It’s Not 1967 Anymore
Posted by Phoenix Woman on June 1, 2010
The days when Israel could get away with attacking non-threatening ships in international waters (see also: USS Liberty) are long gone.
If the Likudniks thought they could uphold their starvation blockade of Gaza by attacking a ship filled with unarmed civilians, they thought wrong.
Egypt, whose border touches the one part of the Gaza border that Israel doesn’t utterly control, and which was pressured by Israel to uphold the Israeli blockade of Gaza, has said that it is opening the Rafah crossing into Gaza and has no plans to reclose it anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Turkey, which up to now was Israel’s strongest ally in the Middle East, has said that all future aid sea-based aid convoys to Gaza will have Turkish military escorts.
It’s not 1967 anymore, kids.
UPDATE: The IDF claims that the flotilla was armed to the teeth, but as more survivors — including an Israeli Knesset member (the Knesset being Israel’s parliament) — are finding ways to get around Israeli efforts to silence them, they are rapidly showing the IDF story for the tissue of lies that it is.
From CNN, of all places:
Hanin Zoabi, a member of the Israeli parliament, was on board the Miva Marmara, the ship that was the scene of the confrontation between activists and Israeli soldiers. The Israeli Navy fired on the ships five minutes before commandos descended from ropes that dangled from helicopters, Zoabi said during a news conference in Nazareth, Israel. She said passengers on board the ship were unarmed.
From AFP (via http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm/sidANA20100601T114423ZAPW54) :
Three visibly shaken Germans who experienced at first hand a deadly raid by the Israeli military on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza denied on Tuesday that anyone on board was armed.
“The Israeli government justifies the raid because they were attacked. This is absolutely not the case,” former member of parliament Norman Paech, 72, wrapped in a blue blanket, told reporters in Berlin.
[…]
His comments were backed up by two others on board the convoy when it was raided at dawn on Monday in international waters, MPs Inge Hoeger, 59, and Annette Groth, 56.
4 Responses to “It’s Not 1967 Anymore”
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Mercury Rising 鳯女 
Larry Wohlgemuth said
Looking at the video of the capture I saw several middle-aged me with too large bellies, terrified 20-somethings and some women. I find it hard to believe that any of these people, knowing the reputation of the IDF, would take them on with pipe wrenches, knives and “sharp pieces of metal”. However there will be the true believers out there that slurp it up like a baby being spoon-fed. Unfortunate there are so many so blind.
Thanks for the post.
Charles II said
There is film of people (probably passengers) hitting other people (probably soldiers) with stick-like objects (which Israel says are metal bars), and of one Israeli soldier getting thrown overboard. But there is also a claim that Israeli soldiers fired and injured and killed people before this footage was taken.
As far as I can see, the entirety of the issue comes down to where the ships were, namely international waters, making this a clear case of piracy and an attack on a vessel that is a member of NATO (i.e., Turkey), making this a clear case of aggression against the NATO countries.
BTW, PW, there is an interesting bit of irony, since Israel used to run blockades back in the days when the British were restricting travel, cf. SS Exodus.
Phoenix Woman said
“There is film of people (probably passengers) hitting other people (probably soldiers) with stick-like objects (which Israel says are metal bars), and of one Israeli soldier getting thrown overboard. But there is also a claim that Israeli soldiers fired and injured and killed people before this footage was taken.”
Yes, indeed. The video in question — which was the last shot onboard the ship before the IDF came and shut down communication with the outside world — does indeed show reporters for Al Jazeera saying that the IDF not only attacked first, but kept attacking even after the white flag was raised by the flotilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFEBbDkyrqQ&feature=player_embedded#!
Here’s a description of the video’s contents:
Of course, one of the first things the Israelis did was to strip the passengers of all cameras, cellphones, computers, even clothes — anything that could be used to document events — so that the IDF’s own heavily-edited video would be unchallenged on US network newscasts. But they reckoned without the internet.
The Survivalist Forum » Blog Archive » Flotilla Members (Inc. Knesset MP!) Debunking IDF’s Storyline said
[…] In order to prop up this storyline, the Israeli government has been trying to deny the international media access to the flotilla survivors — but their effort to create an information blockade is failing. […]