The death throes of a failing state

That Israel would use lethal force against humanitarians is shocking enough – that it murdered at least 15 unarmed civilians in international waters means that today is likely to mark a turning point in the struggle for Gaza and Palestine. In the remains of the Freedom Flotilla lie the last shreds of Israel’s pretence to belong to the international community.

According to Turkish television, all of the dead are Turkish citizens, a fact that previous convoy members find very plausible. The Turkish contingent was always the least likely to stand by and watch while the ships were taken over, and it is this refusal to bend over to the Israelis that could well have cost them so dear. Over the next week or so a fuller picture should emerge of what exactly transpired on board the Mavi Marmamra, and it is one that Israel is likely to emerge from in disgrace. Meanwhile, friends and family of those on board must wait fearfully for news. Even those on board will not yet have a clue as to which of their friends and colleagues are dead, wounded or alive.

Expect public opinion to be enraged across the Arab and Islamic world and beyond. Citizens from over 40 nations were among those on board, and the vessels themselves were sailing under Turkish and Greek flags, which means that Israel has this time attacked the citizens of almost quarter of the world’s countries. There is widespread talk that this could trigger a Third Intifada, a possibility not lost on Israel which has locked down the Palestinian territories and sensitive sites like Al-Aqsa mosque in Jersualem.

Here in in Amman a march took place from the JEA (Jordan Engineers Association) to the Prime Minister’s Office, while another demonstration was held outside the Israeli Embassy in Rabeah. Further marches and protests are due to take place outside Mosque, embassies and government buildings, and these should be expected to continue over the next few days as a clearer picture emerges of the massacre.

The sheer audacity of the attack on the humanitarians, which happened in international waters, means that the diplomatic backlash is likely to be even stronger than during Operation Cast Lead, and is a massive own goal for the Israeli war machine. Already Jordan, Turkey, Sweden, Greece and Egypt have summoned their respective Israeli officials for an explanation of events, and it seems highly likely that some countries, such as Sudan, will cut off diplomatic ties altogether. Turkey and other countries are calling for an emergency UN meeting to discuss the attack while Ban Ki-Moon has condemned it strongly.

Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner and saviour of the world Barack Obama has yet to make a statement about what happened, although a White House spokesman did express a bland and general regret for the loss of civilian life. Worse, Benjamin Netanyahu is still on course to meet with Obama tomorrow, a move that is likely to cement the idea that America will serve as Israel’s protector during the backlash.

Now, Israel has resorted to it’s tried and tested tactic of smearing its victims, describing the flotilla as “an armada of hate” and claiming that weapons were hidden on board. Unfortunately, too many people choose to believe the IDF version of events, which as of now is still the only version to emerge.

It is no irony that one of the flotilla’s vessels was named the MV Rachel Corrie, after the young American activist killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Like Corrie, the Mavi Marmara and it’s as-yet-unkown martyrs will surely become a byword for bravery and dignity in the face of brute force.

Passage to Gaza

A breakdown I did of the political dimension of the convoy's journey through the Middle East.

http://www.jordan-business.net/magazine/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=353&Itemid=40

Gaza 2: Aid

With such a limited time, getting the aid to the right people became the overwhelming concern. It's not a small undertaking either, as the convoy consisted of 148 vehicles filled with medicines, clothing, power generators, atmospheric water extractors and medical equipment like dialysis machines. Eighty of the vehicles were ambulances destined for Gaza’s beleaguered hospitals and clinics.

I found Ellie Merton hugging one like it was her own child. “I’ve lived with this baby for 32 days. I personally picked it up from Norwich’s ambulance depot, and we’ve been through the snow, the rain, the riots and the waits” she explains. Its surprising how attached you can become to a lump of metal. As Ellie explains though, it’s become more than a vehicle. “We’re carrying with us the hopes and emotions of so many we’ve met along the way”.

Nearby I found Mirban Aslam, the driver of the minibus that I traveled in, having a sombre discussion with an education official. Having driven 8,000km into Gaza, the last few hundred with a fractured arm after a fall in Aqaba, he was finally handing over the keys to his vehicle to be used as a school bus for blind children. The usually bubbly Mirban struggled to hold back the emotion as he handed over the keys to the vehicle, which also included six diesel power generators, wind-up torches, and clothes. “This is exactly what I wanted”.

