Antiwar.com Blog

Flotilla passengers aid an injured Israeli commando.

Via Ali Abunimah, the Turkish paper Hurriyet has posted a gallery of photos recovered from the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, the now-famous ship involved in last week’s flotilla incident. Another photo from the set, displayed here, has been posted on the Economist’s Facebook page; it clearly shows the same commando and passenger as one of the other photos in the set. While we must be cautious about the authenticity of any of the information coming out about the flotilla attack, the IDF seems to concede to Ha’aretz that the photos are authentic: while attempting to spin the pictures, an IDF spokesperson did not dispute that they are real.

Taken together, the photos more or less definitively dispel the claim, advanced by the IDF and its media defenders, that the passengers aboard the ship were a “lynch mob” determined to kill Israeli soldiers. On the contrary, the photos show that the passengers managed to capture Israeli soldiers and escort them below deck, where they would have had more than enough opportunity to kill them had they wanted to. Far from doing so, they actually helped treat the soldiers’ wounds, as shown in the photo above.

The photos also lend support to the testimony of one of the passengers aboard the ship, former U.S. marine and Gulf War veteran Ken O’Keefe, who described the passengers’ capture and subsequent treatment of three IDF commandos:

We had in our full possession, three completely disarmed and helpless commandos. These boys were at our mercy, they were out of reach of their fellow murderers, inside the ship and surrounded by 100 or more men. I looked into the eyes of all three of these boys and I can tell you they had the fear of God in them. They looked at us as if we were them, and I have no doubt they did not believe there was any way they would survive that day. They looked like frightened children in the face of an abusive father.

But they did not face an enemy as ruthless as they. Instead the woman provided basic first aid, and ultimately they were released, battered and bruised for sure, but alive. Able to live another day. Able to feel the sun over head and the embrace of loved ones. Unlike those they murdered. Despite mourning the loss of our brothers, feeling rage towards these boys, we let them go.

While the same caveats are in order regarding O’Keefe’s testimony as regarding every other piece of information being released about the flotilla raid, the photos seem to verify his account. In any event, his testimony is worth reading in full.

The week since the Mavi Marmara incident has seen a dizzying amount of propaganda and misinformation released by the IDF and its supporters. There was the claim that the ship’s passengers were “Al Qaeda mercenaries,” since retracted; the claim that Mavi Marmara passengers told an Israeli navy vessel to “go back to Auschwitz,” already partially retracted and seemingly on its way to a full retraction; the claims that passengers had opened fire on the IDF commandos, now dropped without a trace. As more and more details emerge, it has come to appear that the initial image of the flotilla raid was in fact the correct one: namely, that the ship’s passengers acted in self-defense after coming under surprise attack, and that despite the killing of at least nine of their fellows they resisted the urge to take retribution against the commandos.

Of course, all this must remain speculative, for the IDF has still refused to release its complete and unedited footage of the raid. Immediately after the attack, the IDF released a heavily edited clip that highlighted footage of passengers attacking commandos without showing what happened before or after. But if the facts of the raid are as clear and unambiguous as the IDF is suggesting, surely there is no reason to hold back on the full video. They have an opportunity to clear things up once and for all.

Gee, I can’t understand why the Washington Post missed all the key details that Max Blumenthal rounded up from Israeli published sources (in Hebrew and English).

The Flotilla Raid Was Not “Bungled.” The IDF Detailed Its Violent Strategy In Advance.

The Israeli military broadcast its plan for violence, inciting the Israeli public and the soldiers of Unit 13 with fevered visions of a kill-or-be-killed encounter with a group of Arab “terrorists.” The stated conditions for using live fire were arbitrary and poorly defined, giving the commandos little direction and lots of leeway to kill — at the very least the plan demanded force in some form….

Were they that stupid, or just crazy? From the details of the plan it appears that Netanyahu and his cohorts had envisioned Entebbe Part Deux, a daring anti-terror raid that would lift the sinking morale of the Israeli public while intimidating Iran and the Arab world. Though Israel may be more isolated than ever as a result of the massacre, the Netanyahu administration is reaping considerable political benefits at home.

