Pirates of the Mediterranean

By Jeremy Salt

The Turkish aid vessel Mavi Marmara (Blue Marmara) was in international waters when it was attacked by Israeli ships and helicopter-borne soldiers on Monday morning. According to the Israeli government spokesmen, it was the Israeli soldiers who were themselves attacked, with knives, axes and guns, but it was 16 people on board who were killed, according to the estimates of the dead and wounded being made by midday. In fact, as film taken from the Mavi Marmara showed, it was the Israelis who attacked, swarming on the deck and wounding the captain as they took the ship over. The passengers were not armed. They were all checked before they boarded the ship in Istanbul and Antalya and none were carrying weapons. According to a Turkish customs official in Antalya: 'Forty-two passengers boarded in Istanbul and 504 passengers got on the ship here. We spotted no weapons and there is no such record in our logs. We did not notice anything suspicious about the Mavi Marmara. Had our officers had any suspicions they would have reported it'.

In short, when the Israeli Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, said that arms were found on the ship he was lying. Even more hysterically, reaching even deeper into the barrel of falsehood, he accused the passengers of having links to Al Qaida and other 'terrorist' organisations. But there were no 'terrorists' on the Mavi Marmara, there was no live fire from the ship and there was no 'lynch mob' waiting for the soldiers, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It was the Israelis who attacked. Heavily armed 'soldiers’ swarmed on to the deck of the Mavi Marmara from naval vessels or were lowered on to it by helicopter. They began shooting straight away, terrorising the passengers as intended. If some of the attackers (three or four) were hurt it was because some passengers dared to defend themselves against armed assault. One soldier is reported to have been wounded by a passenger who grabbed his gun and turned it on his assailant but no passengers were carrying arms when they boarded the Mavi Marmara. The hundreds of people on board the ship are now on Israeli soil, having been kidnapped on the high seas. No doubt Israel will confiscate mobile phones and cameras, but it cannot hold these people for long and when they are free to tell their stories we will have a clearer idea of what happened on the Mavi Marmara.

Many of the dead were Turkish peace activists and in the coming days Turkey's reaction to this attack on a ship flying the Turkish flag will be critical. Certainly nothing much can be expected from the US and European governments in defence of their citizens. In Ankara, however, the government issued a statement saying that the attack on a ship flying the Turkish flag may well have caused 'irreversible damage' to relations between the two countries. The relationship between the two countries has been deteriorating for years, reaching a low point several months ago when the last ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry simply to be humiliated. For Turkey this might be the final straw. Why would it want to have any kind of relationship with a state that kills Turkish citizens? Thousands of Turks demonstrated in Istanbul's Taksim Square on Monday afternoon. Basically Turks have had enough of Israel. They were shocked by Israel's onslaught on Gaza in 2008 and stung by the humiliation of their ambassador and they will want very strong action from their government following this latest outrage.

To those who do not follow Middle Eastern history and politics Israel suddenly seems out of control. But it has been out of control for the six decades. It has never been in control. It has been allowed to run wild year after year. It is the embodiment of a rogue state. There is no country surrounding Israel that has not suffered a high civilian death at the hands of the Israeli 'defence' forces. Tens of thousands have died in Lebanon. Multiple thousands have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank. The killing of Arab civilians has been so normalised in Israel that individual deaths are scarcely mentioned. Israel will kill foreigners who get in its way but this slaughter of foreigners on the high seas is a new benchmark. This is a state that offers no hope for its own future and at this stage seems beyond redemption.

- Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.

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"Slaughterhouse province"

by Jeremy Salt

In the past four days (February 27 – March 1),
Israeli soldiers havekilled about 88 Palestinians*
in the Gaza Strip, many of them civilians, many
of them children, including five boys playing football,
a six month oldbaby and two sisters. In this time,
one Israeli has been killed by aQassam rocket falling near the
town of Sderot. His was the first death by
missile strike since last May, when hundreds of Gazan
Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks. On the basis
of the missile reprisals fromGaza, Israel is now preparing to
teach the Gazans a lesson they will never forget at the hands
of the most powerful army in the Middle East. A
large armored force has been positioned just north
of the Gaza Strip, ready for a full invasion and what a senior
Israeli minister has described as a coming ‘shoah’ (holocaust)
for the Palestinians. Three US warships have been positioned
off the Lebanese coast for reasons of ‘regional stability’
according to US government spokesmen. In fact, there is
little doubt that they are there to bombard Hizbullah should
it open a second front in the north when Israel attacks Gaza.

