Beyond the Freedom Flotilla: Neoliberal Assault (2 of 2)

 

Outside the US tabloid media zone the world remains transfixed by the horror of the Israeli government’s murderous act of piracy and its ongoing holding of the boats it hijacked and hundreds of hostages kidnapped on the high seas.

 

As I said in my previous two posts on this, I think this act had a dual purpose. Israel’s specific, proximate goal was of course to enforce its illegal blockade. But the lengths of aggression and piracy (even technically to acts of war) to which it was willing to go, and the nature of the blockade itself, which the Israelis have openly admitted is intended not to achieve practical security goals but to punish the people of Gaza, demonstrate that this government’s mindset goes beyond any reality-based goal, and is really trying to enforce total domination for its own sake wherever these criminals believe their power prerogative extends.

 

In the end, as always with totalitarians, the true crime isn’t the proximate allegation, which in this case the Israelis can’t even get straight. (That the humanitarianism of the mission was bogus? But they have all the cargo now; they’ve had it for two days. The fact that they can’t even plausibly try to plant contraband proves the complete innocence of the cargo.)

 

No, as always with such thugs, the true crime is defiance itself. Sure enough, the Israelis sound the most outraged when they simply sputter that the Flotilla was a “provocation”. Yes, indeed it was, and was meant to be. It was meant to challenge Israel’s illegal and illegitimate blockade as such. It was meant to challenge this tyrannical arrogation of power, an arrogation based not on authority or law, both of which on the contrary it flouts, but on brute force. The mission was the same as the eternal mission of all decent people who challenge tyranny. And just as they challenge tyranny on principle, so tyranny seeks to prop itself up on its own anti-principle, which is simply the lust for power and greed for phony wealth itself.

 

Which brings us to the larger significance of this act. On a global scale a great crime is progressing. The criminals seek to condemn ever more people to permanent impoverishment and servitude. The goal of the global finance elite and its flunkey governments is the restoration of feudalism itself, not only across the Global South but throughout the West itself.

 

I’ll give a quick recap.

 

1. As capitalism matured it should, according to reality and to its own textbooks, have seen profits fall to marginal levels. There should be very little profit left in the economy by now. Instead, the entire economy should have long since been functioning smoothly and efficiently, with sufficient goods and services in every sector, while government largely shrunk as it would have little role to play as economic arbiter. There would be rough equality of wealth and power distribution, little wealth and power concentration. Democracy would become steadily more healthy and strong.

 

This is how capitalism was supposed to function. This is what its promoters always promised. This is what would have happened, if every word hadn’t always been a lie.

 

2. In the reality of greed fundamentalism, elites were never textbook capitalists but always gangsters. No one ever wanted to be a capitalist. No one ever wanted to compete and innovate. They wanted to concentrate wealth and power, period.

 

As capitalism reached its terminal profit crisis in the latter 20th century, the power elites resolved to deploy an ever more aggressive command economy. They’d use the power of government to substitute extorted and stolen rents for their diminishing “capitalist” profits.

 

Globalization and financialization comprised the campaign of oligopoly capitalism to prop itself up while stringing along the Western middle classes. They substituted debt for production while obscuring the assault on all public amenities and power. Real wages have steadily eroded since the 70s while wealth concentration has exponentially risen. (That juxtaposition right there is a basic metric of robbery.) The system attacked unions on every political and “legal” level. Social Security has been steadily undermined via ploys like the rigging of inflation metrics (to fraudulently depress COLA increases). Other entitlements have been similarly eroded. Globalization’s open border for unskilled labor provides the basic force of gravitation for all wages, while outsourcing and offshoring destroyed many mid-level jobs completely, forcing and ever greater number  of workers into the undifferentiated unskilled mass. (The system did somewhat protect most kinds of professionals for a long time, but now that’s been eroding for many as well.) Walmartization provides a kind of linchpin, the direct conduit for addicting ex-citizens to cheap consumerism while directly destroying self-proprietors and middle class jobs in general, along with the communities anchored by the people who held such jobs.

 

In this way the temporary “middle class”, fueled by debt and cheap oil, had the carpet slowly pulled out from under it. Meanwhile the basic unproductivity of the Western system was covered up by bubbles, culminating in the housing bubble (itself fueled propagandistically by the Big Lie that you should rely on your house to provide for your retirement, not any other pension; this nicely provided cover while public entitlements and private pensions were gradually being subverted).

