Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid Flotilla: Is there an excuse?

Middle East — By Guest Author on June 9, 2010 at 10:32

By Mohammed Abed

The Israeli Navy intercepted in the early morning of May 31^st a flotilla of six ships loaded with medicines, building materials, and other forms of humanitarian aid bound for the besieged Gaza Strip.  Israeli naval commandos raided the flotilla while it was roughly 70 miles off shore, more than 50 miles outside of Israel’s territorial waters. The largest ship in the convoy was carrying 600-700 activists, most of them Turkish citizens, although many other nationalities were represented. The commandos fired live rounds at some of the civilians on board the flotilla. The conservative estimate is that 9 civilians were killed and 30-40 injured. According to some news reports, 19 civilians were killed and upward of 60 injured.

In the face of serious international condemnation, including a statement from the Turkish Prime Minister that Israel’s actions amounted to “state terrorism,” the Israeli government and its supporters around the world have offered a number of excuses for the raid.

The Claim of Self-Defense

The first is that the civilians on the Gaza flotilla were killed in self-defense. The Israeli government is claiming that its commandos were attacked with knives, metal pipes, and handguns. Under such conditions, there was no option but to fire on the attackers. Avigdor Lieberman – Israel’s Foreign Minister – has accused the activists on board the humanitarian convoy of being terrorist sympathizers who opened fire on the commandos as soon as they boarded the ships.

The official Israeli narrative about the attacks is questionable for a number of reasons. According to Turkish customs officials, all of the ships and civilians on board went through a security screening before the flotilla set sail from Turkey. Some of the activists have denounced as propaganda the assertion that they were carrying firearms, and the absence of Israeli casualties and gunshot wounds would be difficult to explain if they were.

Haneen Zoubi, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament has reported that Israeli naval vessels surrounded the Gaza convoy’s flagship, the Mavi Marmara, and opened fire on it without provocation, even before the Marmara was boarded. Other eyewitness reports suggest that the commandos started shooting as soon as they hit the deck. Haneen Zoubi has also contradicted the Israeli government’s claim that the commandos shot only at the activists’ legs. She personally saw two bodies with gun shot wounds in the head. Members of the Free Gaza Movement, the international coalition of solidarity activists who organized the convoy, publicly endorse principles of non-violence and non-violent resistance “in word and deed at all times.” The materials successfully delivered by the movement in the past have been strictly humanitarian. Israel has now impounded all of the materials carried by the latest convoy and no weapons caches have been found, confirming the humanitarian nature of the Gaza activist’s recent mission.

All the same, let us simply assume a few civilians on board the flotilla were lightly armed with pipes, knives, and one or two pistols. Let us also assume they used those weapons against the Israeli commandos.

What follows from this? Is it plausible to conclude that in killing the civilians, Israel was acting in self-defense? The answer is ‘no,’ and the reasons for this conclusion are as follows: first, because the flotilla was in international waters and did not present a credible threat to Israel’s security, the Israelis had no right to attack it. Doing so was a naked act of aggression. If this is the case (and it is), and considering the fact that the Israeli commandos were heavily armed and presented a serious threat to life and limb, only the activists on board the flotilla can legitimately claim self-defense as their cause and as a means of explaining their actions. Although the Israeli soldier who is fired on can safeguard his personal security by firing back, he is still the aggressor and should be treated as such. Israel’s actions are, in one sense, akin to those of the criminal who hijacks at gunpoint a vehicle on public roads. If the opportunity arose, the owner of the vehicle would be absolutely justified in defending both herself and her property against such an attack, and there is no sense in which the assailant would be any less of an aggressor because of the threat posed by the victim’s defensive action.

The pattern of death and injury on the convoy – and numerous eyewitness reports – suggest at the very least that the commandos did not open fire only when their lives were directly threatened. The claim that the commandos opened fire on civilians indiscriminately is more difficult to defend but is by no means obviously false. Because the flotilla was clearly not a military target, Israel cannot – as it has so often done in the past – excuse as ‘collateral damage’ the killing of significant numbers of innocent civilians. It also makes no sense to say that Israel’s use of force was ‘disproportionate.’ A flotilla of civilian vessels carrying cement, water purifiers, and medicine is not a collection of warships. Clubs, knives and pistols are not sophisticated rockets that can hit Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem.

European legislators and an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset are not heavily armed terrorists. In other words, an analysis in terms of proportionality makes no sense in this context because of the civilian nature of the target. An attack can only be assessed as to its degree of proportionality by determining what is proportionate to the military advantage gained by the attack. An armed assault on a civilian target such as the Gaza convoy gives rise to no proportionality analysis at all since it is straightforwardly prohibited under international law. Unless one can successfully defend the idea that Israel can extend at will its sovereignty over international waters – a claim that cannot credibly be asserted – then one will accept that it had no right to board the Gaza flotilla. And unless one can show that civilians armed mainly with kitchen utensils and common tools pose a mortal threat to heavily armed and professionally trained commandos, then one will question the claim that the commandos killed those civilians in self-defense.

Some commentators have criticized Israel’s actions by suggesting that they amounted to piracy on the high seas. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald argues that “what’s so odd” about the idea that Israel has the right to forcibly intercept ships sailing in international waters “is that the U.S. has been spending a fair amount of time recently condemning exactly such acts as ‘piracy’ and demanding ‘that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes.’” This is an interesting and compelling assertion, but it entirely understates the seriousness of Israel’s actions.

Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla was not a hastily improvised private criminal operation but a carefully planned and coordinated act of state approved through official channels by the political leadership, specifically defense minister Ehud Barak and the security cabinet. An attack of this nature, against civilian ships flying white flags, amounts to military aggression – a casus belli – whereas piracy is not a state-sponsored act under international law and does not capture, for other reasons, the seriousness of what the Israelis did.

A number of Israeli politicians and military leaders have joined Avigdor Lieberman in suggesting that unspecified individuals aboard the Gaza convoy have vague and amorphous links to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Palestinian organizations such as Hamas.

The charge of being a ‘terrorist sympathizer’ or having unnamed connections to terrorist groups has long been a key feature of Israel’s public relations strategy. Israel achieves a number of things by freely making such accusations. First, the accused individuals or groups are immediately discredited and placed outside the bounds of reasonable discourse and ‘civilized’ behavior. Terrorist sympathizers are not perceived as individuals who have legitimate grievances that ought to be seriously considered.

Second, the claim that a person is somehow ‘implicated’ in terror deflects critical attention away from Israel’s own policies and actions. This is convenient because those policies and actions are so often oppressive and injurious, especially to Palestinians living under Israeli military control in the occupied territories. In the United States, for example, the mainstream media has focused more on Israel’s allegations about civilians on board the flotilla than on its deplorable actions.

Third, accusations such as those made by Lieberman exploit the legitimate fears of ordinary people, especially in the Western world, about the threat of terrorism. This suppresses debate about organized state violence directed at innocent civilians and lays the foundation for the use of such violence against similar targets in the future. Finally, the allegation that individuals on board the Gaza flotilla have connections to Al-Qaeda tars the Palestinian cause with a brush of fringe fanaticism that is unrelated to any legitimate grievance. When it is successful, the tarring makes it difficult to see that what ordinary Palestinians seek – and what Israel has systematically denied them – is freedom, both individual and collective. Unless the Israeli government can produce convincing, concrete, and independently verifiable evidence that individuals on the Gaza convoy have committed or are presently conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against Israeli citizens, then its claims should be dismissed as mere propaganda. Even if it had available such evidence, Israel would have been required to arrest and put on trial the suspects rather than simply killing them extra-judicially.

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