Israel faced a wave of global condemnation over its military assault on a humanitarian aid convoy in international waters. Everyone from the UN Secretary-General to the Pope came down hard on the Israeli government. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was constrained to cancel his planned visit to Washington, D.C., since that trip would have forced him to face questions from American journalists on why the Israeli navy could not have simply blocked the aid convoy.
The convoy’s passengers included a wide range of European and American activists as well as Turks and others.
Early on Monday, some 300 Turkish protesters attempted to storm the Israeli consulate but were turned back by security forces. Through Monday, larger and larger crowds gathered to protest the attack on the flotilla. Some news sources were speaking of tens of thousands at rallies in Istanbul, with smaller numbers demonstrating before the Israeli embassy in the capital, Ankara, and in front of the US consulate in Adana.
It is being alleged by members of Free Gaza that the aid ships were boarded in international waters and that Israel contravened the UN international convention on freedom of navigation on the high seas. Although the Israeli press refers to the waters off Gaza as “Israeli territorial waters,” in fact Israel has no legal claim to the Gaza coast. It is the Occupying power in Gaza since 1967, but is in severe contravention of the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied populations.
There are two possible reasons for the violence. One is that the Israeli troops boarding the vessels met some sort of resistance and over-reacted. Aid volunteers are unlikely, however, to have posed much real challenge to trained special forces operatives.
The other possible reason is that the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu and his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman gave a green light to the commandos to respond with excessive force. That is, the deaths and woundings may have been a brutally frank warning to any future Gaza aid activists that they are taking their lives in their hands if they plan any more flotillas to help the Palestinians. The Israeli far right may have felt that there was otherwise a danger that in a few months there would be an even bigger flotilla and that eventually the blockade of Gaza would be broken.
Although we outsiders would welcome this development because we are concerned about the health and well-being of Palestinian children under blockade, the Israeli Right views all Gazans as terrorists and sees besieging them as the only way to safeguard Israelis from attack. The Israeli Right is being paranoid and inhumane in this belief. There is no reason to think that denying Palestinians enough food or medical supplies or concrete will actually deter the small number directly involved in violence.
It is worth noting on Memorial Day that the Israeli attack deeply complicates the task of the US military in the region. It is a propaganda boon for Sunni extremists and Shiite activists such as Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and for the Taliban in Afghanistan. It undermines the authority of the Egyptian and Jordanian governments, which have US-brokered peace treaties with Israel, treaties that are deeply unpopular with ordinary people in both countries. That some demonstrations are being held in front of US consulates and not just Israeli ones tells us who will get the blame for Netanyahu’s machismo.
The vessels were bringing over 600 protesters of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and its collective punishment of its people in contravention of international law, along with 10,000 tons of aid.
The deposed prime minister of the Palestine Authority, elected in 2006 but overthrown in the West Bank by a joint US/ Israeli/ PLO coup in 2007, is Ismail Haniyeh. He is now a leader of the Hamas Party that controls Gaza. He gave a speech carried by Aljazeera in which he ridiculed the idea of good faith peace negotiations with Israel under the shadow of what he called such ongoing atrocities and condemned Palestine Authority Mahmoud Abbas for agreeing to participate in proximity talks with Israel. He also called on the UN Security Council to meet on the crisis.
An organization of Palestinian-Israelis within Israel called for a general strike, according to Aljazeera Arabic.
I received the following account of the beginnings of the confrontation by email:
‘ (Cyprus, May 31, 2010) At 11:00 pm [on Sunday] Cyprus time and in international waters off the coast of Israel, the boats were contacted by the Israeli navy. “Who are you and where are you going?” Our reply was that we were part of a flotilla and we were going to Gaza to deliver humanitarian supplies.
On the radar, the boats could see three Israeli war ships shadowing us, and 15 minutes later, a silent aircraft hovered over the flotilla. One of our Hebrew speakers had found Israel’s strategy and posted it to us. It stated, “You will be boarded by highly trained, very efficient and very SILENT commandos. They will use silent inflatable boats to get to our boats and both try to board our boats directly from the inflatables and by dropping divers into the water to climb onto the boats,” so people were preparing for them to come up and over the sides of the ships.
Our SPOT locator has sent out several HELP messages at www.witnessgaza.com.
Lubna Marsawa, Free Gaza’s organizer on the Turkish passenger boat said in outrage, “Very few times in history has a flotilla delivering humanitarian goods been welcomed by military war ships.”
