Foreign Policy In Focus

The U.S.-backed blockade of the Gaza Strip is “collective punishment” - a war crime under international law, as established in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It must end. That is why I will shortly be setting sail in the Freedom Flotilla II -- Stay Human.

We will be departing on our trip very soon. I will be in New York for a press conference with other passengers on Monday morning, and flying to Athens in the afternoon.

Last Day to Send Letters to Gaza!

If you have not done so already please write a letter to the people of Gaza for carriage on The Audacity of Hope. This is our only cargo on the boat. Writing a letter is no simple thing – it requires time and thought – which is why we often don't do it. Please take 20 minutes and compose your own. They must be received today (Friday) – therefore they will have to be emailed. Send them to letterstogaza@gmail.com. If you prefer to handwrite them, or include illustrations, scan it as an attachment to your email. And when you send your letter, please let me know! I’d like to tally how many people have participated. There is a very real chance that we will not reach Gaza. However, if nothing else gets through, the letters will!

If you have any doubts, Tarak Kauff explains briefly why the letter writing campaign is such an important part of our mission and includes his letter as an example. For background on the campaign and ideas for your letter, visit UstoGaza. They will eventually be collated into an exhibit and perhaps also a book. Exhibition of Letters to Gaza Being Prepared.

“We have sent copies of some of the Letters to Gaza via email to the Qattan Centre for the Children in Gaza City. They are using those to prepare a display that will be put together once they have the letters being brought on The Audacity of Hope.”

One idea for your letter is to tell the people of Gaza what you are doing to challenge U.S. complicity. One such letter was recently posted on Facebook:

Dear Friends in Gaza,

I follow with great sadness the news of Israel’s continuing siege of the Gaza community. I visited Gaza twice between 1988-1992, and saw what a beautiful land it could be IF you were allowed the freedom to make it so. Freedom to fish, tend your citrus groves, build up your economy, rebuild the damaged homes and infrastructure.

I participate in a small Friday afternoon vigil on a busy street. We have several signs, including END THE SIEGE OF GAZA and HONK FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE – this is mine; the honks are heartening.

I greatly admire your resilience and steadfastness. Know that you are remembered in my prayers. 

Sister F.S.

As another example, here is my letter:

To the people of Gaza,

As a taxpaying U.S. citizen, I have been deeply troubled by the role my government plays in oppressing the people of Gaza for many years. In that time I have been vexed by how best to oppose the policies of Washington. How to make an impact? Strange to say of what people call a ‘democracy,’ but it is a challenging thing to change government behavior – even when most people are on our side.

Many in my country feel totally powerless towards such things. Not to mention isolated and surrounded by the mundane pressures of a consumerist society that effectively discourages substantive political involvement of any kind. I am, therefore, grateful to be able to participate in the Freedom Flotilla 2 as a passenger on The Audacity of Hope.

I mention these things by way of attempting to explain how it is that the U.S. has gone on enabling Israeli crimes year after year. It is not that the American people agree with what is being done to Gaza – though the corporate press does what it can to shape opinions, and not without effect – but rather, it is that our society strongly discourages manifestations of solidarity between peoples. People do not know, or if they know, they feel powerless.

However, it is not hopeless. In recent years, slowly but surely, I have seen Palestine solidarity movements in the U.S. grow stronger and inspire ever more people. When I first became active in organizing awareness-raising events at my university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp had just occurred. We formed a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. In the years since, greater coordination and hopes for change have snowballed with groups like U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation and Jewish Voice for Peace. And the Arab Spring has given us all a new sense of possibility.

I speak for many of my fellow Americans when I write: we do not consent to what the U.S. government is doing to the Palestinian people. Our hearts are with you!

Sincerely yours,
Steve Fake

Updates

Video statements from individual passengers on why they are participating are being posted daily, here. Keep checking back for more, including one from me, in the coming days.

Follow breaking news updates on the boat at Facebook and Twitter. 

It is quite likely that there will be periods of time when I am unable to communicate. The boat is equipped with satellite communications; however, the Israelis have in the past used electronic jamming equipment. It is also more probable than not that our ship will be boarded, and that we will be detained in an Israeli port. Organizers will be working with land teams in New York, Athens, Israel, and Gaza. They will have the most up-to-the-minute information on what is happening to us. The above links to the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the U.S. Boat to Gaza are thus the best resource. You do not need to have accounts with these sites to follow the updates at the links.

I will post my own updates as I am able at Scramble for Africa.

Tell President Obama to support our safe passage!

