Another Thing Netanyahu Needs to Apologize For: The Gaza Blockade by Juan Cole

The one diplomatic success of President Obama’s mainly pro forma visit to Israel and Jordan was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s pro forma apology to Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan for killing 8 Turkish nationals and 1 American citizen of Turkish heritage aboard the Mavi Marmara aid ship trying to succor the Palestinians of Gaza in 2010.

The Guardian reports that

“The prime minister made it clear that the tragic results regarding the Mavi Marmara were unintentional, and that Israel expresses regret over injuries and loss of life. In light of the Israeli investigation into the incident, which pointed out several operational errors, Netanyahu apologised to the Turkish people for any errors that could have led to loss of life and agreed to complete the agreement on compensation.”

Erdogan appears to have grudgingly accepted the apology (Israel will pay roughly $6 million to the victims’ families), and the two leaders agreed that normal diplomatic relations would be restored, though Erdogan later said it would be a gradual process.

The Obama administration is touting the apology and the step toward return of correct Israeli-Turkish relations as a win. Turkey is a member of NATO and has been excluding Israel from some NATO meetings (Israel is not a NATO member but is often included in its counsels; Turkey as a member can block it).

What is astonishing in all this is that no one is talking about the reason for which the Mavi Marmara was heading to Gaza and for which the Israeli commandos boarded it and shot it up.

It is that Israel has imposed an illegal blockade on the civilian population of Gaza. The blockade forbids the export of most of what the Palestinians there produce, depriving them of export markets. There are only 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza, many of them thrown into desperate poverty by Israeli policy, so they aren’t much of an internal market. The Israelis have a cover story that they are strangling Gaza out of security concerns, but how could exporting goods from Gaza pose a threat to Israeli security? One Israeli official admitted the truth years ago; the Israelis have put the Palestinians ‘on a diet,’ and most creepily actually tried to figure what was the least amount of food they could let in without producing widespread starvation. This policy can only be called fascist and it recalls the worst kind of medical experiments on human beings and social engineering of the mass political movements of the 1930s.

Since Turkey (rightly and courageously) rejects the Israeli blockade on Gaza civilians, its actual diplomatic relations with Israel are likely to continue to be roiled. The Israelis maintain that blockades are a recognized tool of war in international law, but in fact Gaza is not an independent country with which Israel is at war! Gaza is Occupied by Israel, and the 1949 Geneva convention on the treatment of civilians in occupied territories strictly forbids such punitive measures. Gaza has no functioning seaport or airport because the Israelis disallow the former and bombed the latter into smithereens. More

 

In letter to activists, UK foreign office blames Palestinians in Gaza for bringing suffering on themselves

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has this week exposed once again its one-sided view of relations between Gaza and Israel.

In identical letters sent to Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and PSC members, the FCO reiterated its belief that Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 was a response to rocket attacks into Israel.

The letter came from Barry Griffiths of the Near East Department of the FCO, and was in response to emails sent in November asking for factual evidence for claims made by Foreign Secretary William Hague that “… it is Hamas that bears principal responsibility for starting all of this.”

Hague was speaking on 15 November, a day after the assault began, on Sky News’Murnaghan program, a weekly news show.

Specious arguments

After apologizing for the delay in replying to emails about Hague’s statement, Griffiths wrote: “I would like to reassure you that the UK in no way seeks to take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

His next paragraph then began: “We made clear that Hamas bore principal responsibility for the start of the current crisis, because the conflict would not have happened without the significant increase in rocket attacks in 2012, and particularly in the latter months, including Hamas ending its own ceasefire.”

As with all people, governments and institutions that side with Israel, Griffiths gave the specious “rockets” argument which is propagated by Israeli politicians and PR chiefs, while ignoring the root cause of the “conflict” – decades of occupation and more than six years of siege.

In truth, “the conflict would not have happened,” as Griffiths puts it, if Israel paid heed to international law, ended its occupation of Palestinian land, lifted the blockade of Gaza and allowed the Palestinian people their right to self-determination.

Without specifying what ceasefire Hamas had allegedly broken and when, Griffiths also chose to ignore the documented fact that Israel violated an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire on 14 November, when it carried out the extra-judicial assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari – the signal to its consequent onslaught on Gaza.

And, although he bemoaned a “significant increase in rocket attacks in 2012,” without providing any figures, Griffiths saw no reason to consider that the besieged people of Gaza might also be unhappy with living under near-constant Israeli bombing, shelling and artillery attack.

According to figures from the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 99 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by Israeli armed forces between 1 January and 14 November 2012. There were no Israeli fatalities caused by Palestinian rockets during this period. However, according to Griffiths’ fallacious argument, the deaths of nearly 100 Palestinians, including children, warranted no justified response from Gaza. Israel, on the other hand, was understandably provoked by the crude rockets being launched from the territory it lays siege to and could not, in any way, be blamed for the “current crisis.”

Tragic irony

Further highlighting the skewed FCO notion that only Palestinian violence is to be denounced, while Israeli state violence has its justifications and need only be toned down, Griffiths continued: “We have consistently condemned indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel which are contrary to international humanitarian law and do nothing to help the people of Gaza. At the same time, we called on Israel to seek every opportunity to de-escalate their military response, and to observe international humanitarian law and avoid civilian casualties.”

The tragic irony of asking a state whose collective punishment of the people of Gaza through siege is a breach of the Geneva Conventions, and whose health officials have calculated exactly how much food to let in to avoid starvation while they “put the Palestinians on a diet“ (Dov Weisglass, 2005), to “observe international humanitarian law” appeared to be lost on Griffiths. More

Of course it could be argued that the British Balfour Declaration was the beginning of the entire Palestine problem. Editor