Were you ever in trouble with the authorities before last year?

I’m not the kind of person who knows how to shut up.  In 2005, me and some trusted friends wrote a manifesto talking about the Palestinian Authority and the way it rules us.  It caused some trouble.  I didn’t put it out under any name, but the Palestinian intelligence found out.

They arrested me and two other friends.  They took us to their leader.  He started telling us, “what you did is dangerous, you’re gonna be killed, executed.”  We told him, whatever: as long as we believe in what we’re doing we’re gonna keep doing it.  They took us to prison and they left us there.  Our families did not know anything about us for 45 days.

What about when Hamas took over in Gaza?

We still had a corrupt regime, and we had a stupid situation.  Gaza is one country and the West Bank is another country.  One is runby Hamas and one is run by Fatah.

We needed to change that situation.  And if you look at any youth in Gaza when they graduate they never get a job.  And if ever they gets a job, it’s not really well paid.  And you never have a dream, to think of the future.  So you either leave the country or you start thinking, how do I change this situation?

I started reading books about non-violent resistance, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, all these people.  I had a new understanding. And I talked about it with my friends.  We were sitting in a coffee shop, we started thinking about GYBO, how to do it.  We wrote the manifesto in 30 minutes.  We put it online.  Then we started planning for the future.

Before the creation of GYBO, before March 15, we had this phenomenon in Gaza: you never criticise the political movements.  If you criticise Hamas you’re always gonna be called a collaborator.  If you criticise Fatah you’re never going to have a job.  If you criticise Israel you’ll never be able to leave Gaza.  You never criticise anyone. But when we created GYBO we thought of breaking this wall of silence.  To say what we have in mind without taking into consideration what other people think of us.

What was the importance of the 15 March demonstrations?

We had a revolution in Gaza.  We were able to get almost 100,000 people on the street on 15 March.  And this revolution was for the reconciliation between the political movements.  Our message, to our leaders, was to stop looking at their narrow political interests and look at Palestine.  Fatah and Hamas were created to serve Palestine, not the opposite.  But today they’re using Palestine for their own interests.

We started planning how to do it, when to do it, where to do it.  We started studying scenarios of what Hamas’s reaction is gonna be.  Where we need to move if Hamas attacks us, how we need to move. We started gathering all the plans we needed until we put them into operation on the 15 March.  We put a lot of pressure on.

Our movement lasted until the 30 March.  They attacked us on the 15 March, so we didn’t continue that day.  But every 2 days we started going out from universities, from markets, from hospitals.  Talking about the situation, saying “we’re not satisfied people, we need to end this division, we need to have reconciliation.”

Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation agreement after a few months.  But we paid a very great price for that.  Many of my friends got arrested by Hamas. I got arrested several times.  Every time they arrested me they used to ask me ‘who’s Abu Yazan?’  Abu Yazan is my fake name, it’s not my real name.  They didn’t know me.

In August, after you returned from a media conference in France, you were arrested by Hamas after they discovered that you were ‘Abu Yazan’.  What happened?

They sent a notice saying that I should come right away to the internal security office.  They left me for four or five hours without asking me any questions.  I was sitting in a small chair, facing the wall, and I couldn’t even move.  If I did, I was gonna have someone hit me, so I didn’t move the whole time, for 5 or 6 hours. They gave me water and food, but the first day when I ate the food I threw up, it was really disgusting.  So I just didn’t eat.

They started asking me about the activities of GYBO.  And I always gave them stupid answers.  Because I know how this goes.  Either you give them no information or you give them lots of information.  They interrogated me for three days.  But there was a huge campaign outside the jail against the arrest.  Many people started calling Hamas leaders asking for my release, as fast as possible, as soon as possible.  And I got released after that.  But they never left me alone.  I used to get interrogated every two days or three days.  They send me a note, I go to the internal security, I have this stupid interrogation then I go back home.  Every once in a while, for 5/6 hours a day.  It was really bad for me, especially the last month before I came to Egypt, so I had to leave.

They never used violence against me.  Because they know what’s going to happen next if they do.  They know that I’m not the kind of person who shuts up.  I’m gonna tell everyone about what happened to me.

So what do you think about Hamas now?

