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AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been here in Louisiana going through southern Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta since last Friday, and our intention today was to bring you a special for the hour, but because of events in the Middle East, we are switching gears. And we’ll bring you many of the voices, we’ll introduce you to many of the people we met, in the coming days. Right now we turn, though, to the Middle East. Anjali?
ANJALI KAMAT: That’s right, Amy. We turn now to the Middle East. It was early Monday morning as Israeli soldiers stormed the Gaza-bound international aid convoy called the Freedom Flotilla in international waters about forty miles off the coast of Gaza. The six ships had nearly 700 international activists on board and 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid. They were aiming to break the three-year-long siege of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli commandos landed on the lead ship in the convoy, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, which had about 600 activists on board. These are excerpts from the raw video captured by an Al Jazeera producer on the ship minutes before the ship lost satellite contact with the world. It features two of the journalists on board.
HASSAN GHANI: This is the MV Marmara. This is Hassan Ghani reporting for Press TV. We have had several injuries here. One is critical. He has been injured in the head. We think he may die if he does not receive medical treatment immediately. Another person being taken past in front of me right now has been seriously injured. We are being hit by tear gas, stun grenades. We have navy ships on either side and helicopters overhead. We are being attacked from every single side. This is in international waters, not Israeli waters, not in the sixty-eight-mile exclusion zone. We are being attacked in international waters, completely illegally.
JAMAL ELSHAYYAL: To confirm and update you, the Israeli navy has now boarded the Mavi Marmara, where 600 civilians have been trying to deliver aid to Gaza. Live munition has been fired. There are reports that one person has been killed. Several, I have seen with my eyes, have been injured. We’ve seen them. Doctors trying to work to heal the injured. The organizers onboard the Mavi Marmara, after two people have been confirmed killed by the Israeli army, have now asked all the passengers to go inside. They’ve raised the white flag, this after Israeli commandos descended upon the ship in international water from a helicopter, as well as surrounded it by vessels from all sides. Tens of people, civilians, have been injured. There are still sounds of live fire, despite the white flag being raised. Tens of people have been injured, two people have been killed, onboard the ship which holds 600 activists, parliamentarians, women, children and the elderly, all of whom are civilians. Organizers have asked everyone to go inside, so this is where we shall head. Jamal Elshayyal, Al Jazeera, onboard the Mavi Marmara in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
ANJALI KAMAT: That was the last bits of video from an Al Jazeera producer onboard the Mavi Marmara before losing satellite contact with the world early Monday morning. At least ten and as many, according to some reports, as nineteen civilians onboard the ship have been reported to have died in the attack. There has been a near-complete blackout of information.
Israeli troops proceeded to seize the Mavi Marmara and the five other ships and take them to the port of Ashdod. Hundreds of activists are being detained in an Israeli prison, and nearly fifty others have been deported. Israel has still not released the names of the dead, the injured, and the detained international civilians.
Three Turkish activists who were deported back to Istanbul late Monday night spoke to journalists. This is Mutlu Tiryaki described the ordeal onboard the Mavi Marmara.
MUTLU TIRYAKI: [translated] When we stepped on the board, they emerged from helicopters and military boats and attacked us. They approached our vessel with military ships after issuing a military warning. We told them we were unarmed. Our sole weapon was water.
ANJALI KAMAT: The United Nations Security Council has condemned the attack and called for the immediate release of the ships and the civilians held by Israel and also called for an impartial investigation. All of the permanent member of the Security Council except for the United States explicitly called for Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip to be lifted.
Turkey has compared Israel’s actions to state terrorism. At the emergency Security Council meeting Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu described the incident as murder and piracy.
AHMET DAVUTOGLU: This action was uncalled for. Israeli actions constitute a grave breach of international law. In simplest terms, this is tantamount to banditry and piracy. It is murder conducted by a state. It has no excuses, no justification whatsoever. A nation state that follows this path has lost its legitimacy as a respectful member of the international community.
AMY GOODMAN: But Israel insists that its troops had acted in self-defense after being attacked by those onboard. Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Daniel Carmon, said the civilians on the ship were not peace activists.
