Israel Agonistes

At once both to destroy and be destroy'd;
The Edifice where all were met to see him
Upon their heads and on his own he pull'd.

Milton, Samson Agonistes

I have done my best to avoid writing any blogs about the Israel-Palestine problem—a problem I spent years of my life on, to little effect—but sometimes you have to go where the river takes you.

I opened my emails Monday morning to find a flurry of messages, many forwarded in the middle of the night by a friend in France:

(Cyprus, May 31, 2010) This is a call to the world from the people on the boats. “We are a civilian people doing what our governments have refused to do, challenge Israel’s right to collectively punish 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza by blockading their right to their own sea. This flotilla is bringing construction and educational supplies to the people of Gaza and are being met by Israeli warships.”

The standoff had been going on for days: a humanitarian flotilla of six ships full of international peace activists was trying to break the blockade of Gaza to bring in medical and building supplies, since most of the houses shelled during the Israeli attack in December, 2008, have still not been rebuilt because people have no building materials. The Israeli military, meanwhile, was determined to maintain the blockade and keep supplies out, as they had done with previous convoys, on the theory that the citizens of Gaza must be shown what a mistake it was to vote for Hamas in the last election by being denied housing, food, and medicines. The new flotilla was the biggest so far, originating in Turkey, with notables from many countries on board—surely Israel would just make them turn around as they had before. But as I scrolled through my emails, an ominous message appeared:

Report from IHH boat [ the Turkish boat, Marmora]...two killed, 31 wounded. No verification but medical emergency can be seen from ship. Around 5 am.

I ran to the TV but could find nothing about the Gaza flotilla on any channel except CNN, which was predictably protective of Israel. (But that does it for MSNBC—if they aren’t there when you need news, who needs all their smart-assed commentary?) Back to my computer, to find that Gush Shalom in Israel had sent out a press release:

Uri Avnery: this night a crime was perpetrated in the middle of the sea, by order of the government of Israel and the IDF Command. A warlike attack against aid ships and deadly shooting at peace and humanitarian aid activists It is a crazy thing that only a government that crossed all red lines can do.
"Only a crazy government that has lost all restraint and all connection to reality could do something like that—consider ships carrying humanitarian aid and peace activists from around the world as an enemy and send massive military force to international waters to attack them, shoot and kill."

The Israeli Defence Force is claiming that they fired in self-defense —they say that, once their commandos boarded the ships, they were attacked by peace activists wielding metal bars and knives. One commando even had his machine gun taken away and had to use his pistol to shoot the man who took it. So much for the world-renowned fighting skills of the IDF—if you can believe a word of this. It now seems that they killed at least ten, and possibly as many as twenty, unarmed peace activists. Many more were wounded. Two IDF soldiers were wounded; none killed.

"Noone in the world will believe the lies and excuses which the government and army spokesmen come up with," said former Knesset member Uri Avnery of the Gush Shalom movement. Gush Shalom activists together with activists of other organizations are to depart at 11:00 from Tel Aviv to protest in front of the prepared detention facility where the international peace activists will be brought. Greta Berlin, the spokeswoman for the flotilla organizers located in Cyprus, told Gush Shalom activists that the Israeli commandos landed by helicopter on the boats and immediately opened fire.

Of course it is barely conceivable that a couple of peace activists went berserk when confronted by armed commandos. Or that, since the fatalities were on a Turkish ship, national pride was at issue. While this makes it even more obvious that whoever puts these trips together should screen out anyone who is not committed to non-violence, it does not let the IDF off the hook. They have shown the same lack of humanity and restraint in countless other confrontations with unarmed and nonviolent protesters. Also on Monday, at a West Bank peace demonstration at Qalandiya, the Ramallah checkpoint, Emily Henochowicz, a 21 year old Cooper Union student, was shot in the face with a tear gas canister by an IDF soldier. She is undergoing surgery to remove her left eye.

“They clearly saw us,” said Sören Johanssen, a Swedish ISM [International Solidarity Movement] volunteer standing with Henochowicz. “They clearly saw that we were internationals and it really looked as though they were trying to hit us. They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face.”

This kind of thing happens all the time but we in the US don’t hear about it because it usually happens to Palestinians.

