{"id":13610,"date":"2011-07-18T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=13610"},"modified":"2011-07-18T02:16:03","modified_gmt":"2011-07-18T01:16:03","slug":"neocons-fume-over-us-boat-to-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/07\/neocons-fume-over-us-boat-to-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Neocons Fume over US Boat to Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

My co-passengers and I of the U.S. Boat to Gaza have now gone from \u201cHigh-Seas Hippies<\/a>,\u201d according to the right-wing Washington Times, to participants in a flotilla full of \u201cfools, knaves, hypocrites, bigots, and supporters of terrorism,\u201d says Alan Dershowitz in his usual measured prose.<\/p>\n

Poor Alan, he seems upset at our audacity not only to hope for humane treatment of the 1.6 million Gazans, who currently live under a cruel blockade, but to force the issue. To stop our boat before it could leave Greek waters, Israel\u2019s Likud government gave itself a self-inflicted black eye and again brought the oppression of Gazans\u00a0to worldwide attention.<\/p>\n

This time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government did not even have to kill people to add to Israel\u2019s growing \u201cdelegitimization\u201d before the civilized world. Facing growing international condemnation, Netanyahu and his allies have reason to worry.<\/p>\n

In recognition of our modest accomplishments, we U.S. boaters have now made it onto Dershowitz\u2019s \u201cDishonor Roll!\u201d At first reading of his intended insults<\/a>, my laughter was uncontrollable. I\u2019ve been called a lot of things before, but I cannot remember being labeled a \u201cknave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyone know what a knave is? Does it have something to do with what Damon Runyon used to call \u201cthe Harvards,\u201d among whom Dershowitz has long toiled as a law professor?<\/p>\n

Dershowitz also lashes out at the American Jews onboard, including 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, with the shopworn epithet for Jews who dare to criticize Israel\u2019s government as \u201cself-hating.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suppose if I had criticized some of the ugly extremism in Ireland a few decades back, I would be a \u201cself-hating Irishman.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the bottom line is this: Dershowitz\u2019s Likud friends and their\u00a0neocon chums in the Obama administration realize they have suffered a stinging \u2013 and unnecessary \u2013 PR defeat. They could easily have let our peaceful boat carrying\u00a0passengers, media and letters of goodwill\u00a0reach the isolated people of Gaza.<\/p>\n

What we boaters appear to have accomplished is to provoke the mighty diplomats of Israel and the United States into a full-court press that brought renewed attention to the plight of the Gazans.<\/p>\n

Greek authorities, already tied up in knots over their national financial crisis, had their arms twisted to thwart a group of humanitarians and peace activists \u2013 including poet Alice Walker, retired Army Col. Ann Wright and Code Pink\u2019s Medea Benjamin \u2013 from sailing a boat\u00a0to Gaza.<\/p>\n

By putting the issue of Israel\u2019s blockade front and center, we also managed to force discomforted U.S. State Department spokespersons\u00a0to dissemble about the legality of Israel\u2019s illegal blockade. They ducked declaring something so clearly illegal legal, knowing that otherwise they would have invited international ridicule.<\/p>\n

But caution. The injured-animal syndrome among the Likudniks poses distinct dangers for the people of the Middle East \u2014 the more so, as we watch President Barack Obama continue to let Netanyahu walk all over him.<\/p>\n

U.S. Appeasement<\/strong><\/p>\n

Official Washington\u2019s appeasement of the Likud Lobby seems to encourage Israeli leaders to believe that not only the U.S. Congress but also America\u2019s lusting-for-a-second-term President will condone just about any action Tel Aviv might undertake. That makes the situation very volatile.<\/p>\n

In my view, there is more danger, in present circumstances, that the extreme right in Israel will flail out in a very misguided way than there has been in several years. The Netanyahu regime is in a very defensive, reactive posture.<\/p>\n

It certainly appears that the Likudniks, the U.S. neocons and some of the \u201cHarvards\u201d are running scared as Israel\u2019s growing extremism and anti-Muslim bigotry becomes harder to perfume over with every passing day.<\/p>\n

Beyond expanding settlements on Palestinian lands and resisting serious peace talks, Netanyahu\u2019s\u00a0government has taken to segregating<\/a> not only Arabs\u00a0from Jews but secular Jews from\u00a0ultra-Orthodox Jews.<\/p>\n

Plus, over the past two years, Netanyahu\u2019s right-wing coalition has lost its co-opted ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt as well as the once-friendly Turks and bit-by-bit its legitimacy. This reality is finally sinking in.\u00a0Tel Aviv, Washington and Cambridge see a significant weakening of Israel\u2019s worldwide standing.<\/p>\n

And, as for \u201cdelegitimizing\u201d Israel, no one could do that job better than the Likudniks themselves \u2013 the more so, given their penchant for knee-jerk overreactions and risible rhetoric.<\/p>\n

The likely \u201clegitimization\u201d of a Palestinian state by the U.N. in September is being seen in some Israeli right-wing quarters as the last straw.<\/p>\n

But Netanyahu\u2019s thuggish regime still can count on influential apologists like Dershowitz to excuse whatever it does. Dershowitz and other neocon voices pipe up whenever Israel\u2019s drift toward an unconscionable apartheid system is noted.<\/p>\n