The people of Gaza are practically defenseless in the face
of Israel’s attacks. The Israelis have everything a modern army
could need, down to satellites and nuclear weapons. For years
they have been picking off the Gazans with very little danger
to themselves. They kill them with tank fire, missiles fired from
helicopters or unmanned drones and bullets fired
by long range snipers. They watch every movement of the
Palestinians from their satellites. They orchestrate their killings
by computer. The Gazans have light weapons, home made
Qassam missiles and, if press reports are to be believed, a small
supply of old Soviet-made Grad missiles smuggled in
from Iran. Even if it was in Gaza that Samson brought the
temple down on his own head as well as the heads of his
enemies, the contest could hardly be more unequal.

The stage is now set for the repression of a Warsaw
Ghetto last stand by the Hamas government, whose obliteration Israel,
the US, the EU and the ‘Quartet’ have actively pursued since its
democratic election in 2006. Condoleezza Rice and Hollywood
actors alike are standing by the people of Sderot but not the people
of Gaza. This is fairly typical of how America sees the Middle East
and of how grandstanding politicians and celebrities
will jump on to any bandwagon that promises to enhance their own image.
They do not see or care that the root cause of the problems being
experienced by the people of Sderot is not the Qassam missiles
being fired in their direction and not even the occupation of the
past forty years but Israel’s theft sixty years ago of a land belonging
legally and morally to someone else. The Palestinians were ethnically
cleansed from their homes in 1948 in one of the great crimes of the
20th century. Many ended up in Gaza. The dispossession was
deliberate and accords with the definition laid
down in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. Close to 500
villages were destroyed, with what was left of homes that were
not destroyed being pillaged down to the carpets and window
frames. Millions of acres of land which Palestinians had worked for
generations were seized. This is the ‘right’ that Palestinians are expected
to acknowledge.

There is no moral reason why the Palestinians should accept
what has been imposed on them. Israel was not created by the
UN General Assembly but by an American president courting
votes ahead of an election campaign. Through
a campaign of intimidation, Truman and his advisers compelled
vulnerable UN delegations to vote for a plan they would not
otherwise have supported. Britain and the United States share
responsibility along with successive Israeli governments for the
crimes that have been committed against the Palestinians ever
since Britain signed away the ‘right’ to Palestine through
the Balfour Declaration of 1917. They violate every single
human rights convention known to mankind, including the UN
Charter. Except for the six per cent bought by the zionists
every inch of Palestine remains the legal
property of the Palestinians. The passage of time does not
change this. Palestinians are the legal owners of the bulk of
land and property in west and east Jerusalem. The laws passed by
a state relating to a city that is still defined as occupied
under international law have no legal standing except as ‘laws’ that
breach international conventions. The Palestinians are
under no obligation to accept the theft of their property any
more than someone whose house is burgled. Morally Jerusalem
is theirs as well, the collective inheritance of those Muslim and
Christian Palestinians who built it stone by stone over more than
a thousand years. This is not to say that there is no room for
compromise. On numerous occasions the Arab
states have offered more than generous terms for a settlement.
So have the Palestinians. Hamas has indicated that it is ready
to sign a long term truce with Israel as long as it stops attacking
Gaza. All these offers have been rejected or ignored by successive
Israeli governments. Camp David was just one more attempt to
impose a setlement on the Palestinians and the Annapolis conference
of last November was worse than a waste of time. All
it did was enable the US to maintain the pretence that the
‘peace process’ was moving forward.

Israel’s refusal to comply with international law and its black record of
ethnic cleansing, massacres, wars and murder and its refusal to
countenance any settlement that gets in the way of zionist ideology and
Israel’s long term colonisation plans brings the region back to the
basics. There is now very little room for manoeuvre left. Israel’s
remains what it was at the beginning – a tribal, narcissistic state that has
been a ceaselessly moving engine of death, destruction and theft for six
decades. Backed by western support and understanding of its every need,
matched only by corresponding western indifference to the suffering and
torment of the Palestinians, for which the so-called west is collectively
and ultimately responsible, Israel has set up a catastrophic situation in
the Middle East for which the ‘international community’ will have to take
full responsibility. The slaughter of the Gazans by this thieving bully
state, in the full view of an uncaring west, may well be the turning
point from which there can be no return, a point which future historians may
recognise as the beginning of the end of the Middle East as it was created
by the ‘west’.

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