I was so pissed off that, despite the heat and my arthritis, I went to a demonstration at Times Square. The protest was spirited but kind of weird—maybe a thousand people, very much dominated by Workers World and the al-Awda Right of Return coalition, marching around the TKTS booth where tourists line up to get discounted tickets to Broadway shows. Last year, the city declared Times Square a pedestrian-only zone and put up little tables and chairs where the street used to be. That meant the demonstration had to circle clumps of seated tourists as well as the TKTS booth—one of the little dissonances that make New York such an interesting place to live. The dissonance was increased by a Korean lady on a soapbox preaching to all the demonstrators and tourists that only Jesus would save them.

After a while I came home to search for more news (hopeless in the US except online) and try to figure out what was going on in the heads of those in the Israeli government who gave the command to fire on 600 unarmed international civilians. Here are a few hypotheses:

1) The Avnery hypothesis is that the Israeli government was convinced that the people on the flotilla were such a danger that maximum force must be used against them. If Avnery is right—and he is usually right—Israeli government officials are clinically crazy, in a state of advanced, delusional paranoia where a feather seems a mortal threat. It is certainly crazy to think that making the people of Gaza suffer will make them abandon Hamas. People who have nothing have nothing to lose.

2) The John Wayne hypothesis: Maybe the Israeli government knew the flotilla wasn’t much of a threat. Still, they had ordered the activists to turn back and the activists had refused; this meant Israeli manhood was at stake and must be defended with maximum force. “Sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

3) The Bad Father hypothesis: Maybe the Israeli government decided that, since everyone in the world seems to hate them anyhow, they will give them something to really hate. “You say I’m mean—I’ll show you mean!” A patriarchal response to a child who questions authority—and it’s clear the Israeli right thinks the rest of us are unworldly children, who don’t understand the harsh realities of life.

4) The Rogue Settler hypothesis: The IDF today is not the IDF of yesteryear; it is riddled with settlers and their children, Greater-Israel fundamentalists who think only Jewish lives matter and are perfectly happy to exterminate anyone who stands in the way of their holy mission. The order to use maximum force might have come from settler-officers of this kind, or settler-soldiers could have decided to act on their own.

And what about poor starving Gaza? Fundamentalist rabbis in Israel, like Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Safed, who advocated carpet bombing Gaza so that no Jewish lives would be lost, like to say that Gaza today is the same as it was in the days of Samuel, and Hamas is the equivalent of the Philistines of that time. Advocating that Israel today act like Samson of old, Reb. Eliyahu said in a recent Torah bulletin, "We hope that that Israel today will succeed in its task against the same Philistines from the same place and not fold its hands in 'morality' and prefer that Philistines live instead of Jews." Has he forgotten that Samson pulled the temple down on his own head as well as everybody else's?

The religious fanatics of Greater Israel and those of Hamas are equally poisonous to women, to peace, and to civil society. While calling for an end to the occupation and lifting the blockade of Gaza, we must also make it clear that we do not support either Jewish or Islamic fundamentalism but stand for a strong civil society and secular spaces for argument. A tragedy like the assault on the peace flotilla makes it more difficult and more essential than ever to hold that position.

P.S. For an interesting strategic analysis of the FreeGaza Flotilla and the Israeli response, see www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100531_flotillas_and_wars_public_opinion

Comments

Tue, 06/01/2010 - 12:34 — meredith

Comments I got via email:

From Ros Petchesky:

Again, Meredith, your blog is an invaluable summary and analysis. About the 4 hypotheses: Seems to me a combination of the Avnery & John Wayne positions sums it up; Finkelstein (who usually has his facts right) reminds us that back in the days of the original siege in Dec. 08-Jan. 09, the Israeli government were saying "they think we're a lunatic state, so we'll act like a lunatic state"--and have become one. But probably the 4th (fanatical settler) hypothesis is wrong; the cabinet were meeting all week to decide what to do about the flotilla, and planning how to manage the PR side (including Netanyahu's dramatic cancellation of his meeting with Obama), all in the context of a thousand messages from the US administration from the gitgo that they would do nothing significant in opposition - i.e., the usual green light (which I think would be important to stress in your next blog on this - the role of the US government).

And from Angela Gilliam:

Dear Meredith and Friends; Today I signed a CodePink petition letter to President Obama. This is an approximation of the special message I added: On April 26, 1988, I testified about a visit to the West Bank and Israel in a Congressional Hearing, THE U.S. PEACE PLAN AND THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING: Hearings before the Congressional Black Caucus. I had seen apartheid in action and made this plea to the Caucus "to enlarge your constituency to include those Palestinians and Israelis who believe in equality." I still stand by that statement today. In solidarity, Angela Gilliam

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