There is more to the aid effort than simply bringing stuff though, as Moheeb Abu Alqumboz explained. A manager at the Islamic University and a volunteer who helps receive humanitarian delegations, said that in Gaza, like anywhere else, the proper research needs to be done beforehand. “Proper needs assessment needs to be undertaken before sending medical supplies such as equipment or disposables. If the machines don’t fit the existing system or the staff aren’t trained in their use, then they’re not much use.” He points that often, health officials are too embarrassed to tell donors these details for fear of offending or disappointing them.

Moheeb also stresses that while direct aid is welcome, its really income generation schemes that are needed. One of the projects he’s involved with is Work Without Borders (www.palwork.net), a remote working scheme where you can hire services such as website design and translation from Gaza or other offices in Palestine. The work gets done by the many highly-skilled graduates who live in Gaza, and provides a vital link to the outside world as well as income.

You could find many of those young graduates loitering shyly around the convoy members, eager to help out. Almost all had embarrassingly good English. Despite the conditions, you sense that education is a top priority. Some of the most dilapidated houses we visited had several university students living there, an indication of how much they value it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that “the only way to get out of Gaza is on a stretcher or on a scholarship”, as one student pithily put it. Another English student, Abdul Moniem, can't contain his pride when he tells me that the Islamic University is the top-ranked university in all of Palestine, and the 14th best in the Arab world. I want to get away before he asks me if I went to uni, emabarassed with the Oxford degree I got with only a fraction of the sacrifices that he must make. The Science and Engineering buildings were destroyed in Operation Cast Lead, accused of being weapons workshops. Imagine the Radcliffe Camera got bombed. Think you'd hear about it?

(Photo: Haya Al-Shatti)

Gaza 1: Heroes

With wicked irony, it was the convoy members who ended up playing the role of war victim as they finally entered the Gaza Strip. Still reeling from the Egyptian police attack that left 60 injured the night before, the thousands who braved the night cold to greet us provided the perfect tonic for the cracked heads and stitched faces. What seemed like a sea of a thousand motorcycles, with two, sometimes three people on each, raced alongside us, colliding in their eagerness to keep up as we drove from Rafah to Gaza City. This was a welcome that not even King’s receive. We were allowed only 30 hours in the Strip, an Egyptian imposed time-limit that meant that we could only really catch a glimpse of Gaza.

One of my first glimpses is a youth on a motorcycle who throws me his red kiffiyeh. “Remember me!” he shouts, before disappearing in a sea of flags.

War

Tuesday 5th January

The convoy included more than 80 ambulances as it sat waiting in the Egyptian port of Al-Arish. Little did we know we'd be using most of them before the night was through.

Earlier, protracted negotiations over what was and what wasn’t allowed through the Rafah border had come to an abrupt halt. The Egyptian negotiator had walked out, ostensibly to make a telephone call, but hadn’t returned in two hours. In that time, hundreds of black-clad riot police armed with tear gas and water cannons had enclosed the 500 convoy members, but up until now, everything had passed in peace. We’d been reciting Quran and praying. Some of us tried reasoning, as demonstrated here by the eloquent and passionate Scottish-Libyan, Ibrahim.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9dkzAdXLBs&feature=related

Myself and some Turks had climbed a watchtower on western-side of the port (to Ibrahims right in the video clip), where I could see the waiting water trucks and hundreds of riot reinforcements behind the police lines. Also behind the police crouched a group of around 30 Egyptian-looking types in plain-clothes, stockpiling rocks. I’d heard about these from last year – theories about their indentity ranged from local Fatah supporters or hired mercenaries to members of the mukhbarabrat, the state security apparatus that some number as 1 million strong in Egypt. I took pictures of them from my vantage point.

The standoff continued. About 15 minutes later, some convoy members were sitting down still reciting the Quran when I saw a group of about seven Americans tried to reenter the compound from outside. They were walking with linked arms and were chanting “We are Americans, We are Americans”, over and over. The police couldn’t give a damn. No sooner had they reached the shields than they were set upon with batons. Directly in front of me, the situation none of us had wanted had started to unfold.

The chaos spread like fire. One of the girls whose brother had been taken by the police and beaten started screaming, a terrible piercing scream that spread across the compound. To my left I saw the police break rank, rushing towards the convoy members with batons up. They responded by throwing barriers, punches and rocks back.

