The reports that two of the foreign flagged ships planning to be part of the ten vessel Freedom Flotilla II experienced similar forms of disabling sabotage creates strong circumstantial evidence of Israeli responsibility. It stretches the imagination to suppose that a sophisticated cutting of the propeller shafts of both ships is a coincidence with no involvement by Israel’s Mossad, long infamous for its overseas criminal acts in support of contested Israeli national interests.
Recalling the lethal encounter in international waters with Freedom Flotilla I that took place on 31 May 2010, and the frantic diplomatic campaign by Tel Aviv to prevent this second challenge to the Gaza blockade by peace activists and humanitarian aid workers, such conduct by a state against this latest civil society initiative, if further validated by incriminating evidence, should be formally condemned as a form of ‘state terrorism’ or even as an act of war by a state against global civil society.
The Israeli Government has so far done little to deny its culpability. Its highest officials speak of the allegations in self-righteous language that is typically diversionary, asserting an irrelevant right of self-defense, which supposedly comes mysteriously into play whenever civil society acts nonviolently to break the siege of Gaza that has persisted for more than four years.
From the perspective of the obligations to uphold international law it is the Flotilla participants who are acting legally and morally, certainly well within their rights, and it is Israel and their friends that are resorting to a variety of legally and morally dubious tactics to insulate this cruel and unlawful blockade from what is essentially a symbolic challenge.
The behavior of the Greek Government, surely a reflection of its precarious financial and political situation, also violates the law of the sea: foreign flagged vessels can be detained in port only if they are acting in violation of national law or are proven to be unseaworthy and dangerous to international navigation. Otherwise, interference by detention or by seizing while en route within Greek territorial waters is an unlawful interference with the right of innocent passage. Greece would be very vulnerable to defeat and damages if the Freedom Flotilla victims of these encroachment on rights were to have recourse to the Hamburg International Tribunal for Law of the Sea.
The most relevant precedent for such government-sponsored sabotage is the Rainbow Warrior incident of 1985. There French agents detonated explosives on a Greenpeace (an environmental NGO) fishing trawler docked in the Auckland, New Zealand harbor prior to proactively challenging the French plans to conduct underwater nuclear tests off the shore of the nearby Pacific atoll, Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, Greenpeace photographer for the mission, was killed by the explosions, although the devices were detonated at night when no one from Greenpeace was expected to be on board the vessel. At first, the French government completely denied involvement, later as incriminating evidence mounted, Paris officially claimed that its agents who were identified as being near the scene were only spying on Greenpeace activities and had nothing to do with the explosives, and later still, as the evidence of French culpability became undeniable, officials in France finally admitted government responsibility for this violent undertaking to eliminate activist opposition to their nuclear test, even acknowledging that the operation had been given the bizarre, although self-incriminating, code-name of Operation Satanique.
After some further months of controversy, the French Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius cleared the air by issuing a contrite statement: “The truth is cruel. Agents of the French secret service sank the boat. They were acting on orders.” (The decision to destroy the Rainbow Warrior was later confirmed to have come from France’s supreme leader at the time, the president of the Republic, Francois Mitterand.) The French agents who had by then been arrested by the New Zealand police, charged with arson, willful damage, and murder, but due to pressure from the French government that included a threatened European economic embargo on New Zealand exports, the charges were reduced. The French defendants were allowed to enter a guilty plea to lesser charges of manslaughter that was accepted by the Auckland court, resulting in a ten-year prison sentence, and later supplemented by an inter-governmental deal that virtually eliminated the punishment. The French paid New Zealand $6.5 million and issued an apology, while the convicted agents were transferred to a French military base on Hao atoll, and were later wrongly released only two years after being genteelly confined in comfortable quarters provided by the base.
It is useful to compare the Flotilla II unfolding experience with the Rainbow Warrior incident. At the time, the French nuclear tests in the Pacific were considered legal, although intensely contested, while the blockade of Israel is widely viewed as a prolonged instance of collective punishment in violation of international humanitarian law, specifically Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention. Although Israel could argue that it had a right to monitor ships suspected of carrying arms to occupied Gaza, the Freedom Flotilla II ships made themselves available for inspection, and there was no sufficient security justification for the blockade as the investigation by the UN Human Rights Council of the 2010 flotilla incident made clear. The overriding role of the blockade is to inflict punitive damage on the people of Gaza. Even before the blockade was imposed in 2007 all shipments at the Gaza crossing points were painstakingly monitored by Israel for smuggled weapons.
