated into the tape by government propagandists - "PR amateurs", according to a columnist in the Tel-Aviv daily Yedioth Ahronoth, the widest circulation newspaper in Israel.
Learning of the attack by armed Israeli commandos, the American author and poet Alice Walker wrote in support of "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 ... 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."
The UN Security Council did manage to pass a resolution calling for a thorough and objective international investigation of the flotilla incident, but Tel-Aviv refused to cooperate, insisting on conducting its own probe. It is said the Obama administration arranged a compromise: in return for a partial lifting of the embargo Israel would be permitted to conduct the investigation into its own actions without outside interference.
The Obama administration termed an Israeli self-investigation "an important step forward" - forward toward what was left blank, but self-exoneration seems likely. Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared that "We have no trust at all that Israel, a country that has carried out such an attack on a civilian convoy in international waters, will conduct an impartial investigation."
Given the travesty of the probe carried out by Israel after its winter 2008-2009 attack on Gaza, and its subsequent rejection - shamefully supported by the US Congress and the White House - of the UN's impartial Goldstone Report critical of Israeli actions, there is little doubt the new investigation, which got underway June 28, will be a whitewash unless the rules are changed. Netanyahu ventured recently that the investigation "will prove that the goals and actions of the state of Israel and the Israeli military were appropriate defensive actions in accordance with the highest international standards." That will be precisely the outcome if he has his way, but obstacles have arisen.
Many influential Israelis were dubious about a self-investigation, and there was widespread media criticism in Israel about how the probe will be conducted - far more than in the US media, which is usually uncritical of anything the Israeli government does. In the words of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, the investigation seems "more and more like a farce". Gush Shalom, the Peace Bloc, has petitioned the court system to broaden the investigation and its mandate.
Then, according to Ha'aretz on June 30, retired justice Yaakov Tirkel, who was named to head the investigation, "told the government the committee could not do its job without expanded investigative powers". He "wants to turn it into a full-fledged governmental inquiry committee with real teeth. That would allow it to subpoena witnesses and documents, warn those who testify before it that the panel's findings could harm them, and hire outside experts in relevant fields." On July 4, Netanyahu's cabinet agreed to a limited number of changes. They included adding two experts to the panel, and said it now agreed to placing witnesses under oath. The investigation is still an in-house affair with notable restrictions, such as not being allowed to question the IDF commandoes who attacked the Mavi Marmara.
The flotilla affair did nothing to improve Netanyahu's problematic relations with Washington, which is one of the reasons he was anxious to make a good impression when he met Obama at the White House on July 6, and this meant offering a little "give" instead of the usual "take". Netanyahu said that direct negotiations with the Palestinians could begin this summer, and he pledged "concrete steps" to facilitate the process in a "very robust way".
Israel has claimed to be the victim of several different "existential" threats over the years, the latest being from Iran, but as we have noted before, the Zionist State faces only one existential threat - losing Washington's support. Knowing this, Israel and its dedicated American supporters invest a huge amount of time, effort and money courting American public opinion, working diligently to elect pro-Israel politicians, and assiduously cultivating its backers in the White House and the US Congress.
Despite the American government's unceasing support for Israel, the majority of the Israeli population is wary of the Obama administration, though American Jews are generally supportive. For instance, according to a June poll conducted on behalf of the B'nai B'rith World Center in Jerusalem, "65% of Jewish Israelis say US Jews should criticize Obama's Mideast policy". This is based in large part on an incorrect analysis of the Obama administration's policy toward the Muslim world, its willingness to "talk" to Teheran, and some signs of impatience with Netanyahu. Here's our view of these three matters:
1. It is obvious that Obama's overture to the Muslim world during his Cairo speech a year ago was a public relations gesture representing no substantial change American policy, other than in rhetoric. The purpose was to deflect mounting criticism of the US from the global Islamic religious community of over a billion adherents while he wages and widens wars in several Muslim countries. The objective, to speak frankly, was to strengthen imperialism, not weaken Israel.