 

3. The crash of 2007-8 was the beginning of the collapse of this final bubble. No bubble could any longer be sustained on just propaganda. Now the command economy had to take a direct, very heavy hand. Thus we’ve had the advent of the Bailout and a new level of the disaster capitalist rampage, since the global economy is now nothing but an ongoing disaster, and the criminals have no outlets left but to drive disaster ever harder in order to extract profits from it.

 

In the new regimes, Bailout America and the Bailout Eurozone, all government policy (not just monetary, not just fiscal, but all policy) is now predicated on massive redistribution of public wealth to the banksters. The mechanisms have been too many and varied for me to recapitulate them here, but I and many others have written about them many times.

 

But this Bailout can’t be propped up forever. How long will anyone keep buying dollars? The bonds of indebted countries? Everyone knows these are all ponzi schemes. So in the end the Bailout itself must succumb to the same diminishing returns on “confidence” which did in the “regular” debt economy. Again the bubble must collapse. Reality wants to deflate.

 

4. So the next step is liquidation. It’s the good old “structural adjustment”. The old odious debt which the criminal West used to inflict such suffering on non-industrialized economies is now being brought home to the Western middle classes themselves. Today the term of art is “austerity”.

 

The fact that the “conventional wisdom” (to paraphrase Voltaire, it’s neither “conventional” nor “wise”, but manufactured propaganda intended to whitewash crime) is now that of the deficit terrorists, that the message is “the markets don’t really fear inflation now but might fear it in the future, so governments should act in obedience to this hypothetical future fear”, means the finance vanguard thinks the end is in sight for what free money can do for them, and that in order to continue their extractions they’ll have to move into more direct class warfare. It’ll no longer be sufficient to simply gut the interest returns for savers on pensions; now the pensions themselves must be directly stolen.

 

In the Baltics, in Eastern Europe, now intended for Greece,  now intended for Iceland, and next up Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and soon after the UK, and soon after that the US itself, the non-rich will have their wages, salaries, and pensions liquidated (i.e. stolen) while all public property is privatized (i.e. stolen).

 

Even as you take home ever less in pay and see all prospects for paying for any kind of emergency, illness, or retirement become hopeless, at the same moment you’ll find yourself having to pay ever more extortionate tolls for anything and everything which used to be provided by the fabric of society itself. Driving on any road, receiving any government service, police, fire, calling 911 itself, are just examples of everyday critical extortions we’ll face.

 

Even basic health care will become completely unaffordable (and this at the same time that the system intends to collect Obama’s fascist insurance mandate for a worthless piece of paper), all public parks will be fee-generating private parks, libraries will cease to exist altogether, all environmental, health, consumer, and safety regulations will be removed. Access to the courts themselves will be restricted to the rich. Even the poll tax may be reinstated (although by now at least at the federal level the vote is so meaningless they might not bother with that one).

 

Anyone who doubts the malevolent intentions of Obama and the US kleptocracy on this score needs to learn about Obama’s “deficit commission”. This Star Chamber is dedicated to achieving what Bush failed to do, privatize Social Security. (Thus Obama hopes to outdo his predecessor in consummating the heritage of their shared hero, Reagan.) Pete Peterson and the Washington Post have led the call to bring the full force of “austerity” to America. Obama is simpatico with this goal. With his extralegal and anti-democratic commission he hopes to achieve this and far more. The ultimate goal is to strip all government spending except on corporate welfare, war, and the police state. (Although both war and the police state are being privatized as well.)

 

5. So that sums it up, where we are today. The gangster elite intends to reinstate feudalism, with all of us reduced to the literal serfdom of debt. As our debts become utterly impossible to ever pay, we’ll be indentured in various ways, become sharecroppers at every kind of job, and debt prison under hideous chain gang conditions will be applied as a constant threat to anyone who doesn’t meekly comply with his servitude, since we’ll all be convicts anyway in one big country-wide debtor prison.

 

But there’s an obvious alternative to all this. We debtors and cash cows can simply overthrow the debt at will. We can impose the debt jubilee from the bottom up. (That’s the same debt liquidation “our” governments would have allowed to naturally transpire in 2008 the way the real market wanted it to, if these really were our governments and not irrevocably rogue kleptocracies.)

