Israelis opened fire before boarding Gaza flotilla, say released activists:

First eyewitness accounts of raid contradict version put out by Israeli officialsBy Dorian Jones in Istanbul and Helena Smith

June 01, 2010 "The Guardian" -- Survivors of the Israeli assault on a flotilla carrying relief supplies to Gaza returned to Greece and Turkey today, giving the first eyewitness accounts of the raid in which at least 10 people died.

Arriving at Istanbul's Ataturk airport with her one-year-old baby, Turkish activist Nilufer Cetin said Israeli troops opened fire before boarding the Turkish-flagged ferry Mavi Marmara, which was the scene of the worst clashes and all the fatalities. Israeli officials have said that the use of armed force began when its boarding party was attacked.

"It was extremely bad and very tough clashes took place. The Mavi Marmara is filled with blood," said Cetin, whose husband is the Mavi Marmara's chief engineer.

She told reporters that she and her child hid in the bathroom of their cabin during the confrontation. "The operation started immediately with firing. First it was warning shots, but when the Mavi Marmara wouldn't stop these warnings turned into an attack," she said.

"There were sound and smoke bombs and later they used gas bombs. Following the bombings they started to come on board from helicopters."

Cetin is among a handful of Turkish activists to be released; more than 300 remain in Israeli custody. She said she agreed to extradition from Israel after she was warned that conditions in jail would be too harsh for her child.

"I am one of the first passengers to be sent home, just because I have baby. When we arrived at the Israeli port of Ashdod we were met by the Israeli interior and foreign ministry officials and police; there were no soldiers. They asked me only a few questions. But they took everything – cameras, laptops, cellphones, personal belongings including our clothes," she said.

Kutlu Tiryaki was a captain of another vessel in the flotilla. "We continuously told them we did not have weapons, we came here to bring humanitarian help and not to fight," he said.

"The attack on the Mavi Marmara came in an instant: they attacked it with 12 or 13 attack boats and also with commandos from helicopters. We heard the gunshots over our portable radio handsets, which we used to communicate with the Mavi Marmara, because our ship communication system was disrupted. There were three or four helicopters also used in the attack. We were told by Mavi Marmara their crew and civilians were being shot at and windows and doors were being broken by Israelis."

Six Greek activists who returned to Athens accused Israeli commandos of using electric shocks during the raid.

Dimitris Gielalis, who had been aboard the Sfendoni, told reporters: "Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat. They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used."

Michalis Grigoropoulos, who was at the wheel of the Free Mediterranean, said: "We were in international waters. The Israelis acted like pirates, completely out of the normal way that they conduct nautical exercises, and seized our ship. They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads; they descended from helicopters and fired tear gas and bullets. There was absolutely nothing we could do … Those who tried to resist forming a human ring on the bridge were given electric shocks."

Grigoropoulos, who insisted the ship was full of humanitarian aid bound for Gaza "and nothing more", said that, once detained, the human rights activists were not allowed to contact a lawyer or the Greek embassy in Tel Aviv. "They didn't let us go to the toilet, eat or drink water and throughout they videoed us. They confiscated everything, mobile phones, laptops, cameras and personal effects. They only allowed us to keep our papers."

Turkey said it was sending three ambulance planes to Israel to pick up 20 more Turkish activists injured in the operation.

Three Turkish Airlines planes were on standby, waiting to fly back other activists, the prime minister's office said.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

After Flotilla Raid, U.S. Is Torn Between Allies

By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Struggling to navigate a bitter split between two important allies, the Obama administration on Tuesday tried to placate an outraged Turkish government while refusing to condemn Israel for its deadly raid on a flotilla of aid ships bound for Gaza.
President Obama telephoned Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to express his “deep condolences” for the deaths of Turkish citizens in clashes with Israeli soldiers on the ship, the White House said. He told Mr. Erdogan that the United States was pushing Israel to return their bodies, as well as 300 Turks who were taken from the ship and being held in Israel.

Mr. Obama called for a “credible, impartial and transparent investigation of the facts surrounding this tragedy,” the White House said. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said such an investigation could include international participation, something the Israelis said they opposed.

It is far from clear that these efforts will mollify Turkey, which accused Israel of state-sponsored terrorism and likened the psychological impact of the raid to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. “No one should think we will keep quiet in the face of this,” Mr. Erdogan declared during a visit to Chile.

The deep rift between Israel and Turkey, which had cultivated close ties, puts the Obama administration in a tough spot on two of its most pressing foreign-policy issues: the Middle East and Iran.

The United States does not want to abandon Israel, which has been subjected to international opprobrium since the raid. The administration is desperate to keep alive indirect peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians brokered by its special envoy, George J. Mitchell.

But it also does not want to alienate Turkey, which is playing an increasingly vocal role on the world stage. Relations were already tender after the United States threw cold water on a Turkish and Brazilian effort to resolve the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program. Turkish officials complain that they negotiated the deal with the encouragement and agreement of the administration.