DANIEL CARMON: What kind of peace activists use knives, clubs, fire from weapons stolen from soldiers and other weapons to attack soldiers who boarded the ship in accordance with international law? What kind of humanitarian activists, some with known terrorist history, embrace Hamas, a terrorist organization that openly shuns a two-state solution and calls for Israel’s destruction, defying conditions set by the international community and the Quartet? The answer is clear: there are not peace activists.
AMY GOODMAN: Although governments across the world have strongly condemned Israel’s attack, the United States says it’s still gathering the facts and regrets the loss of life. This is the US deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Alejandro Wolff.
ALEJANDRO WOLFF: We are working to ascertain the facts. We expect a credible and transparent investigation and strongly urge the Israeli government to investigate the incident fully. As I stated in the council chamber in December 2008, when we were confronted with a similar situation, mechanisms exist for the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza by member states and groups that want to do so. These non-provocative and non-confrontational mechanisms should be the ones used for the benefit of all those in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, thousands of people in cities across the world, from Turkey to Europe to the United States to Pakistan, have come out on the streets to protest the bloody attack on the humanitarian aid convoy.
PROTESTER: [translated] This is totally inhumane. None can defend this inhumane violence.
PROTESTERS: Free, free Gaza! Free, free Gaza! Stop Israeli war crimes!
PROTESTER: I’m here today because I’m an American Jew and I totally am opposed to what Israel is doing. Killing those people on the boat who were trying to bring material aid to a starving, imprisoned people is an insane crime, and it doesn’t represent the values of Jews and all people around the world.
PROTESTER: [translated] The truth is that Israel is not the only one responsible. All the official Arab regimes are responsible for this crime. Obama is responsible. The international community is responsible. The International Criminal Court, they became responsible when they remained silent about the crimes being committed against the people of Gaza.
PROTESTER: Continuously breaking international law, and it has never lived up to any United Nation resolution. And we have seen a lot of times that both the European Union and the United States have told Israel that they went too far.
PROTESTER: [translated] It depends on people. We have to force our governments to react. We have to force Europe to react, because this is a humiliation to Europe. A cocky mobster who dares to do what Israel has done in the Mediterranean, in international waters—what kind of security do we have in the Mediterranean? That’s the question we should ask ourselves.
PROTESTER: I know the people onboard. They are people from all walks of life. There are teachers. There are professors. There are journalists. There are politicians. There are cleaners. These are people like you and me who believe in taking aid to poor people. And these are the people that are being gunned down in cold blood by Israel today.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices of shock and outrage from around the world over the Israeli commando attack on the Gaza peace flotilla. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be joined by a number of guests. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re in New Orleans, Louisiana, here to cover BP and the geyser that continues to gush from the bottom of the sea. But because of events in the Middle East, we have switched gears today to cover what happened, the Israeli commando attack on the Free Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
We’re joined by a number of guests, but we’re going to begin in New York with Adam Shapiro. He’s the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a board member of the Free Gaza Movement, one of the groups that coordinated the Freedom Flotilla. His wife Huwaida Arraf, the chair of the Free Gaza Movement, was on the flotilla.
Adam, can you explain to us what you understand happened on—well, it was early Sunday morning in the—what happened to the flotilla?
ADAM SHAPIRO: The boats were making their way, the six ships, in international waters, far in international waters. They were still at least fifty miles offshore, and so well off the coasts of Israel and Gaza. And as they were making their way, Israeli warships surrounded the flotilla, all the ships, and the first ship to come under attack by helicopter, with commandos coming down from helicopter, as we’ve seen on the media, on the footage, was this big Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara. And soldiers, as they came down, started opening fire immediately, as was reported by the Al Jazeera correspondence on live stream that we have. And the soldiers injured and eventually killed at least one person, before other passengers decided at that point to try to act in self-defense and to try to stop soldiers, more soldiers, from coming onto the ship.