As part of that propaganda, we are now hearing, again and again, bizarre accounts about how wonderful life is for the Gazans. In his pro-blockade diatribe, Dershowitz depicted a fun-and-sun existence for these Palestinians, who are, in reality, trapped in what amounts to a squalid open-air prison.<\/p>\n

Besides\u00a0cutting the Gazans off from the world, Israel has strangled\u00a0their economy by tightly restricting\u00a0construction material needed to rebuild homes, businesses and schools damaged in Israel\u2019s 2008-09 invasion, which killed an estimated 1,400 Palestinians, compared to 13 Israeli deaths.<\/p>\n

However, to gloss over the ugly reality, Dershowitz selectively cites a recent New York Times article, which noted that construction material smuggled in from Egypt in the aftermath of Mubarak\u2019s ouster is fueling a mini-boom in construction\u00a0in Hamas-ruled Gaza and slightly lessening the jobless crisis.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Dershowitz\u2019s slanted version: \u201cAccording to reporting by The New York Times, Gaza has been thriving recently. Luxury hotels are being built; stores are stocked with food; beaches are filled with children; and life is far better than in neighboring Al Arish, which is across the border in Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, the few positives were\u00a0only part of what the Times\u2019 Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner reported. In the same article<\/a>, he wrote, \u201cSo is that the news from Gaza in mid-2011? Yes, but so is this: Thousands of homes that were destroyed in the Israeli antirocket invasion two and a half years ago have not been rebuilt.<\/p>\n

\u201cHospitals have canceled elective surgery for lack of supplies. Electricity remains maddeningly irregular. The much-publicized opening of the Egyptian border has fizzled<\/a>, so people remain trapped here. The number of residents living on less than $1.60 a day has tripled in four years. Three-quarters of the population rely on food aid<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strangled Economy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Israeli human rights group Gisha, which has campaigned against the closure of Gaza, notes that while Gaza now has adequate food supplies, \u201ceconomic recovery is blocked by sweeping restrictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gisha noted<\/a> that \u201cThe continued ban on export, construction materials, and travel between Gaza and the West Bank contradicts the 2010 Israeli government decision to facilitate economic recovery in Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt least 83% of Gaza\u2019s factories are either closed or working at a capacity of 50% or less, according to the Palestinian Federation of Industries.<\/strong> The manufacturing sector cannot recover under the present Israeli ban on export. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cEven during the winter agricultural season, when Israel allowed the export of agricultural produce, the quantities were economically negligible: an average of two trucks per day, compared to the 400 trucks a day agreed upon in the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael has banned completely goods destined for Israel and the West Bank, even though prior to 2007, 85% of the goods leaving Gaza were sold to Israel and the West Bank.\u201d [Emphasis in original.]<\/p>\n

In other words, the situation for Gazans remains horribly bleak, although perhaps slightly less bleak now that Egypt is looking the other way on the smuggling of concrete, steel beams and other construction material.<\/p>\n

Under international pressure \u2013 brought about partly by earlier challenges to the four-year-old sea blockade \u2013 Israel also has lightened up somewhat on the land transport of some goods.<\/p>\n

But Dershowitz\u2019s slanted argument is offensive for other reasons. Arguing that some people in the Middle East might be worse off than the Gazans is reminiscent of the claims by white South Africans that \u201ctheir\u201d blacks were better off than some blacks living in poorer parts of Africa, thus justifying apartheid.<\/p>\n

Or the neocon musings in the United States some years back that slavery wasn\u2019t so bad because Africans who were captured by European slavers and forcibly shipped to the New World had a chance for a better life \u2013 more so than Africans who weren\u2019t lucky enough to be put in chains, crowded into foul slave ships (where many died), sold to plantation owners in a strange land, and then be subjected to whippings, rapes, endless humiliations and lynching. Yes, the \u201cupside\u201d of slavery.<\/p>\n

To tout a couple of \u201cluxury hotels\u201d being built in Gaza, some children at the beach and the possibility that some other Arabs might be more miserable than the Gazans \u2013 as an excuse for the entrapment and collective punishment of 1.6 million people \u2013 is the same kind of rationalizing on behalf of injustice.<\/p>\n

As for Dershowitz\u2019s insults toward me and the other passengers on our Boat to Gaza, the old saying surely applies: \u201cNames can never harm you.\u201d But we would all be well advised to keep a keen eye peeled for future sticks and stones.<\/p>\n

We U.S. boaters have just begun; we will get to Gaza. But watch out for Israeli-sponsored provocations, which could become the prelude to even more violence in the months ahead.<\/p>\n

_________________________<\/p>\n

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A veteran Army officer and CIA analyst, he was one of the passengers on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, which was ready to sail in late June but was stopped by Greek authorities under intense pressure from Washington and Tel Aviv. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018Our boat, \u201cThe Audacity of Hope,\u201d remains impounded at a military dock \u2026 for now.\u2019<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/strong> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/strong> BARCODE<\/strong> STARTS WITH<\/strong> 729<\/strong><\/span>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My co-passengers and I of the U.S. Boat to Gaza have now gone from \u201cHigh-Seas Hippies,\u201d according to the right-wing Washington Times, to participants in a flotilla full of \u201cfools, knaves, hypocrites, bigots, and supporters of terrorism,\u201d says Alan Dershowitz in his usual measured prose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}