This is a call to the world from the people on the boats. “We are a civilian people doing what our governments have refused to do, challenge Israel’s right to collectively punish 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza by blockading their right to their own sea. This flotilla is bringing construction and educational supplies the people of Gaza and are being met by Israeli warships.”
Contact: Huwaida Arraf on board the Challenger 0088 216 5207 2093 Ewa Jasciewica on board the Challenger 0088 163 184 7926 Greta Berlin 00 357 99 18 72 75 Mary Hughes 00 357 96 38 38 09 ‘
The LAT quotes him as saying, chillingly, at a news conference Saturday in Robert, LA, “After three full days, we have been unable to overcome the flow from the well, so we now believe it is time to move on to another option . . . This scares everybody — the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing or the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far.”
To put this rate in perspective, it should be noted that oil companies routinely invest substantial resources to get fields going in places such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Iraqi Kurdistan that pump 7,000 to 15,000 barrels of petroleum a day.
Every 1000 Americans consume roughly 68 barrels a day of petroleum. This statistic means that what is gushing up from the BP well equals the daily amount of oil used by 367,000 Americans per day, that is, by cities the size of St. Louis or Minneapolis. Imagine all the cars and trucks filling up in such major cities every day, and the buildings using heating oil, and imagine taking all that oil and gasoline and dumping it in the Gulf of Mexico. Every day.
Although spectacular oil spills of this magnitude are relatively rare, pumping petroleum out of the ground or sea and transporting it routinely results in spills that damage the marine environment. Americans could learn a lot from the problems that beset the Persian-Arabian Gulf, where nearly two-thirds of the world’s known petroleum reserves are found. In fact, BP or British Petroleum got its start as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company when William Knox D’Arcy discovered petroleum in the deserts of Iran in 1908. BP has its origins as a colonial institution, and has had a powerful impact on both Iran and the US. The other Gulf has suffered spills and contamination through the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the Great Oil Spill that attended it, and many lesser catastophes ever since. Mysterious multiple deaths of marine wildlife are baffling Iranian scientists and alarming Iran’s few environmentalists. Since President Obama said initially that he wanted to reach out to Iran, maybe cooperation on this issue would be a place to start.
I was amused at the Radio Free Europe’s comments about about the politics of petroleum pollution in Iran: “The reaction of Iranian officials is notable, and arguably fits into a pattern among states with poor records of accountability. Reports on Persian Gulf pollution and threats to other natural areas suggest that local efforts provide the most effective response and that the environment is not a priority for the state generally. Environmental issues very rarely feature in the speeches of senior officials. Reports frequently suggest that low-level officials block potentially destructive projects or react to degradation at an initial and local stage, but do not always receive systematic backing from officials in Tehran. In Iran, when economic interests clash with the environment, money is given priority.”
Couldn’t we just replace “Iran” with “the United States” and “Tehran” with “Washington” in the above paragraph?
What will happen to this petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico? About 40% of it will evaporate. If a lot of it washes ashore, the ‘evaporation’ will mean fumes harmful to wildlife and humans (people are already being sickened from exposure along the Louisiana coast).
Then, most of the rest will eventually be eaten by bacteria and released as carbon dioxide. The bacteria find it difficult to munch down when the oil is clumped together, and the point of the dispersant chemicals being applied to the massive oil slicks is to scatter the petroleum into smaller concentrations so the bacteria can get at it.
Even with regard to the dispersed petroleum, the bacteria can use up a lot of the sea’s oxygen in the process of breaking it down. And, molecules will bind to oxygen, oxidizing. The petroleum has the potential of adding another set of ‘dead zones’ to the one that already stretched into the Gulf from the mouth of the Mississippi, created by fertilizer (nitrogen and phosphates), which cause phytoplankton to increase like crazy, producing a “bloom” of algae that can deplete oxygen in the water. Likewise, when anaerobic bacteria eat the algae and multiply, that process further decreases the amount of oxygen in the water.
The much smaller Exxon-Valdez spill killed billions of salmon and herring eggs and as many as 250,000 seabirds. Only ten percent of the oil was recovered, with most of the rest infesting the underwater sand, being degraded by only 4% a year.
