A Canadian ship taking part in a planned aid flotilla to Gaza has been forced to return to harbour in Crete after an attempt to reach international waters was thwarted by coast guards, according to onboard activists.
Most of the vessels which hoped to sail to Gaza in an effort to break Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory have been stuck in Greek ports after being refused permission to embark on the journey by Greek authorities.
The Tahrir sailed 15 minutes out of harbour before it was intercepted by coastguards, activists told Al Jazeera on Monday.
The boat, carrying activists from Canada, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey, was forced to turn back to Aghios Nikolaos port in Crete.
“We are just being pulled into docks as we speak right now … [the coast guards] are in complete control of the boat,” Jesse Rosenfeld, a reporter with Toronto’s Now Magazine, who was on board the Tahrir when it set sail, told Al Jazeera.
Rosenfeld explained how the vessel managed to leave port: “In a matter of minutes, the people on the boat turned on the engines while two of the activists kayaked, trying to block the coast guard in port. At that point, the Tahrir made an open break through the port, shooting for international waters.”
The coast guard ship pursued the Tahrir, using water cannons and eventually boarding the ship, Rosenfeld said.
For what must be the third or fourth time since the Egyptian revolution began on January 25, the Sinai gas pipeline that takes Egyptian gas to Israel has been attacked. These attacks are not particularly dramatic, but are enough of a bother that it takes several weeks to restore the flow of gas to Israel — and often Jordan, which is affected by the pipeline. The people behind the attacks are thought to be Sinai-based Islamists who oppose the sale of gas to Israel, but we don’t really know for sure. The attack took place only 60km east of the Suez Canal, and it could very well be people from the Nile Valley carrying out the attacks — and they don’t have to be Islamists, either, since plenty of other people oppose the gas deal.
Since the revolution, the interim government has reviewed gas prices but thus far everything indicates that the sale of gas will continue. From what I’ve been able to gather (and I’d like to write something longer on this one day), Egypt was selling the gas to Eastern Mediterranean Gas (EMG), the private firm that then sold the gas to the Israeli National Electricity Company, at around $3 per mbtu (that’s million British thermal units — the standard measurement for these things). EMG then sold it to the Israelis for around $4.5 per mbtu, pocketing a 50% profit margin for no more than the transaction costs and some of the infrastructure between the two countries. The market price for gas (which is not as fungible as oil since it tends to rely on pipeline infrastructure unless shipped as LNG) is currently around $4.40 for futures in North America, but spot markets in recent years passed the $10 per mbtu mark. Either way, there is no doubt that the price of the gas sold by Egypt to EMG was well below market prices, and that the company made an easy profit without investment of its own (I’ll leave the issue of whether EMG sold the gas to Israel at a fair price aside.)
EMG is owned in large part by an Egyptian business, Hussein Salem, who has long been known to be a frontman for the Mubarak family (and is a former security official), and Yossi Meiman, an Israeli businessman close to the Sharon clan in Israeli politics (he owns the Israeli energy company Merhav), as well as some additional minority investors from South East Asia. Incidentally, although this was not widely known until after the revolution, Salem (who has been arrested in Madrid recently and is wanted by the Egyptian authorities) also had a similar deal set up with Jordan, involving the same kind of markup, and this deal (it’s not clear with who on the Jordanian side, but I’d look at the royal family or the security services) is also being reviewed by the Egyptian authorities.
In the last few years, when lawsuits were filed in Egypt against the sale of gas to Israel, the government often claimed that it was only selling gas to EMG, and has no transactional relationship with Israel. This is the ideal time to turn the argument on its head. If EMG was involved in high-level corruption under the previous regime, it is perfectly understandable if the Egyptian government, which controls the sale of natural gas, were to decide to terminate its relationship with EMG. This does not mean that EMG can’t sell gas to Israel: it would just have to meet its commitment from elsewhere than Egypt. Legally, this procedure may be dicey. EMG is free to resort to international arbitration, or even sue (which would provide an opportunity to look into its accounts). But my feeling talking to energy people in Cairo from multinationals (many operate in Egypt — huge ones like BP, BG or Statoil and independents like Apache) is that they don’t care if the Israeli gas contract is not honored. They want to cover their bacon first, and have assurances that their own substantial investments in Egypt will be untouched. They don’t care about the Israelis and understand if the deal is cancelled, it will be an understandable political exception.
