It looked like a scene from an opera. Massed in the doorway and second floor balconies of a quaint building in Athens, facing a magnificent view of the Parthenon, Spanish activists hung banners and flashed peace signs and proclaimed that they wouldn't leave the building, the Embassy of Spain, until their government assured them that their boat, "The Guernica," could at last leave for the suffering and besieged territory of Gaza.
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 4th 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.
It gives an entirely different picture than the Israeli-biased sentence fragment. Because it is AUTHENTIC.
The USA is the world's largest super-power and therefore, police officer. This position has cost us GREATLY, both in human lives and our national debt, which can be traced directly back to our copious quantities of 'defense' spending over at least the last 50 years. We are also the most generous nation on the globe. Some people need no further reason to hate us but that we are the most powerful military on the planet. If we neglected to use this military, then, we would be the lamist super-power on the planet. I for one would rather be broke then be broke and lame.
Bottom line: Israel is the only Jewish majority nation on Earth, sits on 1.5% of the land on the Mid East, has a 20% Muslim citizenry with full civil rights and has been the victim of relentless attacks for over 60 years. Had the new management of Gaza been more concerned with the best interest of its own people then in destroying Israel, Gaza today would be a fully-functional Arab neighborhood. But their leaders don't need to care about the wellbeing of their own people, as they have an abundance of outside support, which in the clear light of day is not helping the Arabs and is only vendictively hurting the Israelis.
Having land expropriated, being evicted from your home, being denied freedom of movement is not to have full human rights.
And TS I am a homeland zionist--but one who cannot abide bullies no matter where they are or what they call their political party.
This is fantastic.
Yeah right.
Tell me its not. Its reallllllly like 'Beetlejuice'. :)
I'm glad you're taking notice of them because it means other people are too. Decision makers, people in authority and other centers of international policy making.
Although Ms Kelly's article contains more BS and hot air and makes less sense than anything ever witnessed in any given performance, French opera never pretended to be taken seriously.
F & F!
http://www.slate.com/id/2298332/
Would you care to respond?
I pray for his recovery.
Indeed, although or maybe because they have so far not achieved their goals, the activists have achieved a thing that could be considered to be even more significant: they have not gone away, but have been in the news constantly for the last 3-4-5 weeks.
From a "commercial" viewpoint, it can only be concluded that the Flotillas are a huge success, even if only for the awareness raising effects on previously uninterested or ignorant people.
Since the invention of the Internets, Israel is behaving like a panicking ostrich trying to dig it's head out of the hole it made.
They have not found an answer yet to the narrative of the activisists, they can no longer maintain full control of what gets out and published, inside or outside Israel, and even confiscating cameras, held by Flotilla activisits or issued by Btselem to Palestinian civilians under constant daily settler harrasment has not stopped images or footage from reaching the world.
The flotilla(s) have not gone away, and Israel is left with a huge problem.
Publicity wise, they have done a horrible job in the handling of this issue, and they still are frantically looking for an alternative for their traditional approach of disproportionate violence towards unarmed people.
My point was clearly not that the activists have reached their goal, but exactly the opposite, namely that they have been able to put the Palestinian problem even higher in the agdna than it has been for the last ten years.
With the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic woes of the US in general, the Palestinian conflict had moved down to the list of trivial things, but the clumsy Israeli approach has had as a consequence that the Palestinian issue as a whole is now again at the front pages of most serious Newspapers.
If I were an adviser to Barak or Netanyahu, I would have advised them to simply let the first flotilla in, and the problem would have just faded away by now.
This was a major doozie. This operation should be titled Titanic of the Mediterranean :)
2) What did come as a surprise, though was you making a reference to "peace and honesty".
I would be absolutely thrilled if you could expand a little bit on what you consider to be "peace and honesty" to solve the conflict.
"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."
I'd like to know: where do these funds come from? Surely star-eyed "humanists" would not mind letting everybody know what the source of the funding is? But seriously, since they are (by their own admission) political activists, why should we not demand the same degree of transparency we demand of other types of politicians. Let's have the accounts now.
Protesters arent credit checked to satisfy the idle curiosity of people who disagree with them.
What does a professor of linguistics [read: Chomsky] teach anyway? History? NO. Civics? No. Political science? Nope. His advanced degree is in creative factual revision [read: linguistics and semantics].
His knowledge of Mid East history is as weak as his respect for the truth. The Golan was originally part of Jewish Mandated Palestine under the three seminal treaties which concluded WW1:
San Remo
Sevres and
The League of Nations Mandate on Palestine.
Before 1920, it was part of the Turkish-Ottoman Empire and it only became part of Syria in a 'land-for-patronage' deal that I consider an unlawful transaction. If the Israelis were to abandon claims therein, the territory would be claimed (at least 95%) by Syria.
So here is my open question. Were that to occur, how many people (who now assert that Israel is "occupying" the Golan) would thereafter claim that Syria is "occupying" the Palestinian Golan"? Would Chomsky? Me don't think show.
I resent the fact that fringe "activists" with an axe to grind have the audacity (nay, the gall!) to refer to their misguided but PRIVATE endeavour as "United States flotilla boat". The vast majority of US population (and its elected institutions) oppose, deplore and condemn this. If anything, they are breaking US laws. Who gives these people the right to speak on behalf of USA??
You're a real stitch. If anything, the vast majority couldn't find occupied Palestine on a map. Anyone with a soul or a conscience, upon examining the matter, is compelled to support the flotilla. You see where that leaves people who condemn it.
It leaves them in position of using reason and sober analysis "upon examining the matter".
While feeling obvious compassion for ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, they understand that demonizing and provocing Israel is not the way. They understand that the sooner Palestinians will get rid of Hamas in particular and of an idea that they can do away with "Zionist entity" in general, the sooner their families and society will be able to lead normal life of a free people.
Maybe I'm lucky, but most Americans I know have good knowledge and very balanced and nuanced view on the conflict, so I defenitely cannot share your condescending view on majority of Americans.
they are working over time . . . .to prevent the activists reaching Gaza . . .too much to hide . . otherwise they would be allowed into Gaza . . .