A person was unintentionally killed by the French acts of sabotage, and so far no one has died as a result of these efforts to disable and interfere with Flotilla ships, although the Irish vessel, MV Saoirse (‘freedom’ in Gaelic), was disabled in such a way that if the damage had not been discovered before heading to sea, the ship reportedly would have likely sunk with many passengers put at extreme risk of death. Perhaps the most important distinction of all is the failure to claim any right to act violently against peaceful protesters, even though the French state was officially engaged in an activity directly associated with its national security (weapons development). In contrast, the Israelis are seeking to avoid having their universally unpopular and criminal Gaza policies further delegitimized, and claim the entitlement as a sovereign state to engage in violent action, even if it endangers nonviolent civilians. In effect, it is a declaration of war by Israel against global civil society as over 50 nationalities are represented among the passengers on the Flotilla ships.
Any reasonably informed person knows that the Israeli alleged concern about weapons smuggling to Gaza is a smokescreen without substance. The flotilla organizers have credibly pledged nonviolence, have offered to allow inspectors to examine the cargo, and have invited respected journalists to be on board the vessels. There is zero prospect of weapons being allowed on board any of these ships (even without any inspection), and the Israelis undoubtedly realize this, as does Washington. To insist that this demonstrably peaceful activism mainly by dedicated adherents of nonviolent militancy poses a threat to Israeli security while hardly ever mentioning the hundreds of unmonitored tunnels that are in daily use along the Gaza border with Egypt makes a mockery of the Israeli argument.
Long before the flotilla actually set sail, with typical propagandistic fervor and diplomatic finesse, supported every inch of the way by its many powerful friends in Washington, Israel zealously engaged in a concerted hasbara campaign to discredit the shipment of humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza. By verbal acrobatics reminding us that Orwell’s warnings about the extreme debasement of political language (1984) remains all too relevant as ever, Israel has been trying to portray committed peace activists and cultural icons (e.g. Alice Walker) as harboring ‘terrorists’ and arms dealers, if not being themselves willing accomplices. As might be expected, much of the media, especially in the United States, has taken at face value such scandalous accusations, or at the very least has put them forward as credibly accounting for the bitter complaint by Israel that Flotilla II is being used as a humanitarian front behind which arms are being smuggled into Israel.
It does not matter how learned a person is, some are totally focused on their own biases. This article is completely taken out of context. 1) Why did you not speak up when Egypt was part of the embargo? Who is talking about atrocities when Palestinians send their own children to blow themselves up. Even animals don’t do that. Using human shields, targeting civilians including their own. How do you justify this? Your ‘facts’ are wrong or taken out of context. Your hatred is so transparent!
Raymond Bezoule writes: “Who is talking about atrocities when Palestinians send their own children to blow themselves up. Even animals don’t do that.”
I’ve never understood how bombing civilians becomes more abominable because the bomber blows up himself along with his victims. Personally, I think murdering people is just as disgusting when done by the pilot of a F-16 or an Apache helicopter.
All sensible people agree that suicide bombings are atrocities. There’s plenty of condemnation going around when that sort of thing happens, and so there should be. It’s just that Israel is guilty of even more atrocities: the civilian body count on the Palestinian side is far, far greater.
And no, animals don’t make suicide bombers of their offspring. Even though I don’t know the first thing about zoology, I guess you’re right about that. I assume that the relevance of that observation, in your mind, is that it makes Palestinians less than animals?
And then, having made this claim, YOU actually go on to accuse Mr. Falk of being hateful?
Let us see whose prejudice is transparent. Kindly quote even a single statement of fact from the article that you think is “wrong”. Thanks.
It seems to me that arrogance is a hidden disease that is responsible for maiming and killing more people than any other disease, overtly in the tendency to destroy lives an property, displacing people etc, covertly in creating poverty, malnutrition etc.
It is a disease most prevalent in countries which have a habit of continually using force to bend others to their will. And like all diseases which remain untreated it eventually kills the carrier.
