From Lynda Brayer, a human rights lawyer living in Haifa, Palestine, who is an active participant in the One State in Palestine movement and supports the Return of Palestinian Refugees to Palestine.
“Furthermore, what exacerbates the image problem for the Israeli government is that it is no longer Arab blood that has been spilt, but nice “white” or “European” blood that, in the West, is different from Arab or Muslim blood. The international reverberations and the trial against Israeli officials in the case of Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver for attempting to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home, should have provided sufficient warning to the Israeli regime of what is now about to unfold. Having chosen to confront the flotilla, it has now fallen into the proverbial biblical pit of its own making!
It is my assessment that this latest attack, with its future political reverberations, is the equivalent of Israel’s crossing the Rubicon. It is not “just” the use of force against hors de combat (civilians) (*)? something which it has been doing for decades ? but the murder and use of force against non-Arab and non-Palestinian internationals, people who are completely external to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. In addition, the attack took place on the high seas and not within Israeli territorial waters, thereby violating international norms in the international arena, beyond the boundaries of Occupied Palestine.
This event therefore marks not merely a quantitative increase in the number of non-Palestinians killed by Israel within the framework of the Palestinian struggle, but it also marks a qualitative change in the nature of the resistance, a change that I predict will and should become much more pronounced in the very near future. Since today, we have a growing list of foreign martyrs murdered by the Israelis in the non-violent struggle for the Palestinian cause. We are also witnessing an increased number of people from Israel taking part in this particular struggle. An Israeli member of Knesset, Hanin Zoobi, and the universally respected leader of the Northern Islamic movement, Sheikh Raad Salah, were on board. The latest news is that the Sheikh has been seriously wounded, and if this is the case, then I predict that this will lead to non-cooperation and resistance on the part of the Palestinian Arab community of Israel and their Jewish allies, paralleling the situation in the last stages of apartheid Africa.
This latest action carries within it the seeds of future joint International, Palestinian and Jewish cooperation in the Palestinian struggle. Future attempts to break the illegal blockade by the sailing of unarmed vessels will provide a unique opportunity to engage in non-violent resistance to tyranny. It is my hope that what is happening today is only the beginning of a groundswell of cooperative resistance in which we will find more and more Jewish Israelis who are prepared to confront their own government in such actions.”
She can be reached at lyndabrayer [at] yahoo [dot] com
My Comment
Of course, when you have a nuclear arsenal that can be (and according to some Israeli leaders, has been) trained on all European cities, we cannot blame poor Europe for quickly changing its tune and falling in with the US media’s David versus Goliath (European civilization fighting for its life among the untermenschen wogs) narrative.
But now that some non-wog blood has been spilled and that too in supposedly free waters, maybe the Israeli population will waken to the fact that murder really is murder..…