What needs to be acknowledged here is that Israel acted violently by attacking our ships, to begin with. And under international law, under the law of the seas, our people, as the people on that ship coming under such an attack, an illegal attack on the high seas, do have a right to defend themselves. Now, we don’t necessarily encourage people to take up any kind of weapons against the Israelis, and certainly our activists train in nonviolence, but given the kind of scenario that was unfolding on that boat, I certainly do understand the desire of people to try to protect themselves and try to protect others who were already injured.
The other ships, including the one that my wife Huwaida was on, also came under attack. We don’t know, because we didn’t have satellite feeds on those ships, the kinds of attacks that they suffered. And we still don’t know, because all of the detainees are being kept from any kind of communication with media, with their families, even up until now with their lawyers and with their embassies.
ANJALI KAMAT: Adam Shapiro, do you know how many people died? And do you know how many people are being detained by Israel?
ADAM SHAPIRO: Until now, we still don’t know the exact number of dead. Israel refuses to release the names of the people that it killed, despite numerous requests from various embassies, some governments and, of course, the media. And the exact number of dead, the exact number of injured, and the exact number of who are in detention, we do not know, because, again, we are completely—this is becoming a major coverup by Israel to keep all information blocked, blanketed from getting out.
ANJALI KAMAT: Have you heard from your wife, Huwaida Arraf?
ADAM SHAPIRO: Literally just now, as I came on this program, I received confirmation that she has been released. She is without phones and without any money. They took all of her stuff from her. But she’s been released from prison and should be on her way to Jerusalem hopefully right now.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go to Israel and the West Bank. I want to see right now if Amira Hass is on the line. She is the reporter for Ha’aretz.
Amira, we wanted to get the response to what has taken place in Israel and the Occupied Territories and what you understand, because this is the big issue right now, that the Israeli government has spoken out about what has happened, but very few people understand actually, outside of what the Israeli government has said, what took place on these ships. Certainly in the United States, the news media is quoting the Israeli government, the prime minister, various military spokespeople. But since hundreds of people have been detained, and we don’t know the names of the dead or the injured, we are not hearing any other part of the story.
AMIRA HASS: Exactly, Amy. The details cannot be told yet, because we don’t—other than the soldiers and the few people who returned to their homes, in Turkey mostly or in Greece, we don’t have details yet, because we depend only on the official versions of the Israel—of the Israeli army and the Israeli government. I’m here in Ramallah, and so I don’t know—I only follow on the news and what my friends tell me in Israel.
On the one hand, there have been quite a few demonstrations, as I understand, against the attack and against the decision to stop the flotilla. There is a strike in Palestinian communities in Israel proper. There is a strike in Gaza, I think. But also in the West Bank, the police cleared a strike and three days of mourning. In the West Bank, I’ve seen that the Palestinian police is trying very hard to prevent people from clashing with the Israeli army, feeling more—feeling deterioration. So what I’ve noticed is there is—there are many, many security vehicles of the Palestinian Authority near junctions, near areas where the Israeli army is located. They opened, as I read—I haven’t seen it—they opened wake houses in several municipalities all over the West Bank. But people—there were a few demonstrations yesterday in the West Bank, demanding actually the Palestinian Authority to stop all negotiations with Israel and to stop the military coordination with Israel, which is a very—it’s a sore wound in Palestinian life, this military security coordination. So far, as I understand, the PA of course has condemned, but has not—is not reacting to this demand, to the public demand. We don’t know what will happen next.
But I think that beyond those details, what’s becoming clearer and clearer—and I think that’s also to many Israelis—is that who is really under blockade is not Gaza and not the Palestinians, but Israel, under a self-imposed blockade, because they think they could continue to violate our—not only international law or concepts, but also common sense. It’s all reacting against the common sense of every normal person in this world, you know, like if you think about Noam Chomsky not allowed to enter the country. So this is the main thing we can see. From the very beginning, the decision to not allow this ship from entering Gaza, from reaching Gaza, then this attack on civilian ships and then expecting the people will accept this attack, as Adam said, in international water. So it’s a complete act of piracy. And then these soldiers expect to be received as if they were, I don’t know, guests. So this shows about a certain—and unfortunately, the Israeli society is behind the government in that sense, still behind the government. So it is under blockade. The Israeli society is under self-imposed siege.