Mr. Falk speaks of ” an irrelevant right of self-defense, which supposedly comes mysteriously into play whenever civil society acts nonviolently to break the siege of Gaza that has persisted for more than four years.” Really? You find it “mysterious” why Israel would wish to prevent the unobstructed import of goods to a territory that routinely fires rockets accross the borderl?
Are you blind, stupid, or just morally and intellectually bankrupt, Mr. Falk?
Really, Armen? You think blocking humanitarian aid is a legitimate act of “self-defense”? You think the illegal act of collectively punishing the entire population of Gaza is right and appropriate? Are you blind, stupid, or just morally and intellectually bankrupt, Armen?
Practice of prejudice, hatred, deception, and invert the truth, has been propaganda apparatus to validate injustice in the region, holocaust a grave tragedy, and no one denies, but the plot to form Zionist regime is the question
For centauries through out the history the natives lived together dominated by majority rule in harmony, and they respected each others heritage, related to one another through intercourse, association, socializing and being part of it, as one family
Israelis not a Jewish state, and not because they are or not Jews but because they don’t belong to the environment and since the circumstances is not like the new world, they don’t understand the heritage, culture, and the history of the land
The Arabs are in Arabian Peninsula, the Arab speaking nations lost their native tongue after they became Muslims, many other Muslim nations kept their native tongue as Persians, Tajik, Turk, Urdu, The natives in Israel are not the settlers; the natives are Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who were Jews or Christians before becoming Muslims this artificial phenomenon has been created to divide and rule
The irrelevance of the “right of defense” is in its assertion where the issue of defense is not present.
Basically, Israel claims a right to anticipatory offensive strikes wherever it can conjure, fabricate, paranoiacally imagine, or otherwise “feel” a threat requiring defense.
Since Israel is constantly attacking her neighbors and selling weapons and murder-technology to other foreign nations, there are lots of reasons why Israel might “feel” a need to defend herself. When you export murder, you can anticipate that many will feel vengeful toward you.
When a person instigates murderous violence, he is not engaged in self-defense. He is engaged in murderous offense.
The hasbara-styled criticisms of “Armen” and “Raymond Bezoule” are instructive for their manipulation of reality in order to fabricate a “right” for Israel to murder others offensively, without provocation, and call it “self-defense.”
Why does Israel not practice a little humility and acknowledge that Gaza has the hall-marks of a WW2 prisoner-of-war camp even down to the tunnels created by the inmates. The shooting of those who come too near the perimeter fence and the stopping of humanitarian “parcels” being provided in any other way than through the prison guards is further proof that Gaza is nothing more than a prisoner-of-war camp. The only difference between Gaza and the normal prisoner-of-war camp is Israel would like to turn the prisoners into refugees.
It only the most arrogant who would attempt to deny that this is the case. And I never fail to be amazed at the arrogance of Israeli spokes-people.
Israel is mystified that Egyptian war games have Israel as the agressor.Now Israel has attacked Egypt several times,1956 and 1967. Further more Israel’s Passover ritual , has vilified Egyptians for thousands of years.Young Jewish children are indocrinated in the mythology and certainly believe it. Now what do these Egyptians now. Guess if it walks like a duck,….
That this publication and Jeremy Hammond give Richard Falk even a stench of credibility is a stunning achievement in ignorance. The man is the sorriest case for a human being despite his lofty credentials. Here’s an article by Gabriel Latner that appeared in various newspapers around the world that more honestly describes this pitifully harmful, yet useless, human being.
On June 29th, Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s expert on Israel, wrote an article for his blog. The essay itself is unimportant. The six pictures Falk included are what make the article stand out — two copies of the ICC’s logo, a photo of its headquarters, a picture of President Bush Photoshopped to put him behind bars, a photo of an ICC lawyer and a cartoon.
Falk must have thought the cartoon was highly amusing, because it bore little relation to his article. It depicts Lady Justice, with robes and scales, holding a dog by a leash. The dog is eating a dead body and urinating on Justice. On closer examination, the dog is wearing a coat that says “U.S.A.,” as well as a skullcap decorated with the Star of David, the emblem the Jewish people.
Surely, the UN-appointed investigator of human rights in Israel wouldn’t laugh at — let alone disseminate — a vile, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish cartoon. After all, he works for the UN. He’s supposed to be impartial.
