The
second freedom flotilla sails By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV - The
"Freedom Flotilla II", an attempt by international
pro-Palestinian activists to break the naval
blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed by Israel, is
due to sail any time now. The name and the
organizers themselves suggest that their goal is
to emulate last year's bloody confrontation at sea
in which nine Turkish activists were killed and
dozens, including a number of Israeli soldiers,
were wounded. It is possible that this time
around, the confrontation (there is little doubt
there will be one) will be entirely non-violent,
but this outcome is far from certain.
News
reports say that 10 boats are due to sail from,
among other places, Corsica, Greece. They will
include two cargo boats with the rest being
passenger ships.
The undertaking has taken
almost a whole year to organize - and this time,
the confrontation has been raging, behind the
scenes, for many months, alongside continued legal
and political haggling
over the legacy of last
year's violent events. Both sides have been
preparing meticulously, and the maneuvers of a
number of international actors - most importantly,
Turkey - have left their imprint on the operation.
Amid the Arab uprisings that have reshuffled the
entire Middle East in a major way, the affair has
already attracted a lot of controversy.
It
is ironic that the main paradigm of the organizers
of the Free Gaza Movement is last year's debacle
(which arguably did little good for anybody - see
my article Nothing
new for Israel all at sea, Asia Times Online,
3 June 2010) rather than, say, the 2008 expedition
that managed to reach Gaza without violence and
was widely perceived as a success. A number of
other sea-borne attempts to break the blockade
took place meanwhile, with varying outcomes. None
was as deadly and controversial as the May 2010
one.
It is not just the shadow of violence
that contrasts the most recent flotillas to the
previous runs on the blockade. The narrative of
the activists has been evolving in the last couple
of years. The early flotillas emphasized the need
for humanitarian assistance over political
messages. Now, that emphasis appears to be
reversed. "The flotilla is not about aid and
Palestinians do not want humanitarian aid. We
yearn for, we demand liberation," one of the top
organizers, Huwaida Arraf, told the Palestinian
news agency Ma'an.
There may well be a
link between these threads - political
undertakings traditionally hold a much greater
potential for violence than do humanitarian ones.
They also tend to provoke a harsher response from
the "other" side. The main challenge of any
non-violent movement - as the organizers claim to
be - is to break this link between political
activism and violence, and to reverse the logic of
the famous 19th-century military strategy Carl von
Clausewitz (who claimed that "war is the
continuation of politics by other means"). So far,
the Free Gaza Movement has had a very mixed record
at that, despite its rhetoric.
There is
little doubt there will be a confrontation - the
activists, despite numerous hiccups, have
announced thy will sail, and the Israeli
government has announced that it will intercept
the vessels; on Monday, the latter gave its final
approval for the operation to the military.
However, it is difficult to forecast what exactly
this confrontation will look like, just as it is
unclear how many and which exactly activists will
take part in it.
The Free Gaza organizers
were forced to scale down their plans several
times in the past months. One of their main
allies, the Turkish IHH charity, pulled out in the
last moment, ostensibly under political pressure
from the Turkish government. Arguably, Ankara
decided to boycott the undertaking for a complex
mixture of reasons, including the escalating
tensions with Syria (which could use the flotilla
to launch its own provocation against Israel, as
it has done twice in as many months, in hopes of
creating a distraction), a reported warming of
relations between Turkey and Israel, and an
alleged American offer for "major" Turkish role in
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. [1] Some
reports even have it that Turkey is concerned that
a soon-to-come United Nations report on last
year's flotilla will side with Israel and damage
Ankara's credibility. [2]
Whatever the
truth, IHH's decision likely had an ambiguous
effect on the activists' effort: on the one hand,
it deprived the flotilla of its flagship, a
powerful symbol, and a considerable part of its
participants. The original plan was to use the
Mavi Marmara, the ship where the violence
occurred last year, again in order to amplify the
message. The cancellation of that plan delivered a
logistical blow as well, since the Mavi Marmara
is considerably larger and can carry more
passengers than any of the other vessels in the
hands of the Free Gaza Movement.
On the
other hand, however, the Turkish IHH members
spearheaded last year's violence, and their
absence might give the activists a chance to
change tactics significantly, and to rehabilitate
their non-violent credentials. In particular, if
the soldiers overreact, but the activists remain
calm and non-violent, this would be a major
symbolic victory for the latter; clearly, at least
some of the participants are preparing for this
scenario. [3]
However, whether the
non-violent activists will be able to enforce
discipline among all participants, remains to be
seen, and will depend on who else is on board.
Reports have it that some IHH members and other
provocateurs have managed to infiltrate the
flotilla again.
Israeli forces, moreover,
have been preparing hard for the raid - and while
some of those preparations suggest a possibility
for overreaction, most actually point in the
opposite direction.
Part of Israel's
less-known narrative regarding last year's naval
raid is the shock of the Israeli public at images
of wounded Israeli soldiers being helplessly
carried away from the battle scene. The world
largely saw the events through a different prism -
that of armed commandos taking over vessels in
international waters.
Yet most Israelis
regarded the raid as legitimate law enforcement
action, not too different from what Israel and
other countries have done in the past, and carried
out with proper warnings and in accordance with
international standards for such actions. They
held their government accountable for not taking
more precautions to protect the soldiers.