Hamas people think that they’re superior, that they came from God, that they’re senators of God on earth.  If anyone stands against them, they won’t mind killing him.  Your cost is only a bullet to them.  If they feel that their movement is at risk, if they feel that they’re in danger, they won’t mind killing people.  We saw that in 2007, when the clashes happened between Fatah and Hamas, they killed 700 people.

But Fatah is not better than Hamas.  Fatah is corrupt and they were killing inside Gaza before Hamas.  And that’s what forced me to vote for Hamas when the election happened in Gaza.  Because I wanted to get rid of the dirty forces, the corruption of Fatah.  And now I’ve lost faith in everyone, in Fatah and Hamas.

The problem in Gaza and the West Bank is the regimes.  They’re international hands that are meddling in our cause.  The leaders of the movements in Gaza and the West Bank are not following their own faith they’re following demands they get from the outside.  For example, Hamas in Gaza is following the demands they get from Syria, Iran, and lately from the Brotherhood in Egypt.  And Abbas is getting his orders from America, from the US, from whoever gives him money.  So… our situation is really desperate.
Given your criticism of both Hamas and Fatah, is unity between two such compromised factions really what you want?

I’m looking for the election, the chance to vote.  It would give us a chance to vote to get rid of all these dirty faces.  I mean, we might have people from both sides, from Fatah and Hamas, but the clean people, not the dirty ones.

So what has become of the unity agreement, in practical terms?

Nothing.  I’ve been arrested since the signing of the unity agreement.  I mean, I was arrested before, but I got really screwed up after the unity agreement.  They found it amusing to arrest me every once in a while.  And nothing concrete on the ground.  I mean, the only thing that has changed is you can see a Fatah flag waving inside Gaza now, which had been banned for four years.  But some people are speaking up.  And if some things do not change on the ground, you’re going to see a revolution very soon in Gaza.

You think there will be an election?

No.  No way.

But then if people take to the streets, Hamas is going to beat the people with sticks, at the least…

Let them come with their sticks.  People are depressed to the extent that they don’t care about what’s going to happen next.  They won’t mind being hit with a stick, because they’re hitting a dead body.

Most people in Gaza don’t have a life.  The only thing that is covering their pain is the walls that they have around them.  They don’t say anything.  But at some point they’re going to explode and say everything that’s inside their minds.  All this frustration is going to explode.  They’ll say, ‘no, we’re not going to listen any more, we’re gonna say whatever we want, we’re going to act against you, against Fatah, against all this corruption.’

They can’t finish us off.  GYBO became an idea more than a movement, for many of the people.  It gave us the right to speak up, to say what we have in mind.  We broke the wall of silence at last.  Now, people can criticise Hamas inside the Hamas internal security building.  They can tell them, “you’re wrong.”

Practicalities
Nablus can easily be reached by bus or shared or private taxi from Ramallah (or, via Ramallah, Jerusalem). A range of accommodation is now available in the city, from medium/upper range hotels such as the Yasmeen (www.alyasmeen.com), in the heart of the old city, or the Al-Qasr in Rafidia (www.alqaserhotel.com/firstie), to budget hotels like the Crystal (Hotel Crystal Motel on Facebook), or youth hostel-style options such as Damascus House and the International Friends Guesthouse (www.guesthouse.ps).
Nablus has little public nightlife, although Nablus The Culture (www.nablusculture.ps) runs occasional concerts and literary events and the park near the city centre sometimes hosts family concerts. Eating out ranges from high-end choices such as the Qasr Al-Jabi, Saleem Afandi or Saraya restaurants to street stalls serving kebabs or felafel. The Rafidia area and streets around An-Najah University are also home to plenty of cafes.
Dream Tours (www.dreamtours.ps) and West Bank Tours (www.westbanktours.com) are local companies that can organise day trips, longer visits and accommodation and have fluent speakers of English on their staff.

Sarah Irving is the author of the Bradt Guide to Palestine. Red Pepper reader offer: use the coupon code RP35 at www.bradtguides.com to receive a 35% discount off the retail price of £15.99 (p&p free to UK addresses). Sarah Irving also runs palestineguesthouse.com, which lists small-scale and community tourist accommodation in Palestine

The young men and women dressed in khaki uniforms, semi-automatic rifles slung over shoulders, turn not a single head as they stream out of Tel Aviv’s busy central bus station. In any of Israel’s large towns this is a prosaic sight; with military service compulsory for all citizens over the age of eighteen – three years for men and two for women – everybody knows someone in the army. Yet while the embedding of the military in everyday life is manifest on the surface, its reality is not one readily acknowledged.

