Three years ago, the Free Gaza movement
was wrapping up final preparations for a flotilla of eight ships to head
out to Gaza, determined to break Israel’s illegal siege on 1.5 million
Palestinians shut into an open-air prison. Most of us were already in
Cyprus or Turkey or Greece, as we were the primary organizers, having
already sent eight voyages, five of them successful in 2008.
Why a flotilla of boats?
During Israel’s horrific massacres against the people of Gaza (called
Operation Cast Lead) in December 2008/January, 2009, our boat, the
DIGNITY, had been rammed off the coast of Lebanon as we were taking
medical personnel into Gaza. The boat later sank in a storm off the
coast of Cyprus.
Then, in July
2009, Israel brutally attacked the “Spirit of Humanity,” even though
Nobel Peace Laureate, Mairead Maguire, and former Congresswoman, Cynthia
McKinney were on board. The Israeli government stole the boat, threw
passengers into Israeli prison and, laughably, deported them eight days
later, because “passengers had illegally entered Israel.” It was the
first time the Israeli commandoes had actually boarded one of the boats
as opposed to ramming them or trying to sink them.
We realized a new approach would have to be designed, one that would
include more vessels, more passengers and more media exposure to the
brutal closure of Gaza. Sailing one boat at a time was not going to get
the message out to the world that Israel was blockading the people of
Gaza and committing crimes against humanity.
It took Free Gaza a year to organize. We traveled to Sweden, Norway,
France, Turkey, Greece, many Middle Eastern countries, Tunisia, Spain,
Malaysia, the UK, the US and Germany. We helped Palestinian support
groups raise money and send out the message that the next voyage would
have to be organized with worldwide support. We succeeded beyond our
wildest imagination, as organizations and individuals got on board the
mission, raised money from people around the world, and bought the
boats… eight in all, from the boats purchased by the Turkish charity,
IHH, to the boats ready to go from Greece, Sweden, Ireland, Malaysia and
the U.S.
Our own boats,
Challenger 1 and Challenger 2 plus the cargo ship, the Rachel Corrie,
were on their way to the meeting place off the coast of Cyprus. The
Rachel Corrie, bought with money from a charity in Malaysia had finally
left Ireland, its propeller pin suspiciously dropping out just days
before leaving, causing the ship to be delayed for days. Had the final
inspection not caught the problem, the propeller would have flown off,
damaging the boat and putting the passengers and cargo at risk. The
Rachel Corrie would not make it in time to join the flotilla but would
try to get into Gaza five days later, only to be boarded by Israeli
commandos, the passengers brutalized and left in the sun, then thrown
into prison.
The six of us in
the media office in Cyprus were fielding calls, trying to keep track of
passengers and where they were going to board…and also trying to pacify
the Cypriot authorities, who were no longer willing to have our boats
leaving their shores… too much Israeli money had come into Cypriot
departments over the year, and the doors that had been so welcoming to
us, were beginning to close.
As
the boats headed out to the meeting place, our two yachts were suddenly
dead in the water, clearly a result of sabotage, as the Israelis
bragged about it.
After the pin
had come out of the Rachel Corrie propeller, it was obvious that one
way Israel was going to shut down the flotilla was to make sure boats
never left port (during Freedom Flotilla II in 2011, that’s exactly what
Israel accomplished, thanks to outsourcing the occupation to Greece and
shutting down the entire flotilla of nine boats).
Now, both of our yachts had the same gasoline problem at the same time
in the middle of the Mediterranean. One was never able to join the
flotilla (after taking months to repair, it finally became the Irish
ship, Saoirse, that sailed with the Canadian boat, the Tahrir and was
violently boarded in November, 2011 by Israeli commandos who tried to
sink them with water canons).
We
could not have imagined in the days running up to the murderous attacks
on our passengers on May 31, 2010 that the Israeli government, in spite
of ordering the ramming of the DIGNITY and the vicious boarding of the
SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, they would actually send armed commandos onto all
six boats, beating up many passengers, wounding over 50 of them, and
murdering nine, all while the boats were in international waters.
Shutting Us Up
In an attempt since then to make the attackers look as though they are
the victims, the Israeli PR machine has been working overtime to spin
the story. Here are just three of the many lies told by PR shill, Mark
Regev and top Israeli military men.