This year, there is every indication that
the Israeli government is taking all threats
seriously. These include reports that some
activists plan to attack soldiers, possibly with
chemical substances such as sulfur, [4] and that
Iranian agents have tried to sneak aboard the
ships. [5]
According to a Jerusalem Post
report from early June:
This time around, the navy has been
preparing rigorously for the operation,
enlisting all of its Flotilla 13 [Israeli naval
special forces] commandos from the reserves and
running different training models with various
scenarios, from passive resistance - such as
sit-downs - to potential gunfights and
booby-trapped ships.
In addition to
Flotilla 13 - better known as the Shayetet - the
ships will be boarded by members of the Border
Police's Yasam Unit and the Prisons Service
elite Masada Unit, both known for their
expertise in crowd control and the use of
non-lethal means to quell violent riots.
The teams will be supported by snipers -
whose job will be to neutralize violent
protesters before the commandos board the ships
- with dogs from Oketz, the Israel Defense
Force's (IDF's) canine unit, and operators from
Yahalom, the elite unit from the Engineering
Corps. [6]
News of some of these
preparations - snipers and dogs - caused
considerable controversy in the Israeli media, due
to the uncomfortable similarity of the images they
invoke to scenes from concentration camps and the
Holocaust. While the comparison hardly holds on
any realistic terms, the dogs in particular are
almost certain to have been dropped from the final
operation plans.
The presence of elite
crowd-control forces, on the other hand, is
assuring; as subsequent inquiries into last year's
events revealed, military commandos are simply not
the appropriate type of force to use in
circumstances requiring riot control. It seems
that the Israeli government is trying hard to
correct this shortcoming, and we can expect that
the boarding, if one is carried out, will be
conducted more professionally.
It is not
even certain that the boats will be boarded at
sea. An alternative that has long been discussed
is, once all warnings are ignored, to disable to
vessels' engines and to tow them to the port of
Ashdod, where they can be boarded more easily and
with less danger of violence.
Last year,
this same scenario was also reportedly considered,
but it was rejected due to the size of the lead
ship, Mavi Marmara. Allegedly, disabling
the engines of such a large ship would incur
excessive danger that the vessel might sink,
causing many casualties. This year, however, the
Mavi Marmara is not sailing, and all of the
vessels involved are of a smaller size.
By
all accounts, Israel has no interest in seeing
violence erupt. The Israeli government and
non-governmental organizations have been trying
hard to prevent the flotilla from sailing,
including but not limited to putting pressure on
Turkey through various channels. Their efforts
appear to be relatively successful - according to
estimates, less than a half of the original
vessels and participants will sail.
"The
Foreign Ministry is leading diplomatic efforts to
delegitimize the flotilla in the eyes of the
international community," Israel's Deputy Foreign
Minister Daniel Ayalon told the news website Ynet.
[7] Support from the United States also helped,
although it did not prevent an American delegation
from setting out to Greece with hopes of taking
part in the expedition. The activists claim that
some underhand tactics were used against them as
well, including sabotage against one of the boats
and back-channel pressure on Greece to halt the
departure of the vessels. [8]
A
particularly interesting part of the campaign to
delegitimize the flotilla was conducted by an
independent Israeli legal organization, Shurat
HaDin, which threatened to sue insurance and
communications companies and other businesses
providing assistance to the expedition. [9]
All this suggests that Israel itself is
getting better in the field of non-violent
strategy, and may even be about to outpace the
Free Gaza activists. Its successes on this front
are part of why it is so difficult to tell who
will be in the final version of the flotilla as it
confronts the Israeli navy - several of the ships
are still reportedly being held back in Greece,
and it is unclear how that situation will be
resolved.
This, in a sense, presents the
organizers with a dilemma - if they do not create
a violent provocation, they will have to rely on
their luck (an Israeli overreaction) in order to
score any points. Otherwise, they will eventually
end up arrested and deported from Israel, without
the noise in the international media they seek.
Their humanitarian cargo will be transferred to
Gaza, as Israel has promised, but this is not
their goal.
For true followers of Mahatma
Gandhi, success comes slow, sometimes over many
years. If they choose to limit what they can
achieve with one operation, to a strictly symbolic
confrontation with Israel, and if they are able to
enforce the non-violent discipline, chances are
that there will be no violence. It will not be a
big victory, but it will give them an opportunity
to bolster their non-violent credentials, to set a
new standard for their subsequent undertakings, to
purge their ranks of provocateurs, and to prepare
for next stand-offs.
Taking this path
would demonstrate that the activists are firmly
persuaded in the overwhelmingly just nature of
their cause. If they are right and their opponents
wrong, manuals of strategic non-violence
postulate, cruel repression is bound to manifest
itself, if not immediately, then down the road.
This, in turn, would destroy Israel's - or any
opponent's - credibility and moral standing.
If, however, they - or some portion of
them - decide that they need to achieve results
quickly, or they have any reasons to doubt their
cause or the effectiveness of strictly non-violent
strategy, they will actively seek a confrontation.
Then it will all depend on the Israeli forces and
their ability to resist the provocations without
incurring unacceptable casualties.
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