[News] Eyewitness to the Israeli Assault on the Mavi Marmara

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff06162010.html

June 16, 2010


What Kevin Neish Saw


Eyewitness to the Israeli Assault on the Mavi Marmara

By DAVE LINDORFF

Kevin Neish of Victoria, British Columbia, didn’t 
know he was a celebrity until he was about to 
board a flight from Istanbul to Ottawa. “This 
Arab woman wearing a beautiful outfit suddenly 
ran up to me crying, ‘It’s you! From Arab TV! 
You’re famous!’” he recalls with a laugh. “I 
didn’t know what she was talking about, but she 
told me, ‘I saw you flipping through the Israeli 
commando’s book! It’s being aired over and over!’”

A soft-spoken teacher and former civilian 
engineer with the Canadian Department of Defense, 
Neish realized then that a video taken by an Arab 
TV cameraman in the midst of the Israeli assault 
on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza of him flipping 
through a booklet had been transmitted before the 
Israelis blocked all electronic signals from the 
flotilla. The booklet had pictures and profiles 
of all the passengers, and he'd found it in the 
backpack of an Israeli Defense Force commando.

Neish, 53, was on the second deck of the 
flotilla’s lead ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, 
with a good view of the stern, when the IDF, in 
the early morning darkness of May 31, began its 
assault with percussion grenades, tear gas and a 
hail of bullets. He then moved to the fourth deck 
in an enclosed stairwell, from which he watched 
took photographs as casualties were carried down 
past him to a makeshift medical station. Several 
IDF commandos, captured by the passengers and crew, were also brought past him.

“I saw them carrying this one IDF guy down,” he 
recalls. “He looked terrified, like he thought he 
was going to be killed. But when a big Turkish 
guy, who had seen seriously injured passengers 
who had been shot by the IDF, charged over and 
tried to hit the commando, the Turkish aid 
workers pushed him off and pinned him to the 
wall. They protected this Israeli soldier.”

That was when he found the backpack which the 
soldier had dropped. “I figured I’d look inside 
and see what he was carrying,” Neish says. “And 
inside was this kind of flip-book. It was full of 
photos and names in English and Hebrew of who was 
on all the ships. The booklet also had a detailed 
diagram of the decks of the Mavi Marmara.”

Meanwhile, he says, more and more people were 
being carried down the stairs from the mayhem 
above­people who'd been shot, and people who were 
dying or people already dead. “I took detailed 
photos of the dead and wounded with my camera,” 
he says, adding, “There were several guys who had 
two neat bullet holes side by side on the side of 
their head--clearly they were executed.”

Neish smuggled his photos out of Israel to Turkey 
despite his arrest on the ship and imprisonment 
in Israel for several days. “I pulled out the 
memory card, tossed my camera and anything I had 
on me that had anything to do with electronics, 
and then kept moving the chip around so it 
wouldn’t be found,” he says. “The Israelis took 
all the cameras and computers. They were smashing 
some and keeping others. I put the chip in my 
mouth under my tongue, between my butt cheeks, in 
my sock, everywhere, to keep them from finding 
it,” he says. He finally handed it to a Turk who 
was leaving for a flight home on a Turkish 
airline. He says the card ended up in the hands 
of an organization called Free Gaza, and he has 
seen some of his pictures published, so he knows they made it out successfully.

Neish says that claims that the Israeli commandos 
were just armed with paint guns and 9 mm pistols 
are “Bullshit--at one point when I was in the 
stairwell, a commando opened a hatch above, stuck 
in a machine gun, and started firing. Bullets 
were bouncing all over the place. If the guy had 
gotten to look in and see where he was shooting, 
I’d have been dead, but two Turkish guys in the 
stairwell, who had short lengths of chain with 
them that they had taken from the access points 
to the lifeboats, stood to the side of the hatch 
and whipped them up at the barrell. I don’t know 
if they were trying to hit the commando or to use 
them to snatch away the gun, but the Israeli 
backed off, and they slammed and locked the hatch.”

“I never saw a single paint gun, or a sign of a fired paint ball!” he says.
He also didn't see any guns in the hands of 
people who were on the ship. “In the whole time I 
was there on the ship, I never saw a single 
weapon in the hands of the crew or the aid 
workers,” he says. Indeed, Neish, who originally 
had been on a smaller 70-foot yacht called the 
Challenger II, had transferred to the Mavi 
Marmara after a stop in Cyprus, because his boat 
had been sabatoged by Israeli agents (a claim 
verified by the Israeli government), making it 
impossible to steer. “When we came aboard the big 
boat, I was frisked and my bag was inspected for 
weapons,” he says. “Being an engineer, I of 
course had a pocket knife, but they took that and 
tossed it into the ocean. Nobody was allowed to 
have any weapons on this voyage. They were very careful about that.”

