{"id":13680,"date":"2011-07-25T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2011-07-25T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=13680"},"modified":"2011-07-21T20:15:24","modified_gmt":"2011-07-21T19:15:24","slug":"what-did-the-gaza-flotilla-achieve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/07\/what-did-the-gaza-flotilla-achieve\/","title":{"rendered":"What Did The Gaza Flotilla Achieve?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So that\u2019s it, then. With the interception<\/a> by Israeli navy commandoes of the Dignit\u00e9 al Karama<\/em>, the last vessel in this year\u2019s Freedom Flotilla to take a convoy of aid to the Gaza Strip, the mission has seemingly fizzled out. No dramatic breach of Israel\u2019s unlawful siege of the territory; no repeat, thankfully, of last year\u2019s violence, when soldiers armed with live rounds were dropped on to the deck of the Mavi Marmara<\/em>, killing nine activists and injuring many more. Taking place in international waters, Israel\u2019s action amounted to piracy, but at least this time no-one on board was\u00a0hurt.<\/p>\n

But the failure to achieve the stated aim\u00a0\u2014 of providing medicines, building materials, children\u2019s toys and other everyday goods to the Palestinians, who are deprived of them \u2014 should not be allowed to obscure the symbolic gains the activists have made, notably here in\u00a0Australia.<\/p>\n

By providing an Australian angle to a story of grassroots initiative they have managed to reframe the media conception of peace activism in the Palestinian cause. Readers and audiences have been able to relate to Australians acting on impulses we can all recognise: straightforward humanitarian mateship, reaching out to people who\u2019ve been denied a fair go.<\/p>\n

By coincidence, the Avaaz group has just launched a campaign for tougher laws on press ownership, drawing attention to the wrongdoings of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s media empire, exposed in the UK, and the perils to democracy from Australia\u2019s narrowly based corporate\u00a0media.<\/p>\n

That narrowness constantly threatens to constrict what the media researcher, Daniel Hallin, called the “zone of legitimate controversy”, within which journalism\u00a0\u2014 and political debate\u00a0\u2014 takes place. Case in point: the campaign by The Australian newspaper earlier this year to demonise the Greens over strong advocacy, by some of their prominent spokespersons, of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, of which the Flotilla is a\u00a0part.<\/p>\n

This amounted to a systematic and well-funded attempt to consign to Hallin\u2019s “zone of deviancy” anyone seeking to put forward international law and human rights as a lens through which to view the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the avalanche of verbiage, sustained over many days in our sole national broadsheet, one word was conspicuous by its absence: “occupation”. The basic, underlying fact about the conflict\u00a0\u2014 Israel\u2019s illegal, ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza\u00a0\u2014 was entirely\u00a0suppressed.<\/p>\n

Hallin\u2019s theory caught on because it neatly captured an essential element of news reporting. Usually, a statement is treated as newsworthy, and worth taking seriously, not so much for its content as for who says it. The lowest of the low, in terms of news sources, are activists: especially in Murdoch\u2019s newspapers, where politics is properly left to professional politicians, who can be bullied or bribed with headlines hostile or favourable. Anyone seeking to raise issues, supply perspectives or draw attention to versions of events from outside this charmed circle is routinely ignored, smeared or\u00a0belittled.<\/p>\n

To gauge the value created by the four Australians who joined the flotilla, therefore, it\u2019s instructive to look at how their action was reported. Before setting off, three of them\u00a0\u2014 former NSW Green MP Sylvia Hale, along with Vivienne Porszolt and Michael Coleman\u00a0\u2014 were interviewed on Channel Ten\u2019s 6.30 with George Negus. The program also heard from an Israeli government spokesman. What was interesting, however, was that the three activists were presented as Australians doing something interesting and noteworthy, not as though there was something wrong with\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

Conventional news framing in Australian media would regard activists in this context as “extremists”, but there was an opportunity, as they were leaving, to dislodge this apparently fixed meaning from the journalistic stock of background\u00a0assumptions.<\/p>\n

In response to a letter from Hale, DFAT made the shamefaced admission<\/a> that it had meekly waived Australia\u2019s rights under the Vienna Convention to render consular assistance to any of our nationals who were taken into custody. Now, the government\u00a0\u2014 not the activists\u00a0\u2014 could be portrayed as aberrant, having “let the side down” by putting loyalty to Israel before the hard-won rights of Australians travelling\u00a0abroad.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, the line taken by the PM program, on ABC Radio National, was interrogative. As well as Hale herself, reporter Connie Agius interviewed Greg Barns, of the Australian Lawyers\u2019 Alliance, introduced as a former adviser to the Howard government. He told her: “Australia should not tolerate Israel simply saying, well we will drag people into a closed military zone and have no consular\u00a0access”.<\/p>\n

Then, following the safe return of activists to Australia, local newspaper the Inner West Courier featured on its front cover a colour picture of Michael Coleman in a canoe, trying to slow down the Greek coastguard as the Canadian-flagged vessel they had joined, the Tahrir, tried to make a break for open waters \u2014 together with a sympathetic account of his\u00a0adventures.<\/p>\n

The report by SBS World News Australia, on the drama that unfolded in the harbour on the island of Crete\u00a0\u2014 the Tahrir\u2019s intended jumping-off point\u00a0\u2014 was impeccably balanced and\u00a0well-explained.<\/p>\n

These are scattered indications, indeed, but between them, they offer hope that Murdoch\u2019s baleful grip on this section of our national conversation can be at least circumvented, if not\u00a0loosened.<\/p>\n

I myself gave a couple of radio interviews, as a local spokesperson for the campaign, during which I took the opportunity to turn the question around: who, after all, are the extremists in this situation? Australian diplomacy under Gillard has placed us in a small “hard core” of half a dozen countries prepared to vote with Israel, at the UN, no matter what. Canberra stands at the pro-Israeli extreme of world political opinion, in spite of polls suggesting that Australians would prefer a more even-handed\u00a0approach.<\/p>\n

Hallin made his name by tracing the process by which an important viewpoint\u00a0\u2014 opposition in the US to the Vietnam war\u00a0\u2014 migrated from the zone of deviancy to come to be regarded as part of the spectrum of legitimate controversy. The same process is palpably underway for the advocacy of international law and human rights in the Israel-Palestine conflict \u2014 and the Flotilla activists have given it a timely boost here in\u00a0Australia.<\/p>\n

______________________<\/p>\n

Jake Lynch is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, and an advisor for TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong>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 DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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

The Isreali navy prevented Freedom Flotilla activists from delivering aid supplies to the Gaza Strip – but the mission has had an unexpected impact on political debate here, writes Jake Lynch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13680","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=13680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}