Israel’s by-far-too-long-arm should be countered
by the yardarm.
The Yardarm is the Remedy
By Israel Shamir
Dozens
of our friends and comrades, of wonderful compassionate activists are
dead and wounded in the pirate attack in the high seas on humanitarian
aid boats. This is a dreadful crime that will forever be remembered and
should be punished.
The Israeli pirates attacked the humanitarian aid
Freedom Flotilla in the international waters over 90 miles (150 km) out
of their territorial waters. The boats carried no arms; the participants
strictly adhered to Ghandian mode by asking the Greek and Cyprus
authorities to search the boats to avoid later claims that they were
armed. It did not help them: the pirates boarded the boats in the high
seas, and they turned the boats into killing fields.
“They attacked us as we boarded their vessel, and we
killed them in self-defence”, - claimed the murderers afterwards, and
thousands of willing accessories to the murder repeated this nonsense.
An intruder can’t claim self-defence; while the activists were entitled
to defend themselves against the unlawful attack
The Guardian newspaper editorial correctly
stated: “the responsibility for the bloodshed was entirely
[Israel’s]. The Israeli navy said they were forced to open fire to avoid
being lynched. What did the commandos expect pro-Palestinian activists
to do once they boarded the ships – invite them aboard for a cup of tea
with the captain on the bridge?”
Our friend Yvonne Ridley
reminded that “under article 3 of the Rome Convention for the
Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation
of 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or
exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or
kill any person in the process. One cannot attack a ship and then claim
self-defence if the people on board resist the unlawful use of violence.
In other words, according to international law, the actions of the
Israeli military were beyond the law and those involved should be
treated no differently than, say, the Somali pirates who are also in the
habit of boarding ships by force. Any rights to self defence in such
dramatic circumstances rest purely with the passengers and crew on
board. Under international maritime law you are legally entitled to
resist unlawful capture, abduction and detention.”
Israel became a pirate state, like those established
in the Caribbean in 16th c or one that flourished on the
Barbary Coast as late as in 19th century. Pirate states
should be suppressed and dismantled; otherwise normal communications
will be disrupted. And the high seas piracy has a well known remedy: the
yardarm. The names of the pirates are well known; the first of them is
Ehud Barak, the ‘defence minister’ of the pirate state, whose place is
at the yardarm.
This is not the first time Israel acts like a pirate
state. Years ago, the Israelis had decided not to be bound by
international law, by borders and frontiers, by conventions but by its
own will. They seized boats in the international waters, hijacked
airplanes, kidnapped people overseas and killed whomever they fancied.
They kidnapped Mordecai Vanunu in Rome, they killed everywhere from
Norway to Cyprus, they cloned and forged foreign passports, they seized
liners and bombed airplanes. Nobody is safe from their
by-far-too-long-arm; their arm should be countered by the yardarm.
Inability of the world community to deal with the
pirates seriously undermined the Law of Nations and unhinged the Israeli
minds. The Jews of Israel and many of their brethren elsewhere had come
to an entirely wrong conclusion that they are above the law, a breed
apart. “Who cares what the goyim say; what matters is what the Jews do”,
said the founder of Israel, David Ben Gurion in a moment of elation,
though he was well aware of the permissible limits: when the American
president ordered him to roll back his troops from Sinai, he obeyed
within 24 hours. Since Ben Gurion and Eisenhower, not many people tried
to stop Israel.
Their luck lasted for fifty years and caused a
rupture between Israelis and reality; the Jews of Israel do believe now
that they can do whatever they wish for they are real human beings, and
the rest are not. And anyway “the world hates us”. So they try to
justify this hatred. In real life, people of the world do not “hate” or
care this way or other about Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Tutsi and other
small ethnic-religious communities who throw their weight around. These
guys usually get their stroke of luck, but they push it too far and
eventually they come to grief, so the world has to save them from utter
annihilation.
Insanity is not a defence, especially in the case of
simulated insanity. Israelis believe in the Mad Dog strategy attributed
to Moshe Dayan or Pinchas Lavon: “Israel must be a like a mad dog, too
dangerous to bother.” So they pretend they are even crazier than they
actually are. However, if they can’t be contained, mad dogs have to be
shot.
Our friend Jeff Blankfort proposed the diagnosis and
the treatment: “Israel is a nation controlled
by the criminally insane and supported by and large by a criminally
insane public that has total contempt for the rest of humanity and for
those Jews who do not support their racist enterprise. With its nuclear
weapons, it is Israel that is holding the rest of the world hostage. The
goal must be to find a way to disarm and dismantle it.”
Lifting of Gaza blockade is the first goal, while the
second is introduction of democracy and equality in the whole of the
land between the Sea and the River. It’s time for the Jews of Israel to
come to terms with reality: Jews are ordinary human beings, not some
supermen or space travellers or angels; they have to observe the
customary law of nations. They can’t go around killing people in neutral
waters; they can’t lock up a million of Gazans just because they are not
Jews.
The dastardly attack on the Freedom Flotilla provides
an opportunity: not only should the pirates be placed in the dock, but
their supporters overseas as well, for aiding and abetting. The
anti-terrorist laws promulgated by many nations allow for a legal
framework to do it. Israel is a terrorist state, thus its supporters and
lobbyists are supporters of terror network. They should be arrested
immediately and their assets seized.
While this will bring freedom to people of Gaza, it
will incidentally solve the financial and economic crisis as well,
because the terrorist supporters head such criminal structures as
Goldman-Sachs and Pentagon. They occupy not only Nablus, but the Capitol
Hill and Wall Street as well. Their removal will save millions. The
Greek debts and American mortgages will be evaporated; Afghanistan and
Iraq will find peace. Even democracy will become real, instead of demo
version.