I spoke to Richard Goldstone several times after his eponymous Report came out, and it was obvious that the personal slander and vilification from so many in his own community was wearing him down. He was certainly naive and did not expect the excreta storm that would head his way.

He had always been a person of integrity and his editorial in the Washington Post, allegedly “retracting” the Report named after him is saddening. If it had appeared the day before, one would almost suspect it of being an April Fool’s parody.

Indeed, the wording of the editorial, while confused and evasive, was eloquently indicative of heavy pressure -- not least since only two days before at a debate at Stanford University, he is reported as maintaining that “all the investigations showed that, thus far, the facts were as they were reported.”

One cannot help wondering what happened in the next two days to change his mind. Did his daughter, ex IDF and self-confessed Israeli patriot, pull the family chains? It certainly betokens a personal tragedy, since it will detract from his reputation and integrity in the human rights and international law field, with no chance at all of earning the forgiveness of the rabid and vindictive Zionists who have been hounding him mercilessly for two years.

Indeed, reading the editorial reminded me of Comrade Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness At Noon” -- a true believer doing one last duty for the group he had lived with for so many years. It reads like a “confession” rung out from someone trying to free hostages near and dear to him by giving the kidnappers what they want while trying to hold on to one’s own integrity and dignity. Sadly, of course, those who attacked his morals and probity before, will never, ever forgive him for telling the truth originally -- and like Rubashov, he will be shown no mercy once his confession has served its purpose for the cause.

It suited the Lobby to highlight Goldstone, a Zionist and judge whose international reputation made it even more difficult than usual to bury the message especially among Jews. However, those other members are distinguished jurists in their own right who were commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and whose report became the property of the UN General Assembly, neither of whom are likely to drop the report just because complicit Israeli ministers misinterpret Goldstone’s editorial with the same liberty that they misinterpreted the original report -- which after all simply asked the parties to conduct credible investigations.

The core “retraction” in the editorial is the sentence, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” which is about as retractable as a rubber band. It certainly does not substantiate Netanyahu’s reaction “Everything we said was proved true,” although it does raise suspicions that Avigdor Lieberman’s attribution of the editorial to “diplomatic efforts on behalf of Israel,” might conceal some heavy advocacy conveying difficult-to-refuse offers.

Goldstone is a lawyer, and this imprecisely flexibly wording of “different document,” could mean almost anything. If he knew about the ferocity of the tribal scapegoating that was to follow? If he knew that the report was going to spur Israel into mounting a series of pseudo-independent investigations into events that they refused to look into earlier? It certainly is far from an unequivocal retraction of the original, which is not “his” to retract since it was, after all, the product of a team including three others, commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council. 

His claim that Israeli investigations “also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy,” does not contradict his early report, which never suggested that. The My Lai massacre, for example, was no less a war crime because the Pentagon did not directly order it.

His most wrenching default is when he says “the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently (my italics) the consequence of an Israeli commander's erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.”

Looking at the abysmal track record of Israeli investigations -- and bearing in mind that it was the original Goldstone Report that brought about the apology for an investigation he refers to here, Judge Goldstone really has to explain to his own conscience on what grounds he is “confident” of an appropriate response, let alone how the finding of “negligence” came about.

Throughout, he is upsettingly equivocal. “While I welcome Israel’s investigations into allegations, I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn't negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.”

But then later he says “McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree.” How significant is “significant” if after two years, “few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded” and if the proceedings, conducted by the same military body that defends the military, are carried out in private?

In the face of that, his second thoughts about calling upon Hamas calling for its own inquiry are totally gratuitous. Surely he never expected them to. But they did let him and his colleagues in to investigate themselves, which Israel did not, and which, as he reiterates, refused to present evidence to his committee.

Even though it is unlikely that the UN bodies will drop the report, Goldstone’s pseudo-retraction has provided the opportunity for Israeli “Hasbara” to trumpet its misinterpretations. It does a disservice to international justice and humanitarian law and tries to accord to Israeli leaders the impunity which he had spent his career fighting, in South Africa, Rwanda, the Balkans and Central America.

It is a tragedy that such a career should end this way, generating as much sorrow as anger. Sorrow for the damage it has done to the universality of justice, and anger at the unscrupulous manipulation of familial and tribal loyalties that likely brought it about.

For more by Ian Williams visit Deadline Pundit.

(Pictured: Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.)

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the thirty-seventh in the series.

In the face of the bombshell Palestine Papers published this week by al Jazeera and the Guardian, today’s offering from WikiLeaks of a single cable examining the situation in Gaza will doubtlessly be seen as weak tea.