Now, it’s likely that there were personal commitments from Mubarak to successive Israeli governments that the gas would continue. If these exists on paper, let the government make them public. If they don’t — well, an oral contract is as good as the paper it’s written on and we fall back to a relationship between Egypt and EMG. And then let’s see that contract and get the details of how this massive fraud was conducted.
A retired general speaking to the Los Angeles Times had little doubt that whoever is responsible for blowing up the gas pipeline has a patriotic motivation for doing so.
“Whether these attacks are carried out by large groups or individuals, many Egyptians are against supplying Israel with gas,” retired Gen. Mohamed Ali Belal told Babylon and Beyond. “Those who’ve been bombing the pipeline believe that they are fulfilling their national responsibility and playing a part in stopping gas exports to Israel.”
The captain of a US vessel intercepted after it tried to defy a ban and sail for Gaza from Greece is being held in “shocking conditions” Sunday and has not received consular assistance, a lawyer said.
Captain John Klusmer was arrested when the US boat Audacity of Hope — the flagship in a flotilla of pro-Palestinian activists — attempted to leave Greek waters on Friday after Athens banned all Gaza-bound ships from setting sail.
Klusmer was charged with felony and ordered to appear in court on Tuesday. The US Boat to Gaza organisation said he was being held in jail in “shocking conditions” and as far as it was aware, had not yet received consular assistance.
New York lawyer Richard Levy — a passenger on the boat who has visited Klusmer in jail in a port town near Athens — told enraged US activists that “he had no bed or toilet in his cell, and is receiving no food or water.”
US Boat to Gaza is asking Americans to call the US Embassy in Athens: 011-30-210-721-2951. “Insist they fulfill their duty and pressure Greece to release our captain & boat.”
The moment that Hosni Mubarak stood down from the Egyptian presidency and it was apparent that his hastily appointed vice-president, the long-time intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, would not be succeeding him, it was clear that much would be changing in Middle Eastern politics — including for Palestinians.
Easily the most populous Arab state, and one with a central location abutting Israel/Palestine, Egypt has always had the potential to play a huge role on the Palestinian issue. That role was lessened after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat split with the PLO leaders after the 1978 Camp David accords. But in recent years, Mubarak had become a linchpin in U.S. and Israeli efforts to steer Palestinian politics in a direction amenable to them.
Mubarak and Suleiman had two major ways to exert direct influence over Palestinian politics. First, Egypt has the only land border with the Gaza Strip other than the Strip’s much longer border with Israel. The sole legal crossing point on that border, at Rafah, years ago became the only way that most Gaza Palestinians could ever hope to travel between the Strip and the outside world. (Goods, by contrast, are not allowed through Rafah. Under the 1994 Paris Agreement between Israel and the PLO, all goods going into or out of Gaza must go through crossings that go to Israel.) Cairo’s control over Rafah has given it a huge ability to put pressure on Gaza’s 1.6 million people and the elected Hamas mini-government that administers the Strip.
In addition, in recent years, Egypt got the full backing of the United States and Israel to play the role of primary interlocutor in all efforts to heal the rift between Hamas and its main rivals in Mahmoud Abbas’s Fateh. But as Suleiman and Mubarak had long been firmly in Abbas’s camp, it surprised no one to see the reconciliation efforts that Suleiman periodically launched come to nothing — and Fateh and Hamas remained deeply divided.
So the departure of Mubarak and Suleiman from power in Cairo was huge for the Palestinians — especially those trapped for many years inside Gaza, which has been described by many as an open-air prison.