1. The flotilla was Turkish or was run by the IHH and was full of Turkish jihadists.
The flotilla was organized and run by the Free Gaza movement with help
by every initiative that joined, from IHH to the Swedes to the Irish to
the Malaysians. We were all members of civil society who were protesting
at Israel’s brutal behavior regarding the Palestinians, and we took no
money from governments. All money was raised through donations from
average people outraged over Israel’s behavior.
In fact, we had an international passenger list of over 600. Turkey
made up half of the passenger list. Australia 3; Azerbaijan 2; Italy 6;
Indonesia 12; Ireland 9; Algeria 28; United States 12; Bulgaria 2;
Bosnia 1; Bahrain 4; Belgium 5; Germany 11; South Africa 1; Holland 2;
United Kingdom 31; Greece 38; Jordan 30; Kuwait 15; Lebanon 3;
Mauritania 3; Malaysia 11; Egypt 3; Israel 6: Macedonia 3; Morocco 7;
Norway 3; New Zealand 1; Syria 3; Serbia 1; Oman 1; Pakistan 3; Czech
Republic 4; France 9; Kosovo 1; Canada 1; Sweden 11; Turkey 380; Yemen
4.
Every one of these
passengers had filled out an extensive application. Although Free Gaza
was not responsible for the Turkish passengers, they used our
application process. Every person who boarded every boat was searched.
Even one of the crew-members on board the Mavi Marmara had to relinquish
his Swiss army knife.
2. Passengers attacked heavily armed Israeli commandos, forcing them to shoot in self-defense.
Passengers on all six boats testified to being beaten, their bones
broken, and most of them tied up on ships that were in the
Mediterranean, a direct violation of maritime law and the treatment of
civilians.
As the UNHCR report
clearly states, of the nine passengers who were murdered on board the
Mavi Marmara, six of them were assassinated, none of them had weapons.
In fact, the only weapon in their hands was a camera.
Even the whitewashing Palmer report, a panel set up to counter what
UNHRC had issued and co-chaired by that famous human rights abuser from
Columbia, Uribe, reluctantly concluded that Israel overreacted. Their
finding that the blockade was legal has no standing according to many
maritime lawyers (there were none on the panel), since they wer only
tasked to mend relations with Turkey, something they failed abysmally to
do.
3. Israel ‘kindly offered’ to take the supplies loaded on the boats and transfer them to Gaza.
First of all, our missions have never been about delivering supplies.
They have always been about breaking Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza. We
took in supplies, because we could, and because we often loaded the
boats with medical equipment and construction equipment that Israel
refused to allow into the besieged enclave.
Second, there is no method of transporting anything from Ashdod to
Gaza. It is a seaport with no facilities for transporting 10,000 tons of
supplies that were on board the boats. Free Gaza’s lawyers and
representatives in Israel spent months working on getting the supplies
from the Rachel Corrie into Gaza. When they finally were delivered, the
battery operated wheelchairs were minus the batteries, as Israel
determined they might be used to make rockets, the same reasoning they
gave to us on the first trip about hearing aid batteries.
Third, every piece of cargo, every piece of equipment and every supply
that was going to Gaza had already been inspected at the point of
departure. That’s the way it’s supposed to be handled, not by some
paranoid country that thinks it can break all the conventions of the sea
and demand that cargo that was already inspected get hauled into its
port. Imagine what a mess it would be if every country in the world
decided they had the right to inspect cargo coming in from every other
country. It’s what cargo manifests and inspectors are for.
Those three constant lies have been trotted out at every opportunity to
shut up the activists and prevent additional voyages. It has not
stopped us, as evidenced by the most recent initiative, sailing a boat
out of Gaza (www.gazaark.org), nor will it stop us from continuing to
hold Israel accountable for the well-being of the people it occupies.
The best news on this, the third anniversary of the murders of eight
Turks and one American, is that the ICC is going to consider the
complaint from the Cormoros Islands, the country where the Mavi Marmara
was flagged.
In an attempt to
shut in the people of Gaza, shut down the voyages and shut up the
people who advocate for freedom of movement for the 1.5 million people
imprisoned there, the Israelis have failed…. Miserably.