 

The kleptocracy must expect real resistance at some point. This isn’t like the 60s, which was basically political protest against political crime on the part of the system. It was epiphenomenal. Today the struggle is far more elemental. It’s a zero sum fight to the death at the socioeconomic core. This is end game for neoliberalism and corporatism – totalitarianism of total collapse of their wealth and power. Liquidation of the people, or liquidation of their own power.      

 

So however repulsively meek the American people have been so far and perhaps will be in the future, the elites don’t expect things to be so easy everywhere else. In Iceland and Greece especially we’re seeing some will to resist the gangsters. We can expect protest and resistance of many sorts to become stronger and to see people fight back with ever greater resolve, if the people can ever develop a real consciousness of the crimes which afflict them, and the morale of the struggle which feeds on struggle itself.

 

Conversely, the criminals must want to strangle the very thought of resistance in its cradle. A few well-placed blows could sufficiently demoralize people that they’d more pliantly submit to their fate. This is part of the classical shock doctrine. It’s worked before in specific countries like Chile. Today it has to work on a global scale.

 

If we put the murderous assault on the Flotilla in that context, it looks like a rather clumsy attempt to provide such an object lesson. It’s clumsy because Israel’s so hated that outrage over its crimes seems to be one of the few things that can reconcile many peoples and governments. Indeed it’s consistently been used as a divide-and-conquer astroturfing tactic by every Arab government. It’s also clumsy because much like the Wall Street banks, Israel itself can exist in this form only through welfare handed out by the US government. Israel’s gratuitous crimes, which the despicable Obama must now stand isolated to defend, add yet another burden to the already absurdly overextended US government commitment. Once again we see how the best thing we have going for us is the tactical incompetence of the system thugs.

 

So we’ll have to expect the gangsters to become ever more violent and tyrannical as they try to tighten their feudal grip. Throughout history it’s always been this way, and the end of the oil age, the end of the exponential debt age, portend the most vicious reaction yet. The restoration of feudal organization in the form of debt slavery can only be accomplished through a combination of extreme violence and extreme slavishness on the part of the victims. Shock treatment means, among other things, applying the former to enforce the latter.

 

So the Israeli pirates weren’t just firing literal shots into the boats, but a far more profound metaphorical shot across the bow of the much larger Freedom Flotilla in prospect, all over the world. The killers hope that if they demoralize us pre-emptively, they won’t have to board us on the high seas of history at all. They’ll board us in our docile ports, at our jobs, in our unemployment, in our homes, in our thoughts.

 

So that’s the way we need to see this, and this is the propaganda and action of terrorism we must never allow to defeat us. Another flotilla has already embarked for Gaza. Everywhere, let’s put our own ships to sea.

The Freedom Flotilla and the Neoliberal Assault (1 of 2)

 

Israeli pirates physically stopped the Freedom Flotilla, but the spirit and idea of the Flotilla continue on their voyage to Gaza and to everyone besieged by the neoliberal/corporate onslaught.

 

As more information comes out, the Israeli “side” sure doesn’t look any better. The IDF’s own media presentation can’t obscure the fact that they launched an attack on the high seas. They’re reduced to whining that their commandos were resisted with improvised implements. The pirates’ own video seems to show the overmatched activists heroically resisting a professional assault any way they could.

 

Nothing Israel or their US lapdogs say can elide the basic, dispositive fact: The Israelis attacked civilian ships in international waters. All else is peripheral to this. (Although as I just described, their own video shows they’re lying when they claim they were “ambushed” by the activists.)

 

So the pro-Israel flunkey position boils down to:

 

1. The High Seas belong to Israel.

 

2. Therefore they have the right to commit piracy. (Technically, it may in fact be an act of war rather than piracy. But it has to be one or the other. Morally, and from the point of view of man’s law, it’s a crime. It’s first degree murder. War, piracy, do the legalities matter anymore? All law has been hijacked by the power elites and will be infinitely twisted to their ends. So human beings are left with only moral and political categories.)

 

Meanwhile, as the world comes together to condemn this crime, Bailout America stands alone in its lame attempts to exonerate Israel. As predicted, Obama’s response is to oppose placing blame on the killers, but instead wanting a bland, impersonal statement against abstract “violence”.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel canceled plans to come to Washington on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Obama. The two men spoke by phone within hours of the raid, and the White House later released an account of the conversation, saying Mr. Obama had expressed “deep regret” at the loss of life and recognized “the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances” as soon as possible.