Turkey’s foreign minister recognized Libya’s rebel leaders as the country’s legitimate representatives and promised them an additional $200 million in aid during a visit Sunday.
The visit by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu marked Turkey’s strongest show of support yet for the opposition forces trying to out Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Turkey, a regional power, initially balked at the idea of military action in Libya and Turkish companies were involved in Libyan construction projects worth billions of dollars before the outbreak of an anti-Gadhafi uprising in February.
The revolt has turned into a protracted, largely deadlocked armed conflict, in which the rebels control Libya’s eastern third, while Gadhafi clings to power in the west, but has been unable to crush pockets of resistance there. As a NATO member, Turkey is now supporting the alliance’s airstrikes against targets linked to the Gadhafi regime.
Last August, the Atlantic published a splashy cover story by Jeffrey Goldberg that led with a startling prediction: Israel would more likely than not launch bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear sites by July 2011, according to Goldberg’s mostly Israeli (and unnamed) sources.
Today is July 1, and there has, of course, been no attack. It’s worth looking back at the influential piece and considering what happened. Wrote Goldberg:
[A] consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July. (Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Obama administration. But I tested the consensus by speaking to multiple sources both in and out of government, and of different political parties. Citing the extraordinary sensitivity of the subject, most spoke only reluctantly, and on condition of anonymity. They were not part of some public-relations campaign.)
The piece, packaged with a provocative cover image and headline (“ISRAEL IS GETTING READY TO BOMB IRAN”) was the subject of intense debate when it came out. Glenn Greenwald here at Salon accused Goldberg of feigning “‘ambivalence’ about whether Iran should be bombed … while infecting the discourse with the kinds of factual falsehoods documented here, all in service of skewing the debate towards ensuring an attack happens.” Others like Clive Crook hailed the piece as “an amazing intellectual coup.”
A common critique of the piece was precisely what Goldberg tried to preemptively address in the excerpt above: that his Israeli sources, with the protection of anonymity, were overstating the possibility and imminence of an Israeli strike in order to persuade Washington to more aggressively pressure Iran, or even launch its own attack. As Ben Smith wrote at the time, the “unstated logic here [is] that, if Israel is going to bomb Iran, the U.S. might as well do it itself.” That critique seems to have been strengthened by the fact that the central prediction of the article didn’t pan out.
Tens of thousands of protesters poured Friday into the streets of Hama, a Syrian city abandoned by the military and security forces, gathering in the country’s biggest demonstration in nearly four months of unrest and staking a festive claim to a region that bore the brunt of a ferocious government crackdown a generation ago.
The scenes of residents rallying in a central square there, captured by activists on video and circulated on the Internet, seemed to signal a new stage in an uprising that has so far only aspired to rival the mass protests in Egypt and Tunisia, where authoritarian leaders were eventually forced to step down. Protesters exploited at least a temporary vacuum in the official security presence in Hama to stage a panorama of dissent as celebratory as it was angry.
“Leave! Leave!” protesters chanted to a hip-hop beat.
The military and security forces withdrew last month from Hama for reasons that remain unclear. But the move seemed to reflect a compelling, if ambiguous, turn in an uprising that until recently was marked by repeated clashes between protesters and armed troops.
After weeks of stalemate, a new dynamic has emerged recently in Syria. The opposition gathered Monday in a rare meeting in Damascus, government officials are promising reform in coming weeks and protesters have shown a resilience that seems more and more difficult for the government to suppress.
The most visible shift has occurred in Hama, where a government crackdown in 1982 made the city synonymous with the brutality of Syria’s leadership. Since the withdrawal last month, protests have gathered momentum. Each night, youths have converged on Aasi Square, which they have renamed Freedom Square. On successive Fridays, crowds have grown bigger, surpassing 10,000 last week, diplomats say.
The fate of the flotilla to the Gaza Strip was in jeopardy on Saturday after Greek authorities prevented an American vessel from leaving Athens and issued a blanket order forbidding ships from sailing to the Gaza Strip.
