Israel is now on the threshold of another serious confrontation with a second and larger flotilla, including an American boat named The Audacity of Hope, originally the title of President Barack Obama's memoir but here seen as "a wry criticism of his administration's support for Israel".
The American boat was delayed in Athens by a last-minute — seemingly futile — Israeli attempt to question its sea worthiness so as to cripple the international attempt to break Israel's illegal blockade of the Gaza seaport.
Among the boat's 50 passengers are several prominent Americans. They include American Jews like 85-year-old Hedy Epstein, who escaped Nazi Germany as a 14-year-old after her parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-wining author of The Color Purple and the African-American wife of an American Jew.
Walker saw the "incredible damage and devastation" when she visited Gaza after the Israeli invasion in 2009. She told Foreign Policy magazine that she has "a good understanding of what's on the ground there" and how the water and sewerage systems have been destroyed.
She added: "I saw that the ministries had been bombed, and the hospitals had been bombed, and the schools. I sat for a for a good part of a morning in the rubble of the American School, and it just was so painful because we as Americans pay so much of our taxes for the kind of weaponry that was used."
She recalled that her experience with the Arab-Israeli conflict started with the Six-Day War in 1967. "That happened shortly after my wedding to a Jewish law student. And we were very happy because we thought Israel was right to defend itself by pre-emptively striking against Egypt.
"We did not realise any of the real history of that area. So that was my beginning of interest in what was going on and watching what was happening. Even at that time, I said to my young husband, ‘well, they shouldn't take that land, because it is actually not their land'."
Two-state solution
This turnaround is being echoed widely within the American Jewish community, thus establishing another marker in the decades-long conflict. Last Tuesday, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement from the S. Daniel Abraham Centre for Middle East Peace, arguing for "the imperative of the two-state solution".
Under the title, ‘The Prize Is Worth the Price', Abraham argued for a two state solution — one Jewish , the other Palestinian — "or inevitably, Israel will become one state for two people, either non-Jewish or non-democratic". He added that "the price for peace is known, the prize of peace is within our reach".
Another Israeli writer, Carlo Strenger, recalling the outcry that followed a report published last year in the New York Review of Books that highlighted the "deep estrangement between the young generation of American Jews and Israel", went on to say that "unfortunately, the situation has only grown a lot worse".
Reporting on a trip to Europe where he spoke before mostly Jewish, but also non-Jewish audiences, who, he said, wanted to "understand" Israel's colony policies, namely "the dispossession of Palestinian property in [occupied] Jerusalem, and the utterly racist talk about ‘Judaisation' of [occupied] Jerusalem," explaining that "they feel that they no longer have arguments, even words to defend Israel".
He continued: "Israel has never had a government that so blatantly violates the core values of liberal democracy. Never has a Knesset passed laws that are as manifestly racist as the current one. Israel has had foreign ministers who were unworldly and didn't know English; but it has never had a foreign minister whose only goal is to pander to his right-wing constituency by flaunting his disdain for international law and the idea of human rights with such relish."
What is so sadly missing here is the application of international law, particularly by the big powers, especially the Obama administration, vis-a-vis Israel's blockade despite the fact that it has withdrawn from Gaza and its coastline should remain free, or the continued expansion in the Occupied Territories, just to cite two key issues.
All the US State Department did was to issue a ‘travel warning' advising US citizens about the risks of travelling to Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, rather than warning Israel of the consequences of its unlawful actions.
Interestingly, six members of US Congress have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to do "everything in her power" to work to ensure the safety of US citizens aboard The Audacity of Hope — a step that is, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented. The signatories are Dennis Kucinich, William Lacy Clay, Sam Farr, Bob Filner, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Barbara Lee.
These six representatives deserve "a huge round of applause", wrote Robert Naiman, the policy director at Just Foreign Policy, an independent and non-partisan membership organisation dedicated to reforming US foreign policy.
He noted, in his column published in Common Dreams that these representatives "were willing to publicly sign their names to this basic appeal, knowing full well that there is a dedicated and well-financed crew of pro-Likud activists in Washington to punish any deviance from the [Israeli] Likud line".
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.
