On flotillas and the law: civil society versus Israel lobbies in US and Europe
Lawrence Davidson | 11.07.2011 08:07 | Anti-militarism | Palestine | World
Civil society movements versus corrupt politics
When it comes to the struggle against Israel's policies of oppression there are two conflicting levels: that of government and that of civil society. The most recent example of this duality is the half dozen or so small ships held captive in the ports of Greece. The ships, loaded with humanitarian supplies for the one and half million people of the Gaza Strip, are instruments of a civil society campaign against the inhumanity of the Israeli state. The forces that hold them back are the instruments of governments corrupted by special interest influence and political bribery.
Most of us are unaware of the potential of organized civil society because we have resigned the public sphere to professional politicians and bureaucrats and retreated into a private sphere of everyday life which we see as separate from politics. This is a serious mistake. Politics shapes our lives whether we pay attention to it or not. By ignoring it we allow the power of the state to respond not so much to the citizenry as to special interests. Our indifference means that the politicians and government bureaucrats live their professional lives within systems largely uninterested in and sometimes incapable of acting in the public good because they are corrupted by lobby power. The ability to render justice is also often a casualty of the way things operate politically. The stymying of the latest humanitarian flotilla to Gaza due to the disproportionate influence of Zionist special interests on US and European Middle East foreign policy is a good example of this situation.
There are small but growing elements of society which understand this problem and have moved to remedy it through organizing common citizens to reassert influence in the public sphere. Their efforts constitute civil society movements. Not all of these efforts can be deemed progressive. The "Tea Party" phenomenon in the United States is a radical conservative movement that aims at minimizing government to the point of self-destruction. But other movements of civil society, in their expressions of direct action in the cause of justice, are much healthier. The worldwide movement for the boycott, divestment and sanctioning (BDS) of Israel, of which the flotilla movement is an offshoot, is one of these.
The forum of international law
The resulting struggle between the corrupt politics that keeps the West aligned with the oppressive and racist ideology that rules Israel and the civil society movement that seeks to liberate the victims of that ideology goes on worldwide and in many forums. One is the forum of international law. Presently, the debate revolves around the legality of Israel's blockade of Gaza and the effort of the flotilla movement to defy it. Let us take a look at this aspect of the conflict.
1. The well known American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, a strong defender of Israel, has blatantly stated: "Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is legal under international law – anyone who tries to break it can be arrested and prosecuted in a court of law." Of course, Dershowitz is not an expert on international law. Rather, he has made his reputation as a defence lawyer with a passion for murder cases (which makes him quite suited to defend the Israeli state). This being said, what is the basis for his assertion that the Gaza blockade is legal?
2. The argument for the legality of the blockade is based on the 1909 Declaration of London and the 1994 San Remo Manual on Armed Conflict at Sea. Both are part of an international treaty system that sets down the parameters of much international law. According to these documents, two states engaged in armed conflict can legally blockade one and other for clear military reasons. However, any blockade would cease to be legal if "damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade". Defenders of Israeli actions, such as Dershowitz, do a very superficial reading of the documents and reason that Israel is in an armed conflict with Hamas, which is the ruling authority in Gaza, and so Israel can legally blockade Gaza so as to stop the importation of weapons and "terrorist" fighters.
3. The holes in this reasoning are big enough to sail a flotilla of small ships through (if only they were not imprisoned in Greek ports). Thus, Israel certainly does not consider itself engaged in an armed conflict with another state. If you doubt this just ask any member of the present Israeli government whether he or she would define Palestine, including Gaza, as a state. In truth, the proper definition of Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza is that of an occupying colonial power whose policies and actions are stark violations of the Geneva Conventions. That is, by virtue of its colonizing actions and treatment of residents of the occupied territories, its presence in Palestine beyond the 1967 borders is not legal (one can also argue over the legality of Israel within the 1967 borders). That means those they are in armed conflict with are those resisting illegal occupation. There is no international law that makes it legal for Israel, itself acting illegally, to blockade those legally resisting its actions. The arbitrary labelling of those resisting as "terrorists" does not change this legal situation.
4. As noted above, "legal" blockades must have a military objective and must not do excessive harm to the civilian population. Yet there is evidence that Israel's goals for the blockade are not primarily military but are, instead, aimed at committing excessive harm to the people of Gaza. The Gaza blockade was not done out of fear of weapons smuggling or terrorist infiltration, but rather constituted a conscious act of economic warfare against the people of Gaza for having the audacity to be ruled by Hamas, the winner of a 2006 free and fair election.