ANJALI KAMAT: Amira Hass, you were supposed to be on one of the boats in the flotilla?
AMIRA HASS: Yes, I registered, as I—as you know, we are not—Israeli journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza through Erez, and I did enter—over the past year and a half, I did enter three times, so-called illegally. And the first time was with a boat. And I registered to enter, and I was supposed to be on the boat with Dror Feiler, the Israeli Swedish activist and musician. But unfortunately, because they kept postponing the date, I had something I could not cancel in Jerusalem at the end of last week, so, unfortunately, I did not join it. Or fortunately.
AMY GOODMAN: Amira Hass, you talked about the protests in the Palestinian territories. What about in the Israeli Jewish community? What has been the response? And what are you seeing on Israeli television? What kind of video? What is the story, the narrative, you’re getting?
AMIRA HASS: There were. Israeli activists has been—has had several demonstrations since yesterday, as I could tell by emails and by what friends told me, and Palestinians in Israel, as well, of course. There are all sorts of condemnations by Israeli organizations and organizations for human rights organizations. So there is an activity, as an—adding to the quite rejectivity of Israeli Jews against the occupation, which we see permanently. But it’s an activity of a minority. There are, of course, publicists and some public personalities who are alarmed by Israeli blindness, I think, as I can tell by the reports.
Now, the Israeli version, as is seen and is almost the only version that is shown to the Israeli public, is that once they went down the ropes, the soldiers, they were immediately attacked by some people, who had with them knives and sticks or whatever, and were beating them. The official—the video, the photos. And you can hear also on the voice—you can hear that the soldiers are surprised or shocked. And so are their officers, their commanders, which watch everything through the—whatever equipment they have. I tend to believe that they were indeed surprised. They did not expect resistance. They did not expect to be challenged. I cannot tell if it was after—by what we are shown, if it was after some shots were—that they shot and killed some people, or was it simultaneously when they slid down from the helicopters. But this is what is seen on the Israeli—on Israeli TV. And this is also what—I read some testimonies of soldiers, and this is also what soldiers tell, told from a military correspondent of ours who of course got the permission to speak to them. We don’t get any detailed account of anyone of those who were on the ship.
ANJALI KAMAT: I want to bring Ali Abuninah, the co-founder of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, into the discussion. He’s joining us from Chicago.
Ali, can you talk about the reaction from the United States from the Obama administration and also at the Security Council?
ALI ABUNIMAH: Yes. Good morning.
Among the more than 700 people on the ship from about thirty-two countries are thirteen United States citizens, including a former ambassador, Ed Peck, who has been released and is reported to be on his way back to the United States. But as in the previous Israeli acts of piracy and war against ships heading to Gaza—you remember when Cynthia McKinney was kidnapped and jailed in Israel for trying to reach Gaza—once again, the United States government is saying and doing nothing publicly that suggests any great concern for its citizens who have been kidnapped by Israel.
And the statements from the Obama administration, particularly that by the US representative at the United Nations, Alejandro Wolff, were really quite shocking and astonishing. You played a clip during the news, where he suggests really that the flotilla were themselves to blame, talking about using non-confrontational and non-provocational methods rather than going by ship—in other words, suggesting—agreeing with the outrageous Israeli claims that trying to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid is somehow a provocation or a confrontation. And Ambassador Wolff also reaffirmed Israel’s so-called right to self-defense in this context, which suggests that the United States, unless it makes clear otherwise, believes that attacking a civilian ship on the high seas and massacring an unknown number of its passengers is somehow self-defense.