You can get a sense of the size of the primary oil slick versus your city here
All that is not to mention the oil contamination of the delicate marshes along the coast. Something like three-quarters of the shrimp and two-thirds of the oysters produced in the US come from these ecosystems along the Gulf coast, and they are likely to be destroyed for the medium term. Apparently you had a choice between offshore drilling and shrimp cocktails, and you chose offshore drilling.
For the fisherman living along the Gulf, this disaster pulverizes their livelihoods at a time when the Wall Street banks have already robbed us blind with their frauds and ponzi schemes, destroying millions of jobs.
And, this calamity is only the beginning. What stretches before us, as Michael Klare argues, is an age of extreme oil, with riskier and riskier projects that radically threaten the environment. Not to mention that all burning of petroleum of fuel is degrading the environment through global warming and climate change.
In the medium to long term, the fix for this mess is a transition to hybrid and electric vehicles, and to electricity generated by wind and solar. This transition would come more quickly (and it is very urgent) if the federal and state governments would stop subsidizing petroleum on a massive scale, making the public pay for the environmental costs of producing it while giving the petroleum companies substantial tax breaks. Not to mention that the federal superhighway program functions as a huge taxpayer subsidy to automobile and truck traffic, when it would be far less expensive and more ecologically sound to favor trains instead. I.e., we wuz robbed, and continue to be robbed, in order to subsidize corporations that are poisoning us.
Legislation and tax incentives are key to green energy as a start-up industry facing hydrocarbon semi-monopolies that are already massively subsidized by the government and by existing energy and transportation infrastructure. We saw this phenomenon in Germany, which got ahead in the solar game in large part because the Green Party was in coalition with the SPD in the 1990s and shaped some crucial legislation favoring solar and wind.
And, exciting developments are taking place in Denmark and Germany with regard to offshore wind turbine power generation.
If there is a silver lining in the scary and depressing Great BP Gulf Catastrophe of 2010, it is that it may finally get state and federal legislators off their duffs and legislating sane energy policy for the health of the earth.
And here is the transcript of Kirchner’s account of the conversation at a summit in Monterrey, Mexico, in January, 2004:
‘ Kirchner: I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he grew angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war. And that the United States has grown stronger with war.
Stone: War, he said that?
Kirchner: He said that. Those were his exact words.
Stone: Is he suggesting that South America go to war?
Kirchner: Well, he was talking about the United States: ‘The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.’ He said it very clearly. ‘
You wonder who else among the Republican elite fell for Bush’s typical piece of stupidity re: war= growth. It all depends on lots of other factors. If you borrow the money to fight the war and pay interest on it and you get no booty to speak of, then the war could ruin you, as happened to many European regimes in the early modern and modern period.
But even more outrageous is the Aztec-like willigness to rip the beating heart out of a sacrificial victim for the sake of an chimerical prosperity! Here is what was happening in Iraq around the time that Bush was boasting to Kirchner, according to Informed Comment:
‘ Posted on January 18, 2004 by Juan
23 Killed (2 Americans), 130 Injured (including 6 Americans) in Baghdad Car Bombing
AFP has raised the casualty count to as many as 23-25 killed and 130 wounded in the Baghdad car bombing of the US headquarters there.
‘ “The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into a battlefield inferno but the headquarters buildings inside the heavily-fortified area known as the Green Zone were unaffected. The blast came the day before Iraqi and US officials, including US civilian administrator Paul Bremer, are to meet with a wary UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a future UN role in Iraq. “At least 20 people have lost their lives and almost 60 were injured,” US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told reporters. “It would appear from all the indicators this was a suicide bomb. We have confirmation some of those killed were US citizens, US contractors. We believe the current number is two. We are waiting for final confirmation,” Kimmitt said. Another five people were reported dead and 71 wounded at Baghdad hospitals. Witnesses claimed US soldiers opened fire in panic on Iraqis moments after the blast, but a military spokesman denied this.“ ‘
Earlier AP had reported,
‘ Officials said more than 60 people, including six Americans, were injured in the blast on a mist-shrouded morning near the north entrance — known as the “Assassin’s Gate” — to Saddam’s former Republican Palace complex, now used by the U.S.-led occupation authority for headquarters. ‘
I’d say there is increasing evidence that the US is not in control in Iraq, and that the place may well be headed toward being a failed state for the near term. When, 9 or 10 months after an army conquers a place, its HQ is not safe from attack, this is always a bad sign. For those who keep making Germany and Japan analogies, I ask you if MacArthur’s HQ was getting blown up in Tokyo in April of 1946.’
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