Gaza aid victims have not died in vain

It takes some nerve, and a special kind of detachment from reality, to claim that your soldiers were "lynched" by "terrorists" when they have just shot dead nine unarmed human rights activists and wounded dozens of others while suffering no fatal injuries themselves. But that is the line Israel's propaganda machine spun while it held nearly 700 international pro-Palestinian campaigners incommunicado in the wake of last Monday's assault on six boats bringing humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza.

It has already turned the Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev into a figure of international ridicule. The charge of piracy from Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, can scarcely be regarded as hyperbole, when on a string of counts Israel has acted in flagrant violation of international law.

The Israeli military was well aware there were no arms on board the boats in the flotilla. And the fearsome weapons it said it had discovered turned out to be a collection of chair legs and kitchen knives. Those campaigners who used sticks against the attacks of heavily armed soldiers were evidently acting in self-defence, and the bravery — underlined on Friday as the MV Rachel Corrie, an Irish vessel that sailed on towards Israel's exclusion zone, but was seized by Israel — cannot be in doubt.

But whether this outrage was a trigger-happy display of incompetence or an attempt at deterrence that spun out of control, it has spectacularly backfired. What Erdogan branded an act of state terrorism has both set the seal on the rupture between Israel and its one-time Turkish ally and forced open cracks in the siege of Gaza that the attacks were presumably intended to close.

Egypt has been forced to open its border with Gaza; and the Western governments that have connived in the siege since Palestinians voted for Hamas and the movement took over in 2007 now feel compelled to speak out against it. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conceded the situation in Gaza was "unsustainable", while Mark Lyall Grant, Britain's ambassador to the UN, dared call it "unacceptable".

That's still a long way short of condemnation, let alone pulling the plug on the enforced suffering of more than one and a half million captive people. It's that political vacuum citizens across the world are now taking action to fill.

Far from being ships of hate, the Free Gaza movement flotilla represent a growing global movement that has understood governments are not spontaneously going to turn against barbarities they themselves sponsor.

We were told, after all, that the people of Gaza were being subjected to this treatment because of Hamas rocket-fire into Israel. For more than a year since Israel's devastation of the strip in 2008-09, Hamas has maintained an effective ceasefire and the rocket launchers have been mostly silent, but the siege and the boycott of Gaza grinds on. Sooner or later Hamas will conclude that passivity is a dead end.

The blockade of Gaza is only a symptom of the 43-year-old occupation that enforces it — and the Palestinian dispossession that means most of its people are refugees.

The impact of last Monday's attacks on the already soured relations between Israel and Turkey looks set to be far-reaching. Israel's long-time strategy of making common cause with the non-Arab powers of Turkey and Iran against the Arabs has finally been turned on its head.

It would be hazardous to assume the events will be a watershed. Israel has brazened out many far greater outrages before. Something is shifting, however. John Ging, who heads the UN's operations in Gaza, told me that the killings had "exposed the failure of the international community to match its words with deeds" on Gaza. But he sees the opening of the Egyptian border as a "huge breach" in the blockade.

What is certain is that while some will have been intimidated by the Israeli military's violence, many more volunteers will now try to bring boatloads of aid to Gaza to widen that breach. The denial of Palestinian rights has become a great moral as well as political cause of our time.

If relief for Gaza's people is even a step nearer, the victims of the Mavi Marmara will not have died in vain.