“Turkey and Israel are both good friends of the United States, and we are working with both to deal with the aftermath of the tragic incident,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters at the State Department after meeting with Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu.

She conferred with Mr. Davutoglu for more than two hours, rearranging her schedule. Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, went to see him at his hotel before Mr. Obama called Mr. Erdogan.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Davutoglu harshly criticized the cautious American response to the raid, saying: “We expect full solidarity with us. It should not seem like a choice between Turkey and Israel. It should be a choice between right and wrong, between legal and illegal.”

He complained that the United States had delayed and watered down the United Nations Security Council statement on Israel, which condemned the actions on the ship rather than Israel itself.

Mr. Davutoglu demanded that Israel apologize for the attack, release the detained passengers, return the bodies of the dead, agree to an independent investigation and lift its blockade of Gaza. He said Turkey was prepared to go back to the United Nations for further action against Israel.

Israel, which defended the actions of its soldiers as a legitimate response to armed attacks by those on the ship, said it could not release the 300 passengers more quickly because they were illegal aliens and had to be held for at least 42 hours under Israeli law. Israel was also questioning 20 to 30 people who it says were directly involved in clashes with the soldiers.

“We’re going to do our best to heal the wounds with the Turks,” said Michael B. Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, who also met with General Jones and other White House officials.

But Mr. Oren said Israeli authorities had asked Turkey to divert the flotilla to the Israeli port of Ashdod to avoid a confrontation with Israeli forces. He said Israel would have unloaded the cargo of construction material and humanitarian aid and arranged for it to be shipped to Gaza.

Mr. Oren said the Israelis would undertake their own investigation, but he resisted calls for international involvement. Israel has been leery of international investigations since the Goldstone report, which faulted Israel for excessive force in its military strike on Gaza in 2008.

More recently, the South Korean government has won praise for an investigation into the torpedoing of one of its warships, which was aided by the United States, Australia, Sweden and other countries. The report found that a North Korea submarine fired the torpedo.

“The Israelis have traditional and well-founded concerns about international investigations,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But everyone recognizes that for an investigation to be credible, others have to be able to vouch for the results.”

The flotilla case seems likely to harden Turkey’s skepticism about a United Nations resolution on Iran. Imposing more sanctions now, Mr. Davutoglu said, would only precipitate a confrontation with Iran in a few months, one that would be even riskier because of the broader tensions.

Asked what the best policy toward Iran is, he said, “Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.”

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

A Special Place in Hell

The Second Gaza War: Israel lost at sea

We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege, which is itself becoming Israel's Vietnam.

By Bradley Burston

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen.

We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.

In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.

Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on that Israel's own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the Jewish state.

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam.

Of course, we knew this could happen. On Sunday, when the army spokesman began speaking of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in terms of an attack on Israel, MK Nahman Shai, the IDF chief spokesman during the 1991 Gulf war, spoke publicly of his worst nightmare, an operation in which Israeli troops, raiding the flotilla, might open fire on peace activists, aid workers and Nobel laureates.

Likud MK Miri Regev, who also once headed the IDF Spokesman's Office, said early Monday that the most important thing now was to deal with the negative media reports quickly, so they would go away.

But they are not going to go away. One of the ships is named for Rachel Corrie, killed while trying to bar the way of an IDF bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago. Her name, and her story, have since become a lightning rod for pro-Palestinian activism.

Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state of war with Turkey.

"This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with the Turks," said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most sensitive sense of Israel's ties with the Muslim world.

We explain, time and again, that we are not at war with the people of Gaza. We say it time and again because we ourselves need to believe it, and because, deep down, we do not.

There was a time, when it could be said that we knew ourselves only in wartime. No longer. Now we know nothing. Yet another problem with refraining from talks with Hamas and Iran: They know us so much better than we know ourselves.

They know, as the song about the Lebanon War suggested ("Lo Yachol La'atzor Et Zeh") that we, unable to see ourselves in any clarity, are no longer capable of stopping ourselves.
Hamas, as well as Iran, have come to know and benefit from the toxicity of Israeli domestic politics, which is all too ready to mortgage the future for the sake of a momentary apparent calm.

They know that in our desperation to protect our own image of ourselves, we will avoid modifying policies which have literally brought aid and comfort to our enemies, in particular Hamas, which the siege on Gaza has enriched through tunnel taxes and entrenched through anger toward Israel.

For many on the right, it must be said, there will be a quiet joy in all of what is about to hit the fan. "We told you so," the crowing will begin. "The world hates us, no matter what we do. So we may as well go on building [Read: 'Settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem'] and defending our borders [Read: 'Bolster Hamas and ultimately harm ourselves by refusing to lift the Gaza embargo']."

Hamas, Iran and the Israeli and Diaspora hard right know, as one, that this is a test of enormous importance for Benjamin Netanyahu. Keen to have the world focus on Iran and the threat it poses to the people of Israel, Netanyahu must recognize that the world is now focused on Israel and the threat it poses to the people of Gaza.
 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!