“You don’t speak about the army when you come home to your family,” says Eran Efrati, a well-built man in his late twenties. “They [the army] tell you that they don’t need to hear about it, that it might upset them. So it is ignored and denied and you pretend to go back to ordinary life”.

For Eran this denial is one of the ways in which the true nature of the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories is masked within Israeli society.

His chance to speak out came through Breaking the Silence (BtS), an organisation of former soldiers that since 2004 has interviewed hundreds of ex-combatants anonymously about their experiences of active service in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Their aim is to shed light on what really goes on in the occupied territories with the aim of stimulating public debate about the role of young soldiers in controlling the lives of a civilian population.

Full of tales of abductions, humiliation within homes and the beating of children perpetrated by soldiers, the testimonies make for shocking and at times harrowing reading. In doing so they uncompromisingly reveal the day-to-day of life under occupation for Palestinians – subject to measures justified under the banner of ‘security’ – from the unusual perspective of those meting the treatment. The severity of these accounts ranges from the mundane – the long delays inflicted at the checkpoints which carve up the West Bank; to the truly horrific – as recounted in the shock and awe tactics of warfare deployed during the bombardment of Gaza in 2009.

An ordinary soldier

By his own account Eran was an ordinary Israeli serving in the army until a series of incidents led him to question not only what he was doing but the role of the army.

“I went to a Medicins Sans Frontieres demonstration and a doctor asked me to take a pass to a family in Hebron, so that they could cross checkpoints in order for a grandparent to gain treatment. It struck a human chord with me as my mother was ill at the time, so I took it to them.”

On returning to base he was punished for this breach of security with two weeks incarceration in military prison. This would mark the beginning of a journey of disillusionment that almost ended in official disgrace. From thereon throwaway comments by colleagues and behaviour to which before he paid little attention began to take on a new significance, revealing something darker about the nature of the army operation.

“In Hebron one of our jobs was to survey houses in order to make detailed plans of living arrangements and rooms in the case of a suspected terrorist,” he continues. “We sometimes woke people up in the middle of the night and marched them outdoors – men, women and children – to do this. One day I asked my Sergeant what happened to the drawings and he replied: ‘We have had Hebron since 1967. Do you think you are the first to do the surveys?’”.

“I couldn’t believe this, as we had always been made to think that what we were doing was important work”.

‘Searing of consciousness’

On another occasion Eran heard members of a neighbouring unit laughing about an incident in which a Palestinian standing on a porch with a broom was mistakenly perceived to be bearing an arm and was shot dead by soldiers.

“The press reported it inaccurately, saying that a terrorist had been neutralised and that fortunately no soldiers had been hurt. I thought to myself ‘this is wrong, the public needs to know the truth’. So I went to my commanding officer to say that we must speak to the media and set the record straight. He just laughed in my face.”

According to the authors of the introduction to the BtS publication Israeli Soldier Testimonies: 2000-2010, the real purpose of many such routine counter-terror operations is not the flushing out known terrorists or maintaining security. They are, it is argued, intended to ‘punish, deter or tighten control over the Palestinian population’ with the term ‘prevention of terror’ stretched beyond its normal meaning to cover all offensives – in the process disregarding any distinction between civil and paramilitary targets. Other frequent examples cited are detention without charge, the destruction of infrastructure and property extra-judicial assassinations.

While the accounts themselves are stark and without analysis, the BtS authors argue that the overall objective of these aggressive methods is the deliberate strategy of ‘searing of consciousness’, pursued by army commanders. In effect this means proving to the Palestinian population as a whole that opposition is futile. This interpretation is evidenced by accounts of everyday ‘demonstration of presence’ exercises – a term describing tactics of intimidation designed to stamp the army’s authority and instill fear. Under the military euphemism of ‘disruption of normalcy’, soldiers recount night patrols waking up villages at night by firing into the air, searching houses and throwing sound bombs – often without any intelligence linking sites with terrorist activity.

No questions, please

The recurring themes of arbitrary punishment and intimidation indicate that this strategy goes to the heart of the occupation itself; underscoring at the same time the contradiction between the rhetoric of security and reality of violent colonisation. Yet even within the ranks of the IDF this not admitted. Eran recounts how, during an officer training programme, one classmate questioned the logic of the deployment of troops throughout the entire West Bank.