 

Yes, we need the pertinent facts. In this case, we already have the overwhelmingly pertinent fact: Aggression on the high seas. International waters. Piracy. That renders all else insignificant.

 

(It’s no surprise that Obama agrees with the Israelis’ claim to “sovereignty” over the high seas. Obama has already tacitly surrendered US sovereignty in its own waters. He has alienated sovereignty in the Gulf of Mexico to the stateless non-legitimate entity BP. When a government does that, it abdicates any legitimacy it had in itself. Clearly Obama believes in no principle of sovereignty or law whatsoever. Clearly he believes in nothing but corporate prerogatives and might-makes-right.) 

 

Decent people of course recognize this, thus the unanimous condemnation among all who aren’t part of the Western globalization power structure.

 

As for the video showing the victims fighting back, good for them! Although this was no “ambush” the way the Israelis’ lie would have it, even if it had been that would make no difference. Whether you look at it  morally or in the most legalistic terms, either way on the high seas they have every right to resist pirates attacking the ship. It’s exactly as if a robber were breaking into your home. (It’s funny the way the IDF calls the activists “rioters” on their own ship. That’s like the burglar calling the homeowner who pounces on him a rioter in his own home.)

 

This is really naked state terrorism. The proximate motivation here is Israel’s will to enforce its regional totalitarian dominance. From that point of view, for nonviolent activists to challenge the blockade, that is to challenge Israeli “authority”, is an offense punishable by death. That was the proximate occasion for the dispatch of this death squad, to carry out a mass execution.

 

At the next level, we see how as always the Global War on Terror is a pretext for the aggressive deployment of power. Hamas has of course been a threat to Israelis, although not to Israel itself. But just as with “terrorism” worldwide, which poses no existential threat to any western entity but is everywhere used as the pretext to justify police states and imperialism, so here Hamas is really the pretext for Israeli neoliberalism to aggressively extend its power and robbery and tyranny.

 

What is Israel? As I wrote in February, it’s not just any country, but serves as the spiritual and organizational core for the totalitarian security-industrial and disaster-capitalist complex. The global aspects of these have radiated out from that core, for example through China to the West.

 

Two excerpts from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine describe it well:

 

What makes Israel interesting as a guns-and-caviar model is not only that its economy is resilient in the face of major political shocks such as the 2006 war with Lebanon or Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza, but also that Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence. The reasons for Israeli industry’s comfort level with disaster are not mysterious. Years before US and European companies grasped the potential of the global security boom, Israeli technology firms were busily pioneering the homeland security industry, and they continue to dominate the sector today…From a corporate perspective, this development has made Israel a model to be emulated in the post-9/11 market. From a social and political perspective, however, Israel should serve as something else – a stark warning. The fact that Israel continues to enjoy booming prosperity, even as it wages war against its neighbors and escalates its brutality in the conquered territories, demonstrates just how perilous it is to build an economy based on the premise of continual war and deepening disasters.

 

Israel serves as the frontier outpost and proving ground for all imperial assaults:

 

Israel’s case is extreme, but the kind of society it is creating may not be unique. The disaster capitalism complex thrives in conditions of low-intensity grinding conflict. That seems to be the end point in all the disaster zones, from New Orleans to Iraq. In April 2007, US soldiers began implementing a plan to turn several volatile Baghdad neighborhoods into “gated communities”, surrounded by checkpoints and concrete walls, where residents would be tracked using biometric technology. “We’ll be like the Palestinians”, predicted one resident, watching his neighborhood being sealed in by the barrier. After it becomes clear that Baghdad is never going to be Dubai, and New Orleans won’t be Disneyland, Plan B is to settle into another Colombia or Nigeria – never-ending war, fought in large measure by private soldiers and paramilitaries, damped down just enough to get the natural resources out of the ground, helped along by mercenaries guarding the pipelines, platforms, and water reserves.

 

Claude Salhani referred to the “spill over of trouble” from the Middle East. Nowhere is this more true than with the toxic mindset and practices of Israeli crypto-totalitarianism. That’s what corporate imperialism wants, to bring all its trouble home. Disaster is its business, as we’ve seen over and over in recent decades. Since 2008 disaster has been enshrined as the official basis of the US economy and polity themselves. Between the institution of the permanent Bailout, already in place under Bush but with full cooperation from candidate Obama, and then Obama’s enshrinement of Bush’s permanent war and war crimes regimes as official US policy (as opposed to a Bush/Cheney aberration), we now have the enshrinement of a new, toxic regime, Bailout America.

