Israel ’s massacre at sea

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Israel’s massacre at sea
3 June 2010

The Israeli military’s killing of nine civilians and wounding of scores more on
a ship carrying humanitarian supplies in international waters was an act of
cold-blooded murder and a war crime.

For millions of people around the world, this military assault on an aid convoy
carrying wheelchairs, cement, water purification systems, children’s toys and
notebook paper to Gaza—all items barred by Israel’s blockade of the occupied
territory—epitomizes the role played by Israel, as well as that of its US
sponsor, in global affairs.

As always in the aftermath of such atrocities, the Israeli government has blamed
its victims. In a televised speech Wednesday, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu
described the aid convoy as a “flotilla of terror supporters” and praised the
slaughter on the high seas as an act of self-defense by besieged Israeli commandos.

Those who engaged in self-defense were the passengers on the ship, and they had
every right to do so. The fact that nine of them were killed, while the Israel
Defense Force (IDF) commandos suffered not a single fatality, is evidence as to
who was the aggressor.

This is a regular pattern. The massacre in the Mediterranean comes just a year
and a half after Operation Cast Lead, the far greater slaughter that the Israeli
regime unleashed against the suffering people of Gaza. Claiming then as now to
act in “self defense,” in December 2008 and January 2009 Israel rained bombs,
missiles and tank and automatic weapons fire upon Gaza, killing over 1,400
Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed men, women and children.
This one-sided war by one of the world’s most powerful military machines against
a relatively defenseless civilian population claimed just 13 Israeli lives, all
but three of them soldiers.

The aid convoy was a response to the barbaric blockade that has subjected an
entire population of 1.5 million people in Gaza to hunger, disease and misery.

Since the tightening of the blockade in 2007, according to the UN Relief and
Works Agency (UNRWA), the number of Gazan refugees living in abject poverty has
tripled.

The UN reported at the end of 2009 that "insufficient food and medicine is
reaching Gazans, producing a further deterioration of the mental and physical
health of the entire civilian population since Israel launched Operation Cast
Lead against the territory." Among the starkest expressions of Israel’s
deliberate starvation of an entire population was a finding by the Food and
Agriculture Organization last year that 65 percent of babies between the ages of
nine and 12 months suffer from anemia.

Israel is able to carry out this kind of medieval siege as well as piracy and
murder not merely because of its own military might, but thanks to the
unwavering patronage and funding of Washington. This latest mass killing has
only underscored that—as with so much else—the advent of the Obama
administration has effected no significant change in US policy.

While issuing a hypocritical expression of “deep regret at the loss of life,”
the Obama administration is doing everything it can to assure that Israel bears
neither blame nor consequences for these killings. It quashed any criticism of
Israel’s action at the UN Security Council and has implicitly adopted the
Zionist state’s justification for the massacre.

Israel’s criminality and Washington’s role as its unconditional enabler both
have a long history. It is worth recalling another Israeli attack on a vessel in
international waters that took place 43 years ago. In that attack, 34 sailors
aboard the USS Liberty were killed by Israeli napalm, missiles and machine-gun
fire, while another 171 while wounded—the worst casualties suffered by the US
Navy in a hostile action since World War II.

An intelligence ship, the Liberty was attacked off the Sinai Peninsula on June
8, 1967 in the midst of the Six-Day War. While Israel called it a tragic
“mistake,” ample evidence emerged that the Zionist state attacked the ship
because it wanted to stop Washington from listening in to its communications.
Intercepts flatly contradicted Tel Aviv’s claim that it was acting in
self-defense and revealed that Israel wanted to conceal evidence of its
aggressive intentions as it moved to seize Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan
Heights, all of which remain under illegal occupation to this day.

Much of the criticism of this week’s attack on the aid convoy, including within
Israel itself, has treated it as a “botched” operation, an excessive use of
force and a public relations fiasco. But this is not a matter of a government
losing its head. The Netanyahu regime’s policies are directed to a definite
socio-political base, composed of religious extremists, right-wing settlers and
the most politically reactionary layers within Israeli society. Its orientation
is personified by the fascistic background and ideology of its foreign minister,
Avigdor Lieberman.

Deeply reactionary and in deep political crisis, the Israeli government is
driven more and more to act as a global pyromaniac, threatening renewed wars
against Syria and Lebanon and, according to a report in the London Times this
week, sending submarines armed with nuclear missiles to the waters off Iran.

The unconditional support and approximately $3 billion in annual aid to Israel
bestowed by Washington—and continued under Obama—pose a mortal danger to people
across the globe.

This is not a matter merely of a single outlaw regime, but of a general descent
of world affairs into a state of criminality and the disintegration of any
semblance of international law, with Israel’s main patron setting the pattern.

The Obama administration continues two wars of aggression initiated under Bush
and has maintained intact a police state apparatus of unlawful detentions,
rendition and torture. It has now earned the ignominious designation as the
number one practitioner of “targeted killings”—assassinations—through CIA drone
attacks that have killed “many hundreds of people” in Pakistan, according to a
United Nations report released Wednesday. The report condemned Washington for
claiming a “license to kill without accountability.”

The behavior of the US and other governments as if they were the state
incarnation of Murder Inc., acts of state terrorism and piracy like that
committed by Israel this week, and the constant threats of new aggression have
created a global climate that bears ever closer resemblance to the conditions
that prevailed on the eve the Second World War.

These developments are driven by the mortal crisis of world capitalism and will
not be reversed by either protests or pacifism. Only by uniting the working
class, including both Jewish and Arab workers in the Middle East, in a common
struggle to put an end to the profit system can a new global conflagration be
prevented.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j03.shtml

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