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<h1><b>The Real Threat Aboard the Freedom Flotilla<br><br>
</b></h1><h2><b>Israel’s violent attack on the Freedom Flotilla carrying
humanitarian aid to Gaza shocked the world.</b></h2><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/noamchomsky">Noam
Chomsky</a><br><br>
<a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/6064/the_real_threat_aboard_the_freedom_flotilla/" eudora="autourl">
http://inthesetimes.com/article/6064/the_real_threat_aboard_the_freedom_flotilla/<br>
</a>Friday, June 11, 2010<br><br>
Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of
course, a serious crime.<br><br>
But the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking
boats between Cyprus and Lebanon and killing or kidnapping passengers,
sometimes holding them hostage in Israeli prisons.<br><br>
Israel assumes that it can commit such crimes with impunity because the
United States tolerates them and Europe generally follows the U.S.’s
lead.<br><br>
As the editors of <i>The Guardian</i> rightly observed on June 1, “If an
armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the
high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO
task force would today be heading for the Somali coast.” In this case,
the NATO treaty obligates its members to come to the aid of a fellow NATO
countryTurkeyattacked on the high seas.<br><br>
Israel’s pretext for the attack was that the Freedom Flotilla was
bringing materials that Hamas could use for bunkers to fire rockets into
Israel.<br><br>
The pretext isn’t credible. Israel can easily end the threat of rockets
by peaceful means.<br><br>
The background is important. Hamas was designated a major terrorist
threat when it won a free election in January 2006. The U.S. and Israel
sharply escalated their punishment of Palestinians, now for the crime of
voting the wrong way.<br><br>
The siege of Gaza, including a naval blockade, was a result. The siege
intensified sharply in June 2007 after a civil war left Hamas in control
of the territory.<br><br>
What is commonly described as a Hamas military coup was in fact incited
by the U.S. and Israel, in a crude attempt to overturn the elections that
had brought Hamas to power.<br><br>
That has been public knowledge at least since April 2008, when David Rose
reported in <i>Vanity Fair</i> that George W. Bush, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Elliott Abrams, “backed an armed
force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil
war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.”<br><br>
Hamas terror included launching rockets into nearby Israeli
townscriminal, without a doubt, though only a minute fraction of routine
U.S.-Israeli crimes in Gaza.<br><br>
In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The
Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the
agreement on Nov. 4 of that year, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen
Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket.<br><br>
Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the
offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous invasion of
Gaza on Dec.27.<br><br>
Like other states, Israel has the right of self-defense. But did Israel
have the right to use force in Gaza in the name of self-defense?
International law, including the U.N. Charter, is unambiguous: A nation
has such a right only if it has exhausted peaceful means. In this case
such means were not even tried, althoughor perhaps becausethere was
every reason to suppose that they would succeed.<br><br>
Thus the invasion was sheer criminal aggression, and the same is true of
Israel’s resorting to force against the flotilla.<br><br>
The siege is savage, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so
as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is
the latest stage of longstanding Israeli plans, backed by the U.S., to
separate Gaza from the West Bank.<br><br>
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass, a leading specialist on Gaza, outlines
the history of the process of separation: “The restrictions on
Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a
process that had been initiated in June 1967.<br><br>
“Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the
Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country
to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole.
…”<br><br>
Hass concludes: “The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West
Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose
overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international
decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on
Israel’s military superiority.”<br><br>
The Freedom Flotilla defied that policy and so it must be
crushed.<br><br>
A framework for settling the Arab-Israeli conflict has existed since
1976, when the regional Arab States introduced a Security Council
resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international
border, including all the security guarantees of U.N. Resolution 242,
adopted after the June War in 1967.<br><br>
The essential principles are supported by virtually the entire world,
including the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States (including
Iran) and relevant non-state actors, including Hamas.<br><br>
But the U.S. and Israel have led the rejection of such a settlement for
three decades, with one crucial and highly informative exception. In
President Bill Clinton’s last month in office, January 2001, he initiated
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Taba, Egypt, that almost reached an
agreement, participants announced, before Israel terminated the
negotiations.<br><br>
Today, the cruel legacy of a failed peace lives on.<br><br>
International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by
their own citizens. That is always a difficult task, particularly when
articulate opinion declares crime to be legitimate, either explicitly or
by tacit adoption of a criminal frameworkwhich is more insidious,
because it renders the crimes invisible.<br><br>
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