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NY Times: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/201...er=rss&emc=rss
Jewish activists from the United States, Britain, Germany and Israel, determined to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, are sailing toward the Palestinian territory in a catamaran carrying humanitarian aid.
If the 10 passengers and crew members manage to dodge the Israel Defense Forces, they should land in Gaza on Tuesday.
According to a statement on the Web site Jewish Boat to Gaza, the voyage of the British-flagged ship, called the Irene, “is a symbolic act of protest against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the siege of Gaza, and a message of solidarity to Palestinians and Israelis who seek peace and justice.”
Updates on the ship’s progress are being posted on the @jewishboat2gaza Twitter feed. A recent update reads:
Reports that the IDF have boarded the Irene have proven untrue — they fired upon a fishing boat off the Gaza coast.
The project’s Web site also includes details about the peace activists on board, including Reuven Moskovitz, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor; Rami Elhanan, a founder of the Bereaved Families Circle of Israelis and Palestinians, whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber; and members of American, British and German Jewish groups that helped to organize the mission.
Before the boat left Cyprus on Sunday, Lillian Rosengarten, an American activist from New York who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, told the blog Mondoweiss: “We hope and believe there is some possıbılıty that we can get to Gaza. We are nonviolent but wıll practice passive resistance, for we will not turn the boat around.”
The activists also posted this Agence France-Presse video report on their Web site, which includes interviews with some of the passengers in Cyprus:
Marion Kozak, the mother of the new leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is a prominent member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, one of the groups supporting the ship. Ms. Kozak survived the Nazi occupation of Poland and is a well-known human rights activist.
Mr. Miliband, who told London’s Evening Standard last month, “Obviously I’m Jewish, it is part of my identity, but not in a religious sense,” has been outspoken in his opposition to the blockade of Gaza by Israel. His older brother, David, served as foreign minister in the previous Labour government. In an interview this month, Ed Miliband said that British foreign policy in the region should not be too influenced by American policy telling Politics.co.uk:
[O]n the Middle East and Israel-Palestine, they’re always going to have their particular view. We’ve got to have our particular view. So I was certainly outspoken at the time about the attack on the Gaza flotilla. We need to do that. The Gaza blockade needs to be lifted.
Another group behind the ship is European Jews for a Just Peace. In an interview shortly before he died this year, the British historian Tony Judt explained that criticism of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians still mattered. Mr. Judt told The London Review of Books:
Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the E.U. has enormous leverage. If the E.U. said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the E.U. market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.
Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognize international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. "
Jewish activists from the United States, Britain, Germany and Israel, determined to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, are sailing toward the Palestinian territory in a catamaran carrying humanitarian aid.
If the 10 passengers and crew members manage to dodge the Israel Defense Forces, they should land in Gaza on Tuesday.
According to a statement on the Web site Jewish Boat to Gaza, the voyage of the British-flagged ship, called the Irene, “is a symbolic act of protest against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the siege of Gaza, and a message of solidarity to Palestinians and Israelis who seek peace and justice.”
Updates on the ship’s progress are being posted on the @jewishboat2gaza Twitter feed. A recent update reads:
Reports that the IDF have boarded the Irene have proven untrue — they fired upon a fishing boat off the Gaza coast.
The project’s Web site also includes details about the peace activists on board, including Reuven Moskovitz, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor; Rami Elhanan, a founder of the Bereaved Families Circle of Israelis and Palestinians, whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber; and members of American, British and German Jewish groups that helped to organize the mission.
Before the boat left Cyprus on Sunday, Lillian Rosengarten, an American activist from New York who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, told the blog Mondoweiss: “We hope and believe there is some possıbılıty that we can get to Gaza. We are nonviolent but wıll practice passive resistance, for we will not turn the boat around.”
The activists also posted this Agence France-Presse video report on their Web site, which includes interviews with some of the passengers in Cyprus:
Marion Kozak, the mother of the new leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is a prominent member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, one of the groups supporting the ship. Ms. Kozak survived the Nazi occupation of Poland and is a well-known human rights activist.
Mr. Miliband, who told London’s Evening Standard last month, “Obviously I’m Jewish, it is part of my identity, but not in a religious sense,” has been outspoken in his opposition to the blockade of Gaza by Israel. His older brother, David, served as foreign minister in the previous Labour government. In an interview this month, Ed Miliband said that British foreign policy in the region should not be too influenced by American policy telling Politics.co.uk:
[O]n the Middle East and Israel-Palestine, they’re always going to have their particular view. We’ve got to have our particular view. So I was certainly outspoken at the time about the attack on the Gaza flotilla. We need to do that. The Gaza blockade needs to be lifted.
Another group behind the ship is European Jews for a Just Peace. In an interview shortly before he died this year, the British historian Tony Judt explained that criticism of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians still mattered. Mr. Judt told The London Review of Books:
Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the E.U. has enormous leverage. If the E.U. said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the E.U. market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.
Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognize international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. "
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