“The [class] instructor told us that the army was here [in the West Bank] to ensure the security of Israel against terrorists. One guy asked whether it would be a better idea just to have a reinforced line of units along the border instead of loads of scattered inside [the territories] to prevent them from entering. It made sense; but instead he was removed from the class.”

It was at this point that belief in the morality of what he was doing started to unravel in Eran’s mind. Things came to a head when he was arrested at a weekly demonstration against the separation wall which divides many Palestinians from their land, for which he landed another two weeks in army prison and narrowly escaped a dishonorable discharge.

Psychology of the oppressor

While statistics on detentions and the kilometers of road blocks can draw a systematic overview of the occupation, the BtS testimonies are unique in offering deeply human impressions. As anecdotes they go some way to explaining the psychological edifice upon which the occupation is built; and it is their subjective quality which is most striking – especially since they come from the mouth of those whose structural role is that of oppressor.

Soldiers are told how the IDF is the “most moral army in the world”, respectful of human rights and there is no indication that overt racism is promoted within the ranks of the army. Yet Eran says that there is a slow and subtle process of indoctrination in Israeli society – starting in the family and education system – that at once perpetuates the occupation and commands unswerving loyalty from citizens. The corollary fear and suspicion of Arabs pervasive in Israeli society comes to an inevitable ugly head in the army, he recalls.

“You are trained for 8 months to expect a war and then as an 18 or 19 year old they drop you at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere and you are face to face with Arabs for the first time in your life. Many of those guys [IDF soldiers] are young and scared. Army life makes you miserable and without knowing it you want to inflict this upon somebody else”.

While some witnesses express disgust at the excesses of their colleagues, overall there is a general sense of  detatchment from the barbarism of what takes place. This corrosive effect of the day-to-day drudgery on a soldier’s moral compass is laid bare in one unsettling account: “The standards of good and evil deteriorate there…I can’t tell you what’s good and what isn’t, because I don’t have all of the tools.”

The reader quickly infers that a normalisation of violence never lurks far away – degrading not only the victims but, in a different way, the soldiers themselves.

Hostile reception

In a country that has always responded militarily to a (perceived or real) existential threat since its establishment, the reception to BtS is, predictably, not a warm one.

Critics have lambasted BtS as ‘terror supporters’ and for seeking to aid the ‘delegitimisation’ of Israel. The Israeli government sees them as such a threat that in 2009 it sought to persuade the Dutch foreign ministry to withdraw funding issued by its embassy.

Those critical of the occupation are on the fringe of Israeli society and treated with contempt in many quarters, and for people like Eran speaking out can mean accusations of betrayal, estrangement from family and social stigma.

Yet in spite of the the bulk of public opinion a recent article in the liberal newspaper Haaretz shows that there are cracks starting to appear in mainstream discourse.

In an impassioned review of BtS publications Ilana Hammerman decried the ‘logic of the absurd’ that sustains the occupation. This, she wrote, consists of a breakdown of “the mental and moral borders between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between good and evil, between stupidity and wickedness, between the humiliated and those who humiliate”.

You can read the testimonies and download PDF versions of Breaking the Silence’s publications in English at: http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ 

Eran Efrati now lives in New York where he gives lectures on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the ‘Israeli Apartheid’

This land might just be cinched too tight
for a population of humans and gods

Darwish was six in 1948 when his family fled their village in western Galilee. When they returned a year later they found the village destroyed and their land occupied. Since they had missed the census they were denied Israeli citizenship and declared ‘present-absentees’, an ambiguous status that Darwish was to transform into a metaphor for Palestine and much more.
He was 22 when he read his poem ‘Identity Card’, with its defiant refrain ‘Record: I am an Arab’, to a cheering crowd in a Nazareth movie house. Repudiating Golda Meir’s assertion that ‘there are no Palestinians’, his poems played a key role in the Palestinian movement that emerged after 1967, fashioning a modern Palestinian identity using traditional poetic forms in a renewed, accessible Arabic.

Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, Darwish left Israel in 1970 and remained in exile for more than a quarter of a century. His political journey led from the Israeli Communist Party to the PLO, which he joined in 1973 (penning Arafat’s famous ‘Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand’ speech to the UN). He settled in Beirut, from which he was expelled along with the PLO following the Israeli invasion of 1982, the subject of his inventive and harrowing prose memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness.