There is documentary evidence for this interpretation of events. For instance, in 2006 Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, publically stated that the goal of Israeli policy in Gaza was to "put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger". Then, in June 2010 McClatchy Newspapers published Israeli government documentsattesting to the fact that Jerusalem primarily saw the blockade as an act of economic warfare, and not as a security measure. To this you can add the fact that Israeli gunboats keep shooting at Gaza fishermen [video] who they know are doing nothing except fishing. What we have here is the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians. As such it is not legal, it is illegal – a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, usually so responsive to US demands, momentarily broke free and in his 2009 annual report told the Israelis they should end their unwarranted blockade. He was ignored.
We cannot count on governments or international law
So how is it that the Israelis can get away with these crimes? It is because, at the level of government, their lobbyists and advocates wield enough influence to successfully warp the policy formulation of Western governments. Against this corruptive influence, international law means very little. Even embarrassing historical analogies mean little. Nima Shirazi, who blogs at Wide Asleep In America, wrote a very good piece entitled "The deplorable acts: the 'Quartet comments on Gaza". In this piece he points out the relative similarity between the Gaza blockade and the blockade of Boston set up by imperial Britain in late 1773. The Americans of that time labelled the action, "the Intolerable Acts". Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her boss in the White House ought to consider this analogy, but then there is that lobby power factor that would prevent them from ever acknowledging it.
As a consequence, those who seek justice for the Palestinians must, for the moment, not place much hope in government or international law. They must act within the realm of civil society, building the BDS movement and its offshoots. Where government moves in and attempts to block civil society actions, these actions must be turned against government if only by using them as campaign tools to expand the BDS movement further. If we persist there will come a time, as was the case with South Africa, when the power of civil society will be such that politicians and bureaucrats will see the cost of defying popular opinion as greater than defying Zionist lobbies.
For all intents and purposes, when it comes to the Palestine-Israeli conflict, the United States and Israeli governments have placed themselves above all law. That means not just international law, but selective domestic law as well. The ubiquitous and improper use of such categories as "terrorist" or "rendering material aid to terrorists" are the corruptive vectors here. The only hope for justice and the integrity of law is in the realm of civil society which might in the future redeem not only Palestine, but the US and Israel too.
* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.
Lawrence Davidson
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Greece, Gaza and the Grand Drama
11.07.2011 11:35
Like other boats in the "Freedom Flotilla 2," an international flotilla aiming to end the naval blockade of Gaza, the Spaniards' boat has been blocked from sailing by bureaucratic measures imposed by the Greek government. This was unacceptable to the activists. On July 4, 2011, the Spanish Ambassador to Greece had agreed to meet with only four of the Spanish activists, but at a pre-arranged time, one of the four had gone downstairs, opened the door and ushered in 17 others to help them occupy the Embassy. Today, three days later, they have issued an eloquent statement explaining why they still refuse to leave. They call for an end to the illegal blockade of Gaza and for immediate release of their boat so that it can soon reach Gazan shores.
I'm here as an activist passenger on the United States flotilla boat, the Audacity of Hope, also blocked by the Greek government decision. We tried to escape to international waters but were towed back to dock by heavily-armed boats of the Greek Coast Guard. We haven't tried an embassy occupation. "That's what your group should be doing," said one of the main organizers of the international flotilla effort, referring to the Spanish action.
He's right. And yet, crucial and telling differences exist between the Embassy of Spain in Athens, where I counted exactly one security guard nonchalantly keeping watch in the first afternoon of the Spanish activists' demonstration, and the Embassy of the U.S. in Athens. The U.S. Embassy takes up about four square blocks of land. Nondescript, boxy white buildings are surrounded by spiked fences of battleship gray. Embassy employees arrive at a checkpoint and are subjected to search routines that include examining the base of their vehicle as it drives over a pit. Dozens of guards maintain round the clock security. What necessitates such elaborate security measures? Is it simply that U.S. lives are more precious than the lives of others and therefore must be intensely safeguarded, or might it be that menacing economic and military policies enforced by the U.S. have caused antagonism and rage sufficient to endanger official U.S. representatives in almost any part of the globe?