What he did see during the IDF assault was severe 
bullet wounds. “In addition to several people I 
saw who were killed, I saw several dozen wounded 
people. There was one older guy who was just 
propped up against the wall with a huge hole in 
his chest. He died as I was taking his picture.”

Neish says he saw many of the 9 who were known to 
have been killed, and of the 40 who were wounded, 
and adds, “There were many more who were wounded, 
too, but less seriously. In the Israeli prison, I 
saw people with knife wounds and broken bones. 
Some were hiding their injuries so they wouldn’t 
be taken away from the others.” He also says, 
“Initially there were reports that 16 on the boat 
had been killed. The medical station said 16. 
There was a suspicion that some bodies may have 
been thrown overboard. But what people think now 
is that the the other seven who are missing, 
since we’re not hearing from families, may have been Israeli spies.”

Once the Israeli commandos had secured control of 
the Mavi Marmara, Neish says the ship’s 
passengers and crew were rounded up, with the men 
put in one area on deck, and the women put below 
in another area. The men were told to squat, and 
had their hands bound with plastic cuffs, which 
Neish says were pulled so tight that his wrists 
were cut and his hands swelled up and turned 
purple (he is still suffering nerve damage from 
the experience, which his doctor in Canada says 
he hopes will gradually repair on its own).

“They told us to be quiet,” he says. “But at one 
point this Turkish imam stood up and started 
singing a call to prayer. Everybody was dead 
quiet--even the Israelis. But after about ten 
seconds, this Israeli officer stomped over 
through the squatting people, pulled out his 
pistol and pointed at the guy’s head, yelling 
‘Shut up!’ in English. The imam looked at him 
directly and just kept singing! I thought, Jesus 
Christ, he’s gonna kill him! Then I thought, 
well, this is what I’m here for, I guess, so I 
stood up. The officer wheeled around and pointed 
his gun at my head. The imam finished his song 
and sat down, and then I sat down.”

While the commandeered vessels were sailed to the 
Israeli port of Ashdot, the captives were left 
without food or water. “All we were given were 
some chocolate bars that the Israelis pilfered 
from the ship’s stores,” says Neish. “You had to 
grovel to get to go to the bathroom, and many 
people had to just go in their pants.”

Things didn’t get much better once the passengers 
were transferred to an Israeli prison. He and the 
other prisoners with him, who hadn’t eaten for 
more than half a day, were tossed a frozen block of bread and some cucumbers.

On the second day, someone from the Canadian 
embassy came around, calling out his name. “It 
turned out he’d been going to every cell looking 
for me,” says Neish. “My daughter had been 
frantically telling the Canadian government I was 
in the flotilla. Even though the Israelis had my 
name and knew where I was, they weren’t telling 
the Canadian embassy people. In fact the 
Canadians--and my daughter--thought I was dead, 
because people had said I’d been near the initial 
assault. The good thing is that as they went 
around calling out for me, they discovered two 
Arab-born Canadians that they hadn’t known were there.”

“Eventually they got to my cell and I answered 
them. The embassy official said, ‘You’re Kevin? You’re supposed to be dead.’”

After being held for a few days, there was a rush 
to move everyone to the Ben Gurion airport for a 
flight to Turkey. “It turned out that Israeli 
lawyers had brought our case to the Supreme 
Court, challenging the legality of our capture on 
international waters. There was a chance that the 
court would order the IDF to put us back on our 
ships and let us go, so the government wanted to 
get us out of Israel and moot the case. But two 
guys were hauled off, probably by Mossad (the 
Israeli intelligence agency). So we all said, 
‘No. We don’t go unless you bring them back.’”

The two men were returned and were allowed to leave with the rest of the group.

“I honestly never thought the Israelis would 
board the ship,” says Neish. “I thought we’d get 
into Gaza. I mean, I went as part of the Free 
Gaza Movement, and they had made prior attempts, 
with some getting in, and some getting boarded or 
rammed, but this time it was a big flotilla. I 
figured we’d be stopped, and maybe searched. My 
boat, the Challenger II, only had dignitaries on 
board including three German MPs, and then Lt. Col. Ann Wright and myself.

At one point in the Israeli prison, all the 
violence finally got to this man who had 
witnessed more death and mayhem than many active 
duty US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. “I broke 
down and started crying,” he admits. “This big 
Turkish guy came over and asked me, ‘What’s 
wrong?’ I said, ‘Sixteen people died.’”

“He said to me, ‘No, they died for a wonderful 
cause. They’re happy. You just go out and tell your story.’”

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of the new 
independent collectively-owned, journalist-run 
online newspaper <http://www.ThisCantBeHappening.net>ThisCantBeHappening.net




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