What is even more disturbing was Falk’s reaction when confronted over the cartoon. On July 6, UN Watch, a human rights organization that monitors the UN’s Human Rights activities, submitted a complaint to Navi Pillay, the high commissioner for Human Rights and Falk’s boss. The same morning, Falk then wrote on his blog: “It is a complete lie. I know nothing about such a cartoon, and would never publish such a thing, ever.”
After a reader sent Falk a link showing the cartoon on his own website, Falk wrote: “Maybe I do not understand the cartoon, and if it offends in this way I have removed it from the blog. It may be in bad taste to an extent I had not earlier appreciated, but I certainly didn’t realize that it could be viewed as anti-semitic [sic], and still do not realize.”
What a heart-stirring apology. In under twenty minutes, Falk went from denying not only having posted the cartoon, but that he knew it existed, to denying that he thought it was offensive, to denying that it is offensive, while being polite enough to remove it so as not to offend a delicate reader.
Three hours later Falk wrote that “since it offends people I have removed it without understanding why.”
Maybe Falk had a momentary lapse of reason. Sometimes even simple cartoons can be difficult to understand, especially for someone who is a professor at Princeton with a doctorate from Harvard University who has written dozens of books and articles dealing with complex legal and political issues.
But then I remembered that this was Richard Falk, a UN expert charged with investigating serious allegations of human-rights abuses in the Middle East. How could someone who failed to find offense in such a slanderous cartoon be expected to deal with the subtleties of the conflicts in Israel? How could he possibly be able to perceive the implications of a Hamas TV show that features Mickey Mouse teaching children how to be suicide bombers? Or comprehend the not-so-subtle discrepancies between what Hamas leaders say in Arabic, and what they say they said in English?
Perhaps I’m giving Mr. Falk too much credit. After all, as a lawyer he argued that a terrorist who bombed a university and killed a man was morally justified because he was protesting the Vietnam War. As a pundit he gave Ayatollah Khomeini a glowing recommendation, predicting that he “might yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a Third World country.” And as a writer, Falk has lent support to 9/11 conspiracy theories, stating that the “American elites” have “something to hide and much to explain”.
On Israel, Falk’s bias is evident. He wrote an article comparing the country to Nazi Germany, entitled “Slouching towards a Palestinian Holocaust,’ and has repeatedly accused Israel of ethnic cleansing. Simultaneously, Falk says that he is “impressed” by Hamas’ efforts to negotiate with Israel, and that the terrorist organization should be treated as a political actor. He described Hamas’ as the “helpless protectors” of the Palestinians.
Maybe Falk was lying when he said he didn’t understand the cartoon. After all, he falsely denied knowing that it even existed. And we already know where his sympathies lie.
Falk’s behaviour presents his employers at the UN with a dilemma. If they believe his half-hearted apologies, they are forced to face the fact that an expert in their employ lacks the perceptiveness and basic intelligence required for the job, and he must be fired. On the other hand, if they see through his excuses, and decide that he knew exactly what he was doing, then they must deal with the fact that they have an employee who is too hateful, vicious and biased to perform impartially in his job, and he must be fired.
Believe him or not, Richard Falk should start looking for a new job.
National Post
Barry, if anyone is a sorry excuse for a human being, it is you:
You have had your last warning about your ad hominem arguments and personal attacks. The next time, you will be banned.
It’s very telling of some people’s pro-Israeli bias that, apparently, you are simply not allowed to say that Hamas ‘should be treated as a political actor’ (of course it should, if only for purely pragmatic reasons) or that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing (what else to call a policy which aims at displacing people of a particular ethnicity and removing them from ‘your’ country?). If such views simply cannot be expressed, because the person who expresses them is immediately branded as ‘hateful, vicious and biased’, how can a just peace ever be negotiated? But then again, maybe that’s the whole point…
A personal attack on Mr Falk is obviously designed to silence him and indeed this is clearly Barry’s intention when he says “That this publication and Jeremy Hammond give Richard Falk even a stench of credibility is a stunning achievement in ignorance.”
It seems the time has come to stand up to those who bully, intimidate, personally attack, or use any means at their disposal to terrorise those who stand for the truth.
The time is coming when all will come to a knowledge of the truth.
Barry, Richard Falk issued a full apology for the cartoon.
There are many people who respect Mr Falk as a man of intellect and compassion.
I am happy with his explanation for the cartoon. I respect him for offering a full apology. I will continue to read his words with interest.