I think we also have to keep our eye on the context here, Anjali. Just a week or so ago, the United States Congress voted by 410-to-four—I’ll repeat that, 410-to-four—to a request from the Obama administration for additional military aid, another $205 million. This was clearly a political move by the Obama administration to fund the rather useless Iron Dome rocket defense as a way to appease Israel politically. But the message Israel got from this, as it has gotten from US and international complicity and complacency, the failure to hold Israel accountable for the war crimes documented in the Goldstone report; the failure to hold Israel accountable for the act of international terrorism and murder in a hotel room in Dubai; the failure to hold Israel accountable for four years of murderous siege on Gaza that has killed, by itself, 400 Palestinians for lack of access to medical aid and other needed supplies. The failure to hold Israel accountable in all these ways has sent Israel the message: do what you like, get away with whatever you want to, until people hold Israel accountable.
And so, what the Freedom Flotilla was, was it was a peaceful, unarmed people’s navy, assembled to fill the void and the vacuum where the Obama administration should be, where the UN Security Council should be, where the Arab governments should be, where the European Union should be. And it is a shocking outrage and a crime that will live in infamy, along with the bombing of the King David Hotel, along with the attack on the USS Liberty, along with so many other appalling crimes, that international humanitarian workers bringing aid were attacked on the high seas.
I spoke to you a few months ago when I was in Cairo with the Gaza Freedom March. By now, people have tried to reach Gaza to break the siege by land. They have tried by sea. And they have lost their lives. They have given their lives in the cause of breaking this siege on Gaza. And we have to ask, we have to ask, for what crime are 1.5 million people in Gaza being held prisoner? There is a museum in Berlin, which I visited as a schoolboy, to those who were killed trying to cross, those who were machine-gunned trying to cross over the Berlin Wall. Well, an unknown number of people, because Israel won’t tell us, were machine-gunned for trying to break this blockade. When will there be accountability? And when will the Obama administration stop this outrageous complicity, this enabling, this acting as an accomplice with these crimes against people in Palestine and now against Americans, Turks, Greeks, Jordanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Swedes, French people, German people, members of Parliament, doctors, retired people, trying to bring medicine to people in Gaza? That our government has not stood up and condemned this in the clearest possible terms is a sign that something is sick in the United States’ system when it comes to speaking about and dealing with Israel. There is a sickness that has to be addressed.
AMY GOODMAN: Ali Abunimah is speaking to us from Chicago. He’s the founder of the Electronic Intifada. Adam Shapiro in the studio with—in New York at Democracy Now!. Amira Hass is with us from Ramallah in the West Bank. When we come back from break, we’re going to Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, to talk about international law.
“More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against `occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one.”
Evidently, even the Israeli leadership agrees that they are running an Apartheid state.
Senate Foreign Relations Cmte. Hearing on START Treaty (May 18, 2010)
Senate Foreign Relations Cmte. Hearing on START Treaty In April, Pres. Obama and Russian Pres. Medvedev signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that will limit long-range nuclear weapons. Sec. of State Clinton, Defense Sec. Gates and Jt. Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mullen discussed the treaty at a Senate Foreign Relations Cmte hearing. This would replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the 2002 Moscow Treaty.
Washington, DC : 2 hr. 16 min.
Hillary “warmongering” Clinton claimed some things about Iran that I hope you dissect. She said that Iran IS enriching uranium above 20%. She was also saying that she had China and Russia on board for more sanctions.
http://www.c-span.org/
Have you noticed all of the energy commercials on the MSM? First they have a Iraqi Vet talking about how the US needs to get off the oil teat in the middle east, show US tanks being blown up by IED’s, then they show a shot of the Iranian President and call him a MADMAN and how our oil addiction puts money in his pocket. Several versions of these commercials but they are being played all over the MSM. MSNBC, CNN etc.
New strategy to fuel aggression towards Iran
A sad state of affairs in the land of the free and home of the brave.
It all adds up.
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I too would like to boycott Israeli products on a personal basis. I am not sure there are a lot of consumer products being sold in this country that are from Israel. I assume most are industrial products and services sold to industries rather than to consumers. Does anyone know about organization or websites that inform consumers on this issue? Thanks.
Are there any books on the intellectual history of Likud and Jabotinsky’s political philosophy you would recommend? I had read about fascist influence before, but I don’t know the details.