2. Obama's tone toward Iran is less belligerent than that of his predecessor, but his policies (such as the new sanctions) rival those of president George W Bush. Indeed, they seem to be worse, judging by the dangerously increased US Navy activity in the Persian Gulf and nearby waters, plus the grave buildup of war supplies at the US base in the Indian Ocean, (See part 2 for the threats facing Iran.)
3. Obama expects at least small concessions from Netanyahu, on settlements for example, in return for Washington's unstinting protection - the purpose being to strengthen America's hold over the Arab states.
The Israeli government is also furious at Washington because the final document emerging from the month-long review meeting at the United Nations in May on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (1) urges Israel to sign the NPT treaty and (2) set a 2012 date for a regional conference on establishing the Middle East as a nuclear free territory. When the issue of Israel came up at the 2005 NPT review one of the reasons there was no final report was because the George W Bush administration refused to sign any document that mentioned Israel.
Here is Israel's problem: By signing the NPT, Israel would have to acknowledge it possesses a large supply of nuclear weapons or be held in noncompliance, thus revealing its many denials were lies to the entire world. Further, the 2012 conference of Middle East nations will no doubt agree to ban nuclear weapons from the region - obliging Israel to dismantle its weapons, which is hardly likely, or expose itself as a nuclear outlaw. There was simply too much at political stake in the nuclear conference for the United States to once again seek to scuttle the talks, especially on one of its main issues - proliferation. The Israelis were perturbed, so the US issued a statement critical of the meeting for not condemning Iran, which of course does not have nuclear weapons.
Not only the White House but both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate overwhelmingly support Israel and many show contempt for the oppressed Palestinians.
In a mid-June article published in Foreign Policy in Focus, Stephen Zunes wrote: "Democratic congressional leaders were lining up alongside their Republican colleagues to defend the Israeli assault. Countering the broad consensus of international legal scholars who recognize that the attack was in flagrant violation of international norms, prominent Democrats embraced the Orwellian notion that Israel's raid ... was somehow an act of self-defense. The offensive by the Democratic leadership has been led by Gary Ackerman, who serves as House Democrats' unofficial spokesman on Middle East policy ... According to Ackerman, the killings were 'wholly the fault and responsibility of the organizers of the effort to break through Israel and Egypt's legitimate closure of terrorist-controlled Gaza'."
In late June, 87 out of 100 US senators and 307 out of 435 representatives signed a letter to Obama about the flotilla attack, declaring "We fully support Israel's right to self-defense", arguing that "the Israeli commandos who arrived on the sixth ship [the Mavi Marmara] ... were brutally attacked with iron rods, knives, and broken glass. They were forced to respond to that attack and we regret the loss of life that resulted."
The letter also commended Obama for the "action you took to prevent the adoption of an unfair United Nations Security Council resolution, which would have represented a rush to judgment by the international community".
Three congressmen in particular took strong stands against the Israeli attack - Brian Baird, Keith Ellison, and Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich wrote a letter to Obama saying "The United States must remind Israel ... it is not acceptable to repeatedly violate international law ... [or] to shoot and kill innocent civilians ... [or] to continue a blockade which denies humanitarian relief."
In April, according to an article by Ben Smith in Politico, 76 senators and 333 representatives "signed on to a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implicitly rebuking the Obama administration for its confrontational stance toward Israel", as though the White House had not backed down virtually every time Netanyahu waved a disapproving finger in Obama's face or publicly embarrassed visiting Vice President Joseph Biden.
The congressional letter blamed the Palestinians for the breakdown in talks and the lack of progress in solving key issues, noting "by contrast Israel's prime minister stated categorically that he is eager to begin unconditional peace negotiations with the Palestinians".
Israel's unwillingness to work toward a genuine two-state settlement (or a one-state agreement with equality for all), and Washington's one-sided political, economic and military support for Israel, constitute the primary obstacles to peace between the two sides. But there are two other significant problems confronting the Palestinians as well.
Part 2: Barriers to peace
Jack A Smith is the editor of the e-mail Activist Newsletter, and the former editor of the Guardian Radical Newsweekly. He may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net, and his web is Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter.
(Copyright 2010 Jack A Smith.)