Despite the order and additional setbacks, Adam Shapiro, an American co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, and one of the organizers of the flotilla, told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night that the group still planned to sail to the Gaza Strip in the coming days.
He said that the Greek- Swedish ship Juliano, which was allegedly sabotaged last week, was expected to be repaired by Sunday morning and that an Irish ship, also allegedly sabotaged in Turkey, was set to begin repairs soon.
“We are still arranging to go and are working on different fronts to get permission to leave,” Shapiro said by phone from Athens.
He also denied reports that organizers were considering canceling the flotilla since they had already achieved their goal by raising awareness regarding the sea blockade on the Gaza Strip.
“Gaza is still blockaded and there is still a need to sail there,” he said.
Members of the Dutch-Italian boat issued an open letter to the Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou on Sunday, expressing outrage over his “government’s decision to close the ports of Greece to our humanitarian initiative, even by force if needed”.
The letter demanded that they be allowed to sail and said, “It is totally incomprehensible to us and fills us with just wrath that the Greek government closes the ports to our ships…
“You and your government acting as an ally of Israel in the Palestinian question means you also seem to have forgotten the struggle against the military dictatorship in your own country.”
Joe Meadors, a US Navy veteran [and survivor of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty], is one of the roughly 100 passengers on board a flotilla vessel that finds itself standed. Meadors, however, still expects to sail.
“We are waiting for the Greek government to release us,” he told Al Jazeera, “We are here for the long haul, and we’re ready to go just as soon as the Greeks say we can go. We’re pleased we can do something for the Palestinians and remain excited to go.”
Khalid Tuhraani, an American Palestinian activist whose ship is stuck in the port of Corfu, is also frustrated and feels that it perhaps would have been better if the flotilla had orginated from a port in an Arab country such as Tunisia or Egypt.
“However, many of the Arab countries have, like Greece now, become hostages of the political will of the United States and Israel,” he said.
Tuhraani said he remained committed to doing what was necessary to end the Israeli blockade against Gaza, but he expressed disappointment at the Greek government.
“We chose Greece because this country has a history of support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom,” he said.
“Unfortunately we did not expect the Greek government to just roll over and die. But the Middle East Quartet issued a statement against our flotilla, so I think the pressure on the Greek government just might have been too enormous for it to bear.”
Is it possible to break the siege of Gaza if no one notices?
As an exercise in directing global attention to the plight of a population subject to collective punishment, the first flotilla in August 2008 was a bit of a flop — even though it reached Gaza.
In the Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon cynically wrote at the time:
Ever since the Free Gaza Movement made known its intent a few weeks ago to set sail for the Gaza Strip to “break” the Israeli blockade, it was clear that the two boatfuls of professional left-wing demonstrators and tag-along journalists were after one thing: a huge media event.
Nothing, therefore, would have given them a greater media buzz than if a couple of Israel Navy boats stopped them on the high seas, arrested the protesters (hopefully, from the point of view of the organizers of the protest, with some gratuitous brutality), and dragged the Greek-registered vessels into the Ashdod port.
Imagine the footage, imagine the images, and imagine the public relations bonanza for those few “brave souls” on the sea-weary vessels. Israel would, undoubtedly, have faced a public relations drubbing. So by deciding to let the boats through, the government deprived the protesters of the huge media event they so obviously wanted.
Indeed, instead of footage of heavyhanded Israelis stopping boats carrying an 81-year-old American nun and the sister-in-law of former British prime minister Tony Blair leading the nightly news broadcasts in the West on Saturday night, the story of the boats’ arrival in Gaza barely made a blip on the CNN, Fox, or Sky news broadcasts. With the world’s eyes still glued to the Olympics in Beijing, and the media focusing on US presidential candidate Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his vice presidential nominee, the Gaza blockade-running story didn’t register in the electronic media.
And in the written press, the protesters didn’t fare that much better. The New York Times ran a small piece on page 16 on Sunday; The Washington Post on page 12; and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch relegated it to a three-paragraph brief. As media events go, this one was not particularly successful.
