Back in August, I wrote extensively about an organization which bills itself as the “Free Gaza” movement (see here, here and here.) The aim of this organization is to break what it bills as the “Israeli siege” of Gaza. To this end, it has organized two boat trips of activists to the Strip. Each time, the activists have issued hysterical predictions about being blocked by the Israeli Navy. And each time, they have been permitted to dock without so much as a warning shot fired in their direction.
The second boat trip arrived in Gaza this morning. Again, the activists are misrepresenting themselves as humanitarian aid workers. In reality, they are a traveling crew of anti-Zionists bent on pointing out the illegitimacy of Israel to anyone who will listen.
You would have thought that anyone who wanted to free Gaza might be concerned about the reign of terror which Hamas has imposed there. As Human Rights Watch - hardly a friend of Israel - noted in July, “Hamas forces physically abused some of the people they apprehended and closed roughly 100 organizations they consider allied with Fatah.” But not a peep on this score from the “Free Gaza” movement.
Instead, they are busy pushing the “original sin” version of Israel’s creation. Israel, they say, has created the “largest ongoing refugee population in the world.” Pertinent but inconvenient facts - Palestinians can be citizens of other countries and retain their refugee status, and they can also, unlike other refugee populations, transfer their refugee status to their descendants - are conveniently ignored. Nothing shall be permitted to get in the way of the portrait of Israel as an apartheid state, the worst villain on the global stage.
Talk to representatives of UNRWA, the UN agency devoted to Palestinian refugees (the millions of other refugees in the world are all catered for by UNHCR), and they will tell you that the term “refugee camp” is misleading. I recently heard one UNRWA official say that so similar are the dwellings in Palestinian areas, it’s not always obvious that you’ve left the town and entered a camp. But that didn’t stop Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a participant in the first “Free Gaza” mission, from disgracefully comparing Gaza to Darfur, a barefaced lie designed to conjure up images of fragile tents battered by desert winds and populated with starving, emaciated children.
With this second mission, it appears that the “Free Gaza” movement has avoided bringing along liabilities like Booth and Yvonne Ridley, a “journalist” with the Iranian Holocaust Denial outfit Press TV. Among their number was the more august figure of Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.
Drawing on her experience in Northern Ireland, in an interview with the Irish Times Corrigan said:
“The problem between Israel and Palestine will not be solved with militarism and can only be solved by all-inclusive unconditional dialogue between all parties involved. But since Israel is the occupier and the stronger party, it behoves it to move on peace initiatives…You cannot talk peace and at the same time be demolishing homes, carrying out extrajudicial killings, and imposing a siege on Gaza, perpetrating tremendous suffering . . . I think the Israeli government has a responsibility to change things on the ground [in the West Bank], end the siege of Gaza . . . and begin to release prisoners.”
I asked my co-blogger Eamonn McDonagh what he thought of her statement. “The analogy that Corrigan draws with the Northern Ireland conflict is false,” he told me, “because it fails to take into account that in Northern Ireland, negotiations worked when the IRA realised that its objectives were unachievable by force - and probably unachievable anyway. They therefore decided to abandon terrorism in return for a role administering what they tried, for thirty years, to destroy by violence. Hamas has a long way to go before it reachs the level of enlightenment and self-knowledge achieved by the Provos at the start of the 1990s. Fortunately, the Israelis are patient teachers.”
Hamas certainly won’t learn any valuable lessons from solidarity activists who see their role as cheerleaders, and who assiduously refrain from any criticism of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Er, I think you’ll find it’s the Israeli government that has been threatening to stop the boats, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with being anti-Zionist. Any person truly interested in justice is anti-Zionist by definition.
And your point about Hamas is a red herring. It’s not Hamas that is taking away the Palestinian people’s right to travel. It is Israel and her collaborators.
I’m interested in justice and also call myself a Zionist.
Hiya Tone,
1.
Sovereign states are normally held to have the right to control who and what crosses their border. Any particular reason why that wouldn’t apply to Israel?
2.
Israel in fact supplies food and fuel to Gaza, a territory ruled by a religious gang sworn to destroy it and in spite of that group’s repeated attacks on border crossing points. The cunning of the Elders really does know no bounds.
3.
It might be fun, or maybe not, to hear about your concept of justice, one that apparently includes the denial of national rights to one particular people.
Anthony “Er, I think you’ll find it’s the Israeli government that has been threatening to stop the boats, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with being anti-Zionist. Any person truly interested in justice is anti-Zionist by definition.”
Anthony found his definition of “justice”
in a Hamas and Hizbollah handbook.
