The flotilla's real motivation
Melanie Phillips has a lengthy feature about the flotilla of fools and the legal battle being waged against them on her new blog. While I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, I want to highlight for you this 'straight from the horse's mouth' talk by Adam Shapiro - who co-founded the 'International Solidarity Movement' with his wife Huweida Arraf - about the true motivations for the flotilla.Well, the true aim was actually spelled out by Adam Shapiro, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a board member of the Free Gaza Movement (which is behind the flotilla), at a meeting last November at Rutgers university in New Jersey to raise money to fund an American flotilla boat. I have obtained a video of this address (no link, I’m afraid). This is what Shapiro said:Like I said, read the whole thing.What we’ve been doing over the last ten years with the International Solidarity Movement, Free Gaza, and all the other outgrowth organisations and movements and groups is to ...work with Palestinian society to ramp up the resistance. This is all part of a Palestinian movement for Palestine...This is truly an international movement ... It’s only Palestine, this cause that has been going on for over 60 years, that generates this kind of activism, this kind of resistance...So from the horse’s mouth we learn that the prime aim of the flotilla is not to provide humanitarian supplies to Gaza. It is not even to protest Israel’s ‘siege’ of Gaza. It is instead a tactic in a campaign to undermine Israel itself on account of its 60-plus year existence as a Jewish state. In other words, the flotilla is part of a strategy designed to destroy Israel altogether.
Free Gaza is but one tactic of a larger strategy, to transform this conflict from one between Israel and the Palestinians, or Israel and the Arab world...to one between the rest of the world and Israel... [applause]
It’s not just the conflict, it’s not just the siege, it’s not just the home demolitions, it’s not just the wall on the West Bank, it’s not just the effort to continue to dispossess Palestinians of their land...it’s also the attempt to define a place where 20 per cent of the population is Palestinian, to define the land underneath their feet as Jewish, to further dispossess them and subject these people to permanent second third or fourth class citizenship...Free Gaza is a tactic...all of it is part of a strategy now to transform the conflict and internationalise it and really undermine Israel where it gets its most support...
Our ground is the whole world. And that’s where our resistance has to be. The whole world... We already have a third intifada. It’s going on right now. It’s going on all over the world. [my emphasis]
These people are still fighting the 1948 war and are still fighting Israel's 'right to exist.' Anyone who thinks the flotilla is about a 'siege' on Gaza or that our dispute with the Arabs is about the 'occupation' ought to rethink their assumptions.
Labels: Adam Shapiro, flotilla of fools, Gaza plenty, International Solidarity Movement, Israel's right to exist
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:24 AM
4 Comments:
im still not clear why israel has not labeled the ism as a terrorist org and given orders to all idf to shoot their members on site
and as free gaza is nothing but an ism cover org...the same should be with the members of that org
also not sure why the state dept has not labeled the ism a terrorist org and locked shapiro up in gitmo
They were very successful last year in making it about Israel.
This year the story is about them and they frankly have no good excuse to sail.
With their flotilla tied up in the Greek port and its costing them money to keep their ships docked, its going to be difficult for them to attain their objective.
For Israel is not going to fall into their trap.
Israel is not trying to define "the land under their feet" as Jewish. Much more modestly, Israeli governments are the trustees of a Jewish state. The land itself was "defined as Jewish" four thousand years ago.
It's not the 48 war they are fighting, it's the apartheid struggle, they need a reason to go on, to get funding...
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