 

This brings us back to the Flotilla atrocity and its broader implications. Just as Israel’s version of the “war on terror” is one iteration of the Global War on Terror, so Israel’s will to enforce regional domination is a regional iteration of the neoliberal global will to total domination. The real terrorists, in deed and propaganda, are the neoliberal thugs themselves.

 

As the banksters and globalization elites contemplate the next stage of their economic assault, in particular as they attempt to fit the peoples of the countries onto the various torture devices of “austerity”, they face increasing protest. Possibly resistance. That’s why the Freedom Flotilla, which seeks to be exemplary in the eyes of freedom activists the world over, was the target of this brutal assault. The robbers want the example to be a demoralizing and terrorizing one. The real target audience for this exercise in terrorist propaganda is activists and anybody contemplating protest and resistance, all over the West. The real targets are Greek protestors and anybody else who might get uppity about being crucified on “austerity”.

 

What does US “diplomacy” say?

 

The United States, which habitually defends Israel in the council, said that the attempt to run the blockade by sea was ill advised. “Direct delivery by sea is neither appropriate nor responsible, and certainly not effective, under the circumstances,” said Alejandro Wolff, the deputy permanent representative of the United States.

 

Yes, when pirates attack the ship and slaughter the passengers and crew, delivery tends to be “not effective.” The veiled threat is clear: “To all you activists, do you think [whatever resistance you contemplate] will be effective? Not if we kill you instead.”

 

So now we’ve seen overt fascist terrorism before the eyes of the world.

 

The crime is the same as where Obama claims the right to put out a hit on anybody he chooses, anywhere, without trial, on his “authority”. The crime is to challenge corporate domination. To engage in assertive nonviolent activism against the global kleptocracy is a capital crime. This was a mass execution.

 

So as I said yesterday, this is a war of example against example, lesson against lesson, idea against idea. The killers want to efface the exemplary courage of the Flotilla crewmen by drowning our courage in the blood we’ve seen flow. As always with the tactic of terrorism, they want to use terrorism to force fear and resignation to overwhelm courage and exuberance and resolve in the minds of the people.

 

So far it doesn’t seem to be working, as the world has spoken with one voice its revulsion and rage. But the real test is the long grind. I hope Hamas learns a lesson from this and takes up the tactic of assertive nonviolence rather than playing into the hands of the killers by reciprocating with further violence against civilians. That’s just what the Israelis and the neoliberals at large want – the dialectical burning of the world in a gyre of terrorism and state terrorism. Their world is the burning world. They expect to lauch their arsonist sorties from secure fortresses while the rest of the world alternately slaves and tears itself to shreds.

 

But if instead we the people unite for the Ghandiesque counteroffensive on a global scale; if we can keep dictating the battlefield and the pace through assertive nonviolence; and if we don’t let the thugs quash our intelligence and resolve with the fog of fear and hate; if we do all this, we’d turn the flames around. The nightmare they’ve prepared for us would become their nightmare, while we’d emerge from the smoke into a new sunlight.

 

The Freedom Flotilla is holding that course and will do so for as long as we hold the course with them.

Terrorism vs. Humanity (the Freedom Flotilla is butchered)

 

The Israeli military has responded to nonviolent activists challenging its illegal blockade and more importantly its “authority” with a murderous assault. Al-Jazeera reports at least 15 were killed when the Israeli commandos stormed the ship, while even the NYT says at least 10 were slaughtered.

 

The reaction of the world has been shock and condemnation. After all the innocent talk in the weeks leading up to this, all the Israeli protestations of good faith, and how their response would vindicate their claims of moderation, all the alleged conversations about how to turn this into a show of Israeli reason and restraint, we see how they actually planned to turn this into a test case of the most brutal fascist state violence.

 

According to the Flotilla passengers the death squad stormed aboard without warning and opened fire. This was premeditated murder.

 

Of course the Israelis are claiming that they were fired upon first, which is absurd on its face. Evidently their story is breaking down faster than they can spin it, however, since even the NYT, which was passively hostile toward the Flotilla and previously imposed a news blackout upon it, reports how lame and obviously phony the Israeli story is.