In the years that followed, Darwish wandered – Tunis, Cyprus, Damascus, Athens, Paris – broadening his poetic scope and deepening his insight. He was elected to the PLO executive committee in 1987 but resigned in 1993 in protest at the Oslo accords. ‘There was no clear link between the interim period and the final status, and no clear commitment to withdraw from the occupied territories,’ he explained. It’s said that when PLO leader Yasser Arafat complained to Darwish that the Palestinian people were ‘ungrateful’, the poet (remembering Brecht) snapped back, ‘Then find yourself another people.’

Oslo did allow Darwish to return to Palestine and in 1996 he settled in Ramallah, only to find himself under siege again six years later. In his last years he wrote more prolifically than ever, responding to the tragedies of Iraq, Lebanon and the violent conflict between Palestinian factions:

Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on our hands … to realise that we are no angels … as we thought?
Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin? How much we lied when we said: we are the exception!

When Darwish died in 2008, thousands joined the cortege and there were candle-lit vigils in towns across the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority declared three days or mourning and issued a series of postage stamps in his honour.

Being the Palestinian national poet was a heavy burden, one that Darwish bore from an early age, and though he chafed under it he never shirked the load. Instead, he succeeded in transforming the Palestinian experience into a universal one. The themes of loss, exile, the search for justice, the dream of a homeland, the conundrum of identity: all became, as his work evolved, human and existential explorations, without ceasing for a moment to be rooted deeply in the vicissitudes of Palestinian life. For decades he mourned Palestine’s losses, denounced its tormentors, celebrated its perseverance, and imagined its future.

And we have a land without borders, like our idea
of the unknown, narrow and wide
… we shout in its labyrinth: and we still love you, our love
is a hereditary illness.

Though preserving Palestinian memory and identity was his life’s work, Darwish conceived of this as a creative act of self-renewal: ‘Identity is what we bequeath and not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember.’ Among his last verses was this admonition:

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets
We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

Darwish was a ‘national poet’ who challenged as well as consoled and inspired his national audience. As he moved away from his earlier declamatory, public style towards a more personal idiom, elliptical and oblique, and at times (unpardonable sin for a ‘national’ poet) obscure, he met resistance. ‘The biggest achievement of my life is winning the audience’s trust,’ he reflected in 2002. ‘We fought before: whenever I changed my style, they were shocked and wanted to hear the old poems. Now they expect me to change; they demand that I give not answers but more questions.’
Even in translation, where we miss so much, Darwish’s voice rings clear. In his mature style there’s a seductive fluidity: he moves lightly from realm to realm, pronoun to pronoun (‘I’ to ‘we’, ‘I’ to ‘you’, ‘us’ to ‘them’), from the intimate to the epic, past to future, abstract to concrete. Metaphors topple over each other, abundant and inter-laced. This is poetry that fuses the political and the personal at the deepest level.

Throughout, his evocation of loss and exile, of coming from ‘a country with no passport stamps’, is poignant, elegiac but open-ended, conjuring resolution from despair: ‘We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing’; ‘There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration’; ‘Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?’; ‘In my language there is seasickness. / In my language a mysterious departure from Tyre’.

Guests on the sea. Our visit is short.
And the earth is smaller than our visit
… where are we to go
when we leave? Where are we to go back to when we return?
… What is left us that we may set off once again?

Yet, convinced that ‘Out of the earthly/ the hidden heavenly commences’, Darwish affirmed the richness and beauty of life, especially life in its ordinariness:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories

In one of his late poems, Darwish pays tribute to his friend Edward Said, putting this advice in Said’s mouth:

Do not describe what the camera sees of your wounds
Shout so that you hear yourself, shout so that you know that you are still alive, and you know life is possible on this earth.

When firebrand Israeli advocate Lea Tsemel was allowed 20 minutes to interview more than 100 flotilla activists being held in Ela Women’s Prison in Be’er Sheva, she entered and declared: ‘You have no idea what is going on out there. You have changed the world. Israel is finished.’

Nato member Turkey demanded an emergency session of the UN security council and got it. Ecuador, South Africa and Nicaragua joined Turkey in recalling their ambassadors from Israel. World leaders, including foreign secretaries Hilary Clinton, Bernard Kouchner and William Hague, called Israel’s blockade ‘unsustainable’. Protests erupted from Jakarta to Johannesburg. The Swedish dockers’ union launched a blockade of Israeli goods.

