There is an Arab saying that best describes Israel's murderous campaign against the aid-loaded Freedom Flotilla that was headed for the besieged Gaza Strip, where some 1.5 million Palestinians have endured the appalling and shocking policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. It says, "You either shoot him or crush his skull".
That is exactly what happened when helicopter-borne Israeli commandos confronted six ships led by the Turkish vessel, the Mavi Marmara. Aboard were several hundred pro-Palestinian international activists, many of them Turks. In the bloody confrontation on Sunday night, the Israeli commandos reportedly killed 16 unarmed passengers and wounded 50 others.
Murder
An Arab member of the Knesset, Haneen Zoabi, who was on the lead ship, has now spoken in Nazareth. She said it was clear that the Israelis "intended to cause the largest possible number of casualties ... We had no plans for a confrontation". Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called the raid "tantamount to banditry and piracy" and "murder conducted by a state".
The Israeli-initiated violence has precipitated widespread international condemnation and several countries have summoned the Israeli ambassadors in their midst. The UN Security Council issued a statement calling for a "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent" inquiry into the raid. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has long maintained that the blockade of Gaza is illegal. Israel has recently declared that the no-go zone is 60 miles deep, which takes it well into international waters.
Ever since the tight blockade was imposed in 2007 by both Israel and Egypt after Hamas took over control of the Strip, the Palestinians living there have been receiving, according to the UN, only one quarter of the needed supplies. The situation was aggravated further by the ban imposed by Israel against land, air and sea travel to Gaza, despite the fact that it pulled out of the region five years ago.
Since then, Israel's harsh actions against the Gazans have been overlooked for many years by several countries, and US President Barack Obama's reaction was unbelievably mild this week when Netanyahu called cancelling his visit to the White House, scheduled for the second day after the assault on the flotilla. All that Obama was able to come up with was to voice his "deep regret at the loss of life ... and concern for the wounded". His apparent excuse was that he was unaware of the "circumstances around this morning's tragic events". We are all sitting on edge awaiting his final assessment and expect him to take action against the Israeli regime, which has for too long shown disdain for international law and humanitarianism.
Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books about the arrogance of the Israeli prime minister, who probably believes he can wash his hands of this appalling event. (Netanyahu, in fact, had chaired a meeting with his key Cabinet ministers and reportedly planned the response to the expected flotilla before his trip to Canada and the US, now cancelled).
Beinart wrote: "In his 1993 book, A Place Among Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a ‘ghetto-state' with ‘Auschwitz borders'. And the effort ‘to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel' resembles Hitler's bid to wrench the German-speaking ‘Sudeten district' from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state."
Expectation
The worldwide expectation is that Obama should not follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and treat Israel gently but take a much tougher stance. For example, an outright American condemnation of the disastrous Israeli action is sorely needed. Also, Israel must be urged to comply with the UN Security Council's call for an investigation of the incident, release all the passengers and forward all the much-needed goods to the suffering people in Gaza.
But all these crucial steps are minuscule when compared with the wider expectation that the unjustified Israeli blockade of Gaza should end forthwith.
George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.