The day after the massacre, spontaneous celebrations broke out in Ashdod, Tel Aviv, and throughout the country, bringing together right-wing elements with everyday Israelis. Over a thousand Israelis gathered tonight outside the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv to rally against the Turkish government and express their support for the raid. Multiple demonstrators including one man who has lived in Israel for 60 years told me, “What Turkey [the sponsor of the Mavi Marmara boat] has done is great. I have never seen this country more united in my entire life. We are all standing together now.” (Video coming soon).

Israeli newscasters are routinely using the term “mechabel,” or terrorist, to refer to the flotilla activists, while the violence that broke out on the deck of the Mavi Marmara is called “the lynch.” (Nevermind that zero commandos were hung and nine activists were killed, including an American citizen who was shot in the head four times.) No evidence is required to support claims in the Israeli media. The public desperately wants to believe that its government is right, so much so that Israel’s media is not even making a token effort to challenge the increasingly hysterical press releases disseminated by the IDF press office every few hours.

Hanin Zoabi, a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset who was on the Mavi Marmara, was physically accosted in the Knesset by fellow legislators for attempting to relate her experience aboard the flotilla. MK Miri Regev of Likud called her a “traitor,” while Yoel Hasson of Kadima, a supposedly centrist party, denounced Zoabi as a “terrorist.” An Israeli Facebook group devoted to inciting Zoabi’s assassination has gathered 600 members in just a day and a half. In the meantime, Israel’s Interior Minster Eli Yishai is “looking into” means of stripping Zoabi of her citizenship.

The art world has been abuzz the last couple of months over the performance of “The Artist Is Present,” by Serbian artist Marina Abramović at New York’s MOMA. In the piece, she sits in a chair, nearly motionless, for eight hours a day — no food, no water, not even a bathroom break — and audience members may sit across from her as long as they like. Some have been reduced to tears. To those unfamiliar with Abramović’s past and past work, this is just a woman in a chair. But to know her background is to unlock the meaning of all this nothing.

Abramović has made her career on such feats of strength; in one piece, she lies on a bed, her head hanging over the edge, and screams incessantly until her voice gives. She has whipped herself, cut herself, drugged herself, brushed her hair for hours, and in 1974, she nearly died performing a piece in which she lied inside a 5-pointed star set aflame. In the 90s, to protest the Balkans wars, she sat atop a pile of cow bones and vainly attempted to scrub the flesh from them, her white dress staining yellow and red; we cannot make war clean.

In the most shocking and famous of her performances, she laid out items next to her prostrate body and invited the public to do to her what they would. Most were timid, some cut her clothing, others stuck thorns in her, but a riot nearly ensued when a man pointed the loaded gun she provided at her head. When the show ended, she walked toward the public — and they ran away. A comment on doing nothing while evil festers? A mere step in the direction of her erstwhile tormentors sent them scattering.

The artist’s influences are chiefly the air of Yugoslav nationalism in the postwar years — both parents were popular WWII figures; her great uncle was the patriarch of the Serbian Church — and the stark and dreary oppression of Tito’s communist regime. Abramović came of age under this anti-individualist orthodoxy; might this lead one to experiment further with self-denial, self-imposed stress positions — a popular tool in the torturer’s repertoire — and self-inflicted pain? She participated in a student protest that forced the dictator to convert a military building into an artists’ school, but Yugoslavia proved too stifling, and the young artist fled to Amsterdam in 1976, where she met her future partner Ulay.

On the last day of “The Artist Is Present,” Abramović tumbled out of her chair, lept up and did a twirl, and worked her adoring crowd like a rockstar. As in her life, as in the lives of many others who suffered under tyranny, she broke figurative but stultifying chains — and then did whatever the f*ck she wanted with her new freedom.

Though I saw in person and was amazed by the performance the day before the end of the show, I simply sported an awestruck grin. But just seeing the photos on my computer screen of Marina Abramović reveling in the end of her long and arduous feat made me cry, too.