At the same time, a coalition of 60 international lawyers launched lawsuits against Israel for breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, including wilful killing, inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer, unlawful confinement, taking of hostages and extensive appropriation of property. Further boat efforts were launched in Canada, India, Belgium, South Africa and Australia, including a German-British organised Jewish boat. The global media buzzed with soundbites from across the political spectrum. Gaza and Palestine were back in people’s living rooms.

New space in the US

According to the International Solidarity Movement co-founder and Free Gaza board member Adam Shapiro, the flotilla has created new political space in the US: ‘The public did start questioning why Gaza is under such restrictions and overall there is more support for Gaza and changing the situation there. More and more folks are coming into the movement, including more Turkish-Americans. Additionally, there is now a campaign in the US to get a boat to join the next flotilla, which was really not viable before.’

At least a dozen Americans, including former US army colonel Ann Wright, were aboard the flotilla; and Free Gaza’s Challenger 1 and 2 boats were both legally American territory, flying the US flag. Since the attack, US activists from the flotilla, including Wright and lawyer Fatima Mohammadi, have been touring the US as part of the US Ship to Gaza effort. This is raising money and awareness in a campaign comprising more than 70 US peace and justice organisations to get The Audacity of Hope, as yet un-purchased, to Gaza.

Ramzi Kysia, a Lebanese-American writer and Free Gaza board member based in Washington, is organising for the US boat effort: ‘Prior to the attack, the flotilla received very little press coverage in the US. After the attack, we received more coverage than I’ve ever seen before for any single “activist” action. But we weren’t prepared or logistically able to work the media to our advantage.’

Neither Kysia nor Shapiro think the flotilla attack was an immediate game-changer. Kysia says: ‘I’m not sure the event by itself resulted in any more support within the general public for Palestine, but it certainly helped in planting seeds and adding to the general unease that many folks already felt. Long term, the most positive result may be in invigorating and motivating existing activists and organisations on the pro-justice side.’

The Jewish Boat to Gaza project, however, certainly has attracted more funding and support since the flotilla, according to Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP). ‘We have reinforced our coalitions with Jewish peace and justice groups in Europe and America who are supporting us financially and we are also working far more closely with many solidarity movements,’ says Diana Neslen of JfJfP.

The Jewish Boat to Gaza project was originally a Judische Stimmer (the Germany-based Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East) initiative inspired by the first Free Gaza missions but has now broadened into a coalition sponsored by a federation of European and American Jewish peace groups.

Concrete success

One of the most concrete examples of success, aside from media agenda-setting and coalition-building, was an actual concession from Israel in easing the blockade. Although the move was criticised by the Freedom Flotilla coalition as ‘cosmetic’, Israel was forced to admit that elements of the blockade were unjustified.

Egypt also opened the Rafah border with Gaza, reporting that it had allowed as many as 65,253 Palestinians to cross in a period of 83 days. All aid was given to the UN to distribute inside Gaza. According to Akram al Sattari, project manager at Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza, ‘Many essential electronic apparatuses we lacked before have now been delivered, and if you look at everyday commodities on the markets, you can now pretty much buy anything – if you have the money. But, the most important things we still lack are building materials. We still cannot reconstruct.’

Wafa Hospital itself was bombed with white phosphorous and eight tank shells during Operation Cast Lead in January 2009. The UN estimates some 20,000 people still remain homeless and most of the 4,000 levelled homes, 18 destroyed schools and thousands more public buildings, including factories and ministries, have yet to be rebuilt.

Impact in Palestine

What impact did the flotilla make at the grassroots in Gaza? Mahmoud Abu Rahma of the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights sees it as having had a unifying effect on Palestinian factions: ‘What was unique with this flotilla was that it unified Palestinians around a cause, something we have not seen much of in the past few years. I was surprised that civil society, ordinary people, but also all the factions and the two governments, made strong statements supporting the flotilla. It was significant that these statements were made before the attack, so they were not out of investing the tragedy for narrow political reasons.’