Below me, I watched the police beat one of the Americans, Emad, so badly I was convinced that they would kill him. He disappeared in a sea of black boots, gloves and batons as I could do nothing but shout from the ledge. If they killed him there noone would even have seen it, but to jump down would have been suicide. With nothing else to do, I shouted “Ya Allah!” (Oh God) so hard I couldn’t speak for the next two days, and continued to take pictures.

This attracted the mysterious people with the rocks, and no sooner were they aware that there were people on the ledge then a torrent of rocks began to come our way. Not just little stones. Half-bricks and sharp pebbles, carefully collected and prepared for our welcoming party.There was no chance but to turn and run.

Broken glass rained down on me as I scrambled down the ladder, and I could feel the water from a gust that blew over my head. As I ran deeper inside the compound, desperately trying to adjust my camera settings, a rock struck me unexpectedly on the back of the head, no doubt hurled by the youths I was watching just minutes earlier. Bleeding and confused, I put the camera down as one of the Turks poured water and antiseptic over the wound, and handed me a tissue to apply pressure. All around me others staggered back, bloodied and blinded by the tear gas as the rocks continued to rain down. The sky was full of rocks, sailing gracefully in both directions. Absolute white-hot rage.

Further inside, I found Emad the American again. Lying flat behind an ambulance surrounded by first aiders, his eyes were bulging as blood seeped from a head wound. Neda Agha Sultan’s last moments instantly came to mind, and I hesitated before taking a few pictures with my camera that another Turk had handed back to me. He was desperately trying to tell us who was still lost in the throng of black outside. “Haya is still out there, Faith is still out there..”

It transpired that Zubair, another brother who was on the watchtower, had pulled him to safety from the ledge below. If it wasn’t for his bravery then I don’t think Emad would have made it out, such was the savagery of the beating. Others were still missing, including seven who were arrested and were to be kept in a police van with no food or water for 12 hours.

We’d taken some hostages of our own. Some were fair game - policemen - but some were random Egyptians unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the heat of battle, it’s difficult to think rationally. God forgive those of us who wanted to take out their frustration on the wrong target. None of them were harmed, but you could see the pure terror on their faces.

The din died down after about 10 minutes, though not before more injuries were brought back from the front. I could see old Turkish men stumbling back with bloodied heads and faces lay on the floor, as well as those who were sitting down blinded by the gas which I was lucky enough not to encounter. Out of all of us, it was the Turks who stood firm the most, and took the biggest beating.

Nobody slept much that night. Later I saw some of the most mild-mannered and gentle people I know (I won’t say who) walking around with steel pipes and baseball bats, ready for any policeman who dared come in. They played games with us, and kept moving formations throughout the night. We could see guns this time, ensuring that the next kick-off would not be as merciful. I managed to get some sleep in the mosque just inside, camera at the ready beside me in case events escalated. Thankfully they didn’t, and as I awoke in the morning from my bloodied pillow we were already getting ready to move out.


Convoy members praying before they were assaulted. Note the aid lorry in the background.















The seconds before it kicked off, from on top of a ledge. Riot police and water cannons.















American Emad, lying delirious behind an ambulance.
















Samir, another convoy member.
















The Turkish aid lorry from the first picture.
















(Photos courtesy of Zuber Hatia)

Back in Amman

I got back to Amman yesterday, on a flight from Cairo with the Jordanian delegation. In a goodbye kiss from the Egyptian government, 11 convoy members were arrested at the airport, which had a heavy riot police presence. They included several of my friends who were taken prisoner in Al-Arish, along with several Turks who had been involved in trouble at Rafah on Friday. As of yet, I haven't heard anything about their release, but once I do I will update their situation here.

Over the next few days I'll be updating my blog with back-dated entries of what happened, starting with my experience in Egypt. I won't be able to put the full details of what happened on the blog right now, as I will be writing about the events for several newspapers and magazines and I don't want to be duplicating text. For now, here's an article which I wrote which was published while I was away, which describes the convoy's reception in Amman. http://tinyurl.com/yetdbao

Gaza

We are finally, finally in Gaza. Alhamdulilah.

I've been without internet since the last post. So much has happened since then that I cannot even begin summarise it here. I promise to do that once I get back to Amman, beginning with the story of Al-Arish. Suffice to say here that we are now in Gaza, and all the trouble and the travel, the lack of sleep, the frustration and the doubt and the confusion and the blood was worth it, for this.

And only now I realise that its the being here that counts. To a prisoner with no hope of release, a gift parcel is a welcome distraction, but a visit from your brother, a brother you've never seen before, means a whole lot more.