 

A military statement said two activists were later found with pistols they had taken from Israeli commandos. The activists, the military said, had apparently opened fire “as evident by the empty pistol magazines.”

 

So the Israelis themselves are admitting the activists had no weapons, and claim that they took some pistols from the commandos themselves. So according to the story of the killers themselves, the activists acted in self defense  and only by being able to capitalize on death squad incompetence (even for a hillbilly sheriff the worst sin is to let your weapon be taken from you).

 

We can expect this lie to quickly be exposed. (How lame and clumsy – they couldn’t even come up with a more plausible way to plant weapons on the victims?)

 

This is textbook fascist murder, exactly the symptom we who’ve been following the course of corporatism would expect at some point. I’m somewhat surprised they chose such a high-profile moment and such brazen action, but I guess the logic is that since governments everywhere expect to have to use this level of force against their own recalcitrant people, and especially against non-violent activists, they think if they engage in a high-profile act of state terrorism this might cow many of the putative activists who were looking to the Freedom Flotilla as an exemplary deed.

 

So it’s a war of example against example. We must not let ourselves be cowed. We mustn’t cave in to terrorism. Instead, the example of the courage and martyrdom of these peaceful, humane souls must shine brightly before us as we continue the fight against those who reveal themselves to be among the most vile, despicable killers who ever disgraced the species.

 

We look to two examples, one professing and living all the highest ideals of the human faith, the other capable of nothing but lies and murder. This must confirm our resolve to be worthy of the legacy of the Flotilla freedom fighters, who take their place in the freedom pantheon which illuminates history.

 

The terrorists want to crush us with violence and even more the terror of violence. But we will not let them win.

The Freedom Flotilla

As I write the Freedom Flotilla, a vanguard of conscience, has embarked from multiple ports in Turkey and Greece, with one ship coming from as far away as Ireland. Its destination – the besieged and throttled Gaza Strip. They expect to arrive sometime this weekend.

 

 

Click here for a map.

 

The eight vessels – four cargo boats and four passenger craft, the largest a Turkish ferry carrying 600 human rights activists  – carry humanitarian cargo. They also carry witnesses to the action, and the conscience of the world’s people. The passion is so oversubscribed that even Noam Chomsky, recently refused entry to the West Bank to deliver a lecture at a Palestinian university, may be unable to find a berth.

 

In the port of Agios Nikolaos, here on the Greek island of Crete, one of the lead organisers of the flotilla is the Free Gaza Movement’s Renee Jaouadi – a 34-year-old schoolteacher, formerly from Newcastle, NSW. Under the banner of the Freedom Flotilla, the protest is a $US3 million-plus ($3.6 million) operation. Apart from 10,000 tonnes of building, medical, educational and other supplies, on board are dozens of parliamentarians from around the world and professionals planning to offer their services in Gaza.

Celebrity names include the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell and Denis Halliday, a former United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator who in 1998 resigned, protesting that economic sanctions on Iraq amounted to genocide.

On Saturday evening, attempts were under way to find a berth on the over-subscribed manifest for the activist American philosopher Noam Chomsky, who Israeli authorities last week barred from entering the West Bank where he had been invited to speak at a Palestinian university.

 

The people of Gaza were already a dispossessed alien group on their own land when in late 2008 Israel launched war upon them. This war was really more a campaign of systematic economic destruction, as the Israeli military destroyed homes, factories, and crops. Since then they’ve continued the war by other means, the garotte of a blockade.

 

According to the WHO the consequences have been severe:

 

“In Gaza, Israel’s blockade is debilitating the healthcare system, limiting medical supplies and the training of medical personnel and preventing serious medical cases from travelling outside the Strip for specialized treatment.”
“Israel’s 2008-2009 military operation damaged 15 of the Strip’s 27 hospitals and damaged or destroyed 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, none of which have been repaired or rebuilt because of the construction materials ban.”
“Some 15-20 percent of essential medicines are commonly out of stock and there are shortages of essential spare parts for many items of medical equipment . . . ”
In Late 2008, nearly 1 in 5 Palestinians lived in “extreme poverty.” Over half lived below the poverty line.
“In the second half of 2008, one third of West Bank households and 71 percent of Gaza households received food assistance, with food accounting for roughly half total household expenditures – making families highly vulnerable to food price fluctuations.”
“In May 2008, 56 percent of Gazans and 25 percent of West Bank residents were deemed food insecure by the UN.”
“Chronic malnutrition has risen in Gaza over the past few years to reach 10.2 percent.” [This is especially true among children in Gaza).
The entire fishing and agricultural sectors in the Palestinian population are very badly off.