In the West Bank, Dr Husam Zumlot, of Fatah’s Commission on International Relations, sees the flotilla tactic as a historic success for the Palestinian people as a whole: ‘In the West Bank people responded to the flotilla with excitement and inspiration. The action has brought about some of the most fruitful results in the history of the conflict. The target of the flotilla was not seen as support for Hamas, but solidarity with the people of Gaza and ending the injustice there, and the people of the West Bank were as totally and utterly behind it as the people of Gaza. Even if it does benefit Hamas, so what? It means nothing. If it benefits the people, that is the most important thing.’

The response from the Hamas leadership in Gaza is similar to that of Fatah in the West Bank. Spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told Red Pepper: ‘All Palestinian parties were united in condemning the vicious act against the flotilla, demanding a swift lifting of the unjust blockade, and calling for an international tribunal to look into the matter in support of the flotilla organisers. This means in a way that the flotilla united all Palestinians for a while.’

‘The flotilla succeeded in inciting global resentment against Israel’s occupation,’ Barhoum continues. ‘It further isolated Israel, and played a critical role forcing Israel to ease the siege. The negatives were the human price paid – the fatalities.’

Was Hamas strengthened by the flotilla? ‘Israel, the US, and their allies in the region and outside of it have been accusing whoever calls for a dignified life for the people of Gaza as someone who is going to reinforce Hamas governance in Gaza. The flotilla and all the past attempts to help the people of Gaza were of humanitarian nature. However, at the political level, the flotilla, the Lifeline convoy, and the Miles of Smiles convoy brought some positive change to the community and Hamas government there.’

What about Israel?

The Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev tries to focus on delegitimising the flotilla by association with Islamism: ‘The flotilla was jointly sponsored by the Turkish Islamist organisation IHH and by the Free Gaza Movement. The former is an extremist Islamist group which openly supports Hamas. The Free Gaza Movement claims to be a human rights group, a pro-peace group and a progressive group but nothing could be further from the truth. They have never condemned Hamas’s ongoing and deliberate targeting of innocent Israeli civilians. I think that many in Israel genuinely fail to understand how people who claim to have progressive politics can be apologists for violent reactionary Islamists.’

However, British journalist Rachel Shabi, who is based in the region, says the attack created new space for debate in the Israeli left about boycott, divestment and sanctions, and raised questions for ordinary Israelis about why the international community views their government so differently from the way they do.

‘Within Israel, the incident seemed to widen the growing chasm between the country’s self-image and the way it is perceived overseas,’ says Shabi. ‘Israelis couldn’t really comprehend the force of foreign criticism, or why Israel’s claim that it was acting in self-defence against hostile, weapon-bearing activists was so summarily dismissed overseas. The incident, and international reaction to it, has compounded Israel’s “besieged” narrative – one of being constantly condemned by an international community that doesn’t understand Israel’s predicament and is motivated by undertones of anti-semitism.’

On the other hand, according to Shabi, ‘It has galvanised and empowered Israel’s small, beleaguered activist community – for whom the feeling that their country is rapidly losing the plot was loudly amplified by the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008-9 and then reinforced by the flotilla raid. Some say they have become more acutely aware that their position as “progressive” is increasingly received as “extremist” and “treacherous” in Israel.’

Internationally, the flotilla attack has strengthened the cultural boycott of Israel. The Pixies, Gorillaz, Faithless, Leftfield and the Klaxons have all since cancelled shows in Israel. According to Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli boycott activist and former air force captain in the unit that dropped the commandos that killed activists on the biggest ship of the flotilla, the Mavi Marmara, ‘Most Israelis are desensitised to images of dead Palestinian children and burnt homes, but the refusal of the Pixies to play Tel Aviv has an impact, this gets them asking questions.’

Overall, the freedom flotilla illuminated the possibility that non-state actors can directly intervene in global issues, becoming players in a game seen as one for state and armed actors only, and change it. It showed grass-roots organisations and radical NGOs asserting and claiming the right to be political in directly challenging Israel and international collusion in the illegal siege and occupation of Palestine, in the process opening up new political space and new alliances that will have a cumulative effect on broadening and emboldening the solidarity movement.

A second international flotilla of up to 12 boats is scheduled to depart in the next six months. See www.freegaza.org for more details. Also see www.jfjfp.com for updates on the Jewish boat to Gaza and www.boycottisrael.info, the Israeli Boycott from Within. Ewa Jasiewicz is a freelance journalist and a co-ordinator of the Free Gaza Movement