But — as Keinon also noted — the story was not over. Indeed.
What the flotilla organizers understood was that whatever the outcome, each challenge to the siege could in fact never fail. Ships could succeed by reaching Gaza, or succeed without reaching Gaza by exposing Israel to the eyes of the world as a cowardly bone-headed bully.
The only solution to Israel’s problem was and remains the one that it refuses to entertain: backing itself out of a dead-end policy that by any metric one wants to use, has been a demonstrable failure — a policy which hasn’t weakened Hamas; hasn’t turned Gaza’s population against its rulers; hasn’t made Israel safer; and above all has brought Israel’s global image to an all-time low while callously inflicting yet more suffering on the Palestinian people.
The Israeli columnist, Asaf Gefen, suggested this week:
If the Marmara that took part in the previous sail sought to present Israel’s brutality to the world (and managed to do so, thanks to our kind assistance,) it appears that the current flotilla was meant to present Israel’s stupidity.
At this time already, when it’s still unclear whether and when the ships shall arrive, it appears that this objective had also been fully achieved.
But now that the flotilla appears stuck in Greece, can’t Netanyahu claim victory? Some Israeli reporters seem to think so:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sometimes seems almost too arrogant and self assured for his own good. However, unlike in most instances, this weekend he actually has justification for his haughtiness.
Really?
Look at The Audacity of Hope as it chugged out of a Greek harbor yesterday and ask yourself: what kind of prime minister and what kind of nation could feel threatened by this kind of challenge?
The need to subjugate others; the obsession with existential threats; the insatiable hunger for loving affirmations; and the fear of equality between Jews and non-Jews — all of this exposes Israel’s intrinsic weakness, a weakness that cannot be overcome by belligerence, isolation or warfare.
In truth, nothing threatens Israel more than its own fear of the world.
It’s time not just for Israel to end the siege of Gaza but for Zionists to break out of their own self-made prison.
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has delivered a telephone address through loudspeakers to thousands of supporters gathered in Tripoli’s Green Square, warning the NATO-led alliance to stop its war support or face “catastrophe”.
In the Friday speech, 100 days after NATO first entered the country, Gaddafi gave multiple warnings to foreign forces that have been militarily supporting anti-regime rebels for months, to a crowd of supporters who waved green flags and posters of the head of state.
“We advise you to retreat before you face a catastrophe… If we decide to, we are able to move to Europe like locusts, like bees,” Gaddafi said.
Addressing the West, Gaddafi warned that Libyans could take revenge on Europe for supporting of rebel forces.
The hacker group Anonymous has declared a cyberwar against the City of Orlando, disabling Web sites for the city’s leading redevelopment organization, the local Fraternal Order of Police and the mayor’s re-election campaign.
Anonymous, a large yet loosely formed group of hackers that claimed responsibility for crashing the Web sites of MasterCard and the Church of Scientology, began attacking the Orlando-based Web sites earlier this week.
The group described its attacks as punishment for the city’s recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city’s largest parks.
“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”
A public prosecutor has ordered an investigation into alleged police brutality against Greeks protesting against austerity measures amid an outcry over the excessive use of force and teargas to control crowds in Athens this week.
As municipal employees worked furiously to clean up the capital in the wake of street battles that left its central square resembling a war zone, the socialist government faced growing criticism of the controversial methods employed by riot police to disperse demonstrators.
“What took place in the centre of Athens these past few days is a complete violation of democratic law,” said Alexis Tsipras, leader of the leftist Syriza party, emerging from the supreme court where he filed a suit against the Greek police.
Fierce fighting erupted outside the Greek parliament on Wednesday as MPs inside voted on the hard-hitting policies demanded by the EU and IMF in exchange for the debt-choked country receiving further aid.
The release of video footage depicting police beating protesters, and in one instance seemingly colluding with rock-throwing extremists before firing off rounds of tear gas, has shocked Greeks.