 

This strangulation has reduced the civilian existence of Gazans to whatever can be smuggled in through tunnels. As per the Israeli intention, this has filled the Gazans’ lives with uncertainty and fear, as they tremble for the very necessities of life.

 

Such collective punishment is a crime against humanity, but by now the Israeli kleptocracy, a more perfected crystallization of the globalist kleptocracy, has moved defiantly beyond concern for the mere laws and morals of the human race.

 

Half the population of Gaza are children, and they are suffering the most. Incredibly, the Israelis won’t even allow through the building materials for the one hundred schools the Gazans need to build. It’s as if the Israelis <i>want</i> this entire generation to grow up enraged and ignorant, and therefore perfect jihad material.

 

So far Israel has responded to the Flotilla with a combination of playing innocent, disparagement, and threats. The one part of the message which has been clear is that they intend to stop the boats. They reiterated this yesterday, while claiming they’d deliver any legitimate humanitarian cargo themselves. This dovetails with their broader claim that they’re already letting sufficient civilian goods through the blockade. Bizarrely, they even cited the smugglers as alleged proof that this flotilla’s cargo isn’t necessary.

 

But all of this is a lie. The Israelis do let in just enough food and seeds and medical supplies to try to claim they’re not starving and sickening out the people of Gaza, when in fact it’s only a trickle just barely sufficient to sustain life, but completely insufficient to help the Gazans rebuild their shattered society. Meanwhile necessary rebuilding materiel like cement are forbidden completely, and will not be among whatever anodyne portion of the Freedom Flotilla’s cargo is “delivered” after the IDF has intercepted it.

 

The purpose of the blockade is to let just enough through so that the people don’t literally die, but otherwise to be sufficiently severe that they can never rebuild. The entire campaign, starting with the original blockade (since 2007), escalating into the military assault, and now terminal with this apparently permanent intensified blockade, is meant to collectively punish the Gazan people for exercising democracy by electing Hamas to run their government. Whatever we think of Hamas (which is both a violent resistance organization as well as a significant provider of civilian services), it truly represents the will of the people.

 

We should always be aware of how willing are The Powers That Be to punish democracy wherever it functions to their disapproval.

 

So the Israeli navy promises to halt the vessels, as it has in several earlier incidents (in one case violently ramming a peaceful cargo boat). Meanwhile, in shades of old times, a private Israeli “volunteer” fleet is organizing to “assist” the navy. We’re familiar with such paramilitary volunteers from the bad old days of fascism. It’s a textbook fascist organizational tactic.

 

So what will happen at the confrontation point? Presumably the IDF hopes to physically block and then board the vessels without any violence beyond that. They say they’re bringing foreign journalists along to prove their reasonable intentions. (But who are these “journalists”? If they’re from the MSM of Bailout America, nobody should trust their good intentions or professional ethics.) In that case they ought to exclude private troublemakers from anywhere near the vicinity. We can take that as one metric.

 

As for the Freedom Flotilla, it’s determined to assertively and non-violently steam through and dock and unload at Gaza ports. This is exactly the kind of non-violent assertion that has often worked. It was a favorite tactic of Gandhi. They should try to keep moving, if possible circumventing Israeli warships which try to physically interpose. It’s true that if the Israelis are determined to stop them, they will stop them.

 

But if there’s any lack of will at all among the interceptors, any ambivalence or divided resolve, this can generate enough lassitude in the counteraction to let the action slip through. That’s how active non-violence works, and how it can triumph.

 

And if they do get through, what a moral victory against the segregating walls being built to enclose, stifle, and strangle our economies and our politics! It’s the foray of conscience.

 

Now if we could only figure out ways to physically challenge Wall Street and the US government like this…

Edit Sunday 5/30 6:25 EDT:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/30/world/AP-ML-Israel-Palestinians.html?_r=1

The Flotilla has recently departed from Cyprus and is expected to reach Gaza on Monday morning.