As a Zionist, my idea of justice includes the idea of a Palestinian State living in Peace alongside a Jewish State.
Anthony’s idea of justice is a Judenrein Arab State and no Jewish State.
Anthony, if you come back, perhaps you’d like to explain how this group can call itself the “Free Gaza Movement” and behave like the poodles of Hamas. Doesn’t compute.
Some replies:
1.
“Sovereign states are normally held to have the right to control who and what crosses their border. Any particular reason why that wouldn’t apply to Israel?”
Well, Israel doesn’t have borders with Gaza, not in the sense of borders it itself recognizes. Never did — only armistice lines and troop withdrawal lines. But let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that it does. So what? Israel occupied the Gaza Strip since 1967; whether it does so now or not is a matter of dispute (it depends whether occupation implies “boots on the ground” or not.) But a country doesn’t occupy a territory for forty years, then unilaterally withdraw forces, and wash its hand of responsibility for the people it occupied. During those forty years Israel did nothing to build a viable economic infrastructure in Gaza; on the contrary, it built an economic dependence of the Gazans on Israel for Israel’s sake and destroyed any hope of an infrastructure during the Second Intifada. As former colonizers and, for the sake of argument, former occupiers in Gaza, Israel has a reponsibility for the Gazan’s welfare above and beyond its obvious responsibility in the name of human rights and welfare, which it says that it recognizes.
2. “Israel in fact supplies food and fuel to Gaza, a territory ruled by a religious gang sworn to destroy it and in spite of that group’s repeated attacks on border crossing points. The cunning of the Elders really does know no bounds.”
In fact, Israel supplies food and refrains from supplying food (just as it allows for freedom of movement and refrains from allowing it) based on Israel’s own perceived interests on how it can put pressure on the Gazans. This has been going on for sixty years, and the Oslo period was no different. So suggesting that it somehow it is a new development is contrary to the facts. True, the control has been tightened since Hamas won the parliamentary elections — well before, by the way, Hamas started lobbing rockets.
Does Israel have a right to beseige Gaza once a party sworn to its destruction becomes the majority there? Of course not. The regime in Iran has nor right to attack Israel, even though the Israeli government opposes the regime, and works to destabilize. Israel itself does not recognize the right of Hamas to rule Gaza — does this justify Hamas’ suicide bombing? Israel’s reaction — any state’s reaction to a threat against it — cannot be disproportionate. And history shows that Israel is as quick to reject truce overtures by Hamas as “bogus” (especially long-term truces) as it is to violate those truces if it feels that it can get away with it. Let’s face it; Israel is immeasurably more powerful than Gaza, and Israel has many weapons in its arseneal.
3. “It might be fun, or maybe not, to hear about your concept of justice, one that apparently includes the denial of national rights to one particular people.”
I wager that the writer of the lines above denies “national rights” to many peoples, for there are quite a number of peoples who do not have — and should not have — such rights (and, given the growth of ethno-nationalism, those groups are multiplying.) But the statement shows a regrettable ignorance of the complexities of the subject. What constitutes a people? What peoples have “national rights”? Do national rights include the right to statehood or to some lesser form of self-determination? And how are these rights adjudicated in the face of other national groups who claim similar rights? These are knotty topics that are not self-evident, and I can’t think of a worse argument for Zionism that the Jews, as a people, have a right to a state. For one thing, many Jews didn’t and still don’t believe that. For another, the question “who is a member of the national collective” is particularly complicated in the case of Jews, where religion and ethnicity are bound up.
Finally, I wonder whether Shriber believes in a genuine two-state solution. I have lived in Israel for close to thirty-five years, and I don’t know more than a handful of Jews who support a two-state solution — and none of the Zionist political parties, from the right to Meretz on the left, do so. Oh, they say that they do, of course. But what they support is a one-state, one-’state’ solution, the former an economically and militarily advanced Israel, the latter a truncated Palestine, demilitarized, in barely contiguous areas, with an urban ghetto in Jerusalem (if it is lucky), which exists in order to solve the Jewish state’s demographic problems and to provide much of its unskilled labor force. Even the Geneva Initiative, almost universally rejected in Israel, subcontracts Palestinian security to a multi-national force. Apparently, the Palestinians have little to fear for, since they live next to the benevolent Jews.
But if one were to suggest a genuine two-state solution, where there would be some greater measure of parity, or a federation in which the two states had limits on their sovereignty (perhaps a common military, foreign, and economic policy), then the Israelis — from left to right — would be up in arms.
So you see, gents, virtually no supporter of Israel as founded in 1948 supports the creation of a genuine Palestinian state. Or, at least, none that I know of.