Several of us who were quietly fasting, across the street from our Embassy, earlier this week, called upon the U.S. to help free Gaza, free our ship from a Greek port, and free, or at least visit, our captain who was, at the time, detained in a Greek jail. When we politely declined to end our fasting presence, we were loaded into Greek police squad cars and held for several hours. The next day, the Greek police again detained six U.S. activists, this time for sitting on a park bench across from the home of the U.S. Ambassador to Greece.
Had U.S. activists attempted to occupy the U.S. Embassy in Athens, in an action comparable to that of the Spaniards, we surely wouldn't have been filmed waving from open air balconies. It's likely that the only cameras within the U.S. compound that would cover such an event would be U.S. surveillance cameras.
And, of course, the plight we want to make visible is not ours but rather that of the Palestinians in Gaza who rarely have an opportunity to raise or amplify their voices. Our guiding question, our rudder, as we contemplate next steps, asks to what extent we can focus world attention on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. Today, I read an article by Professor Noam Chomsky in which he asked Chris Gunness, a spokesperson for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza to describe the humanitarian crisis Gazans face. "If there were no humanitarian crisis, if there weren't a crisis in almost every aspect of life in Gaza there would be no need for the flotilla," said Gunness. " 95 percent of all water in Gaza is undrinkable, 40 percent of all disease is water-borne ... 45.2 percent of the labor force is unemployed, 80 percent aid dependency, a tripling of the abject poor since the start of the blockade. Let's get rid of this blockade and there would be no need for a flotilla."
And so it goes. Our formation as peace and antiwar activists, should be guided by focusing on the most impoverished people who bear the brunt of our economic and military warfare. We U.S. activists must continue to learn from the durable actions and plans of the Spaniards and numerous other internationals gathered here in Athens, many of whom are facing draconian new economic policies in their home countries as financial institutions hold sway over governments and demand new austerity measures..
Greek activists who assemble every night in Athens' Syntagma Square have constructed an inspiring, effective means for developing free speech and determined, risk-taking action in a setting that has evolved to emphasize simplicity, sharing of resources and a clear preference for service rather than dominance.
I leave Greece tonight with sincere regret that I didn't spend more time learning from these sturdy activists.
I and another US Boat to Gaza campaign member, Missy Lane, will head to Tel Aviv, where we plan to be part of a "flytilla," a new campaign which will bring hundreds of activists together in Israel's Ben Gurion airport, all of us intent on reaching Palestinian refugee camps and/or visiting Gazan families.
Earlier this evening, a group of U.S. activists who've been able to remain longer, here in Athens, demonstrated at each of the heavily guarded streets leading to the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Greece. The Ambassador is hosting a huge festival tonight, in celebration of the U.S. July 4 holiday that commemorates independence.
Several Greek people passing us read our signs seeking freedom for Gaza and asked us to understand that as recently as one year ago, the government of Greece showed no sign of submitting to Israeli or U.S. pressure and allowed international flotilla boats to sail. But, now. they are dependent on the whims of financial elites around the world. The IMF is prescribing draconian measures which will wreck their economy and make them subservient to the dictates of foreign multinationals. What would happen if the government defied the masters?
The Greek government has been told to bend down and kiss the dirt, and if it doesn't do so it will be told to bend down and eat the dirt.
So far, the government has complied, and one instance of galling obeisance is their cooperation with Israeli and U.S. governmental insistence that no boats bound for Gaza be allowed to depart from Grecian ports.
The flotilla may not leave Grecian ports this month, but the idea and practice of dissent surely will. The Arab Spring has planted seeds throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from its birthplace in the Tunisia through the Mubarak overthrow here to Greece, and of course throughout the world as it spreads into a heralded European Summer. With democracy in Gaza, here in Greece, and throughout the world so dependent on what our own government does in the United States, U.S. citizens should surely be thinking, thinking constantly, of daily actions, gutsy and inspiring, which we can take in our home country where we face so little risk compared with so many living in utmost precarity – so many beckoning all of us to carry their hard-fought struggle beyond one Arab Spring into a perennial human striving for freedom; into hope, perhaps outlandish hope, even for an American autumn.
A grand drama is unfolding here in Greece, in Egypt, in Gaza, and throughout the world, which may end in sorrow or in jubilation largely depending on whether people of the United States are watching, and themselves getting ready to take the stage.
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams (CounterPunch / AK Press). Kathy can be reached at:
Kathy@vcnv.org.
Kathy Kelly
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