Still, where the Palestine Papers succeed in demonstrating Palestinian Authority weakness, the cable just WikiLeaked shows rival Hamas to be no less insecure. The 2010 Jerusalem embassy dispatch reports rumors from trusted contacts which suggest that the organization suffers from a liquidity crisis which, if true, would certainly undermine prospects for the group’s long-term popular support.

Most alarmingly, embassy contacts in Gaza reported to American diplomatic officers that

Hamas was late in paying January salaries to civil servants on its payroll, and has not yet paid those salaries in full. While Hamas salary payments are typically available on the first day of every month, employees of the de facto Hamas government did not line up at post offices or the Islamic National Bank…until February 8 when, according to contacts, Hamas paid low-level employees with salaries up to NIS 1,500 (USD 400) per month.

One source reported overhearing an employee at Hamas’s Ministry of the Interior

complain on the phone that his salary was late and he would only receive a portion of it. The employee further complained that this was at least the third month he had received only a “portion.”

If true, Hamas has a problem on its hands. The group reportedly employees some 34,000 workers on a payroll that pays out roughly $16 million in monthly salaries, on top of the $9 million allotted for other operational costs. One source confided to embassy personnel that Hamas only collects between $3.5 and $4 million a month in levied taxes and other fees and thus relies heavily on outside assistance to make up the difference.

For instance, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX employee salaries at Hamas’s “Ministry of Education”—except those receiving salaries from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah are covered by Qatari donations.

Recently, however, Israeli and Egyptian crackdowns on entry and exit to the Strip compromised Hamas’s ability to capitalize on foreign largesse. Contacts reported that tighter Egyptian restrictions were especially deleterious to the organization’s checking account,

Including increased interference with smuggling operations. Gaza contacts note that Egypt has also cracked down on travel of Hamas officials outside Gaza by restricting their access through the Rafah crossing. In particular, Egypt reportedly no longer tolerates “Hamas VIP bags,” a reference to suitcases of cash transported across the Rafah border into Gaza.  

But the cable notes also that while all of the American embassy’s contacts inside Gaza reported Hamas’ financial troubles, they “interpret the nature and depth of the problem differently.” One contact speculated that Hamas indeed possessed enough money to cover all of its various expenses at the moment, but was “protecting its fiscal position by holding back on payments. ” Another asserted that Hamas has plenty of cash on hand, but instead of honoring the payment schedules of its employees, chooses to invest it in real estate accumulation in Gaza. The source provided intelligence that Hamas was offering “bids on properties…well above market prices,” and speculated that “purchasing real estate is a sustainable investment for Hamas, a money laundering scheme, and/or part of a strategy to strengthen its financial position (or physical presence) in Gaza as a bulwark against future events.”

At the same time, Hamas was reported to have been not only cutting costs but also accelerating its efforts at rent-seeking.

According to multiple contacts, municipalities in Gaza are stepping up the collection of electricity and water bills. Hamas-run ministries also charge fees for various services, like the issuance of official documents. The first-time “registration” fee for a car is USD 12,000…Gazans must also pay an annual fee to renew their car or motorcycle. New traffic signs are being installed, and traffic laws are being aggressively enforced by the police. For an infraction, according to a Gazan contact, police typically confiscate a driver’s license or car documents and require the driver to retrieve his documents at a police station, where he will likely pay a penalty fee.

If the reports are to be believed, some cases are outright predatory:

In one anecdotal account…a man who used his van to transport children to school was confronted by Hamas authorities and instructed to register his van as a school bus, and then pay requisite taxes.

The attack on education isn’t relegated solely to making transportation difficult. “Another contact said that Hamas now demands private school to pay taxes based on tuition fees, and threatens to shut down schools for non-compliance.” Purported school taxing would be of a piece with other reports that increased taxes and fees were also being levied against local businesses.

The fact that Hamas is unable, or unwilling, to pay salaries, combined with its practice of increased taxes and random fees cannot have positively contributed to the party’s already sagging popularity in Gaza. Despite claims that the Gazan economy is improving, Hamas’s favorable ratings currently remain at less than half of what they were five years ago when they assumed power of the territory, numbers that dropped precipitously in 2010. This is surely in large part due to the organization’s difficulties staking out political positions on the continuum between rhetoric and responsibility since 2006. And needless to say, worsening humanitarian conditions on account of the Israeli blockade haven’t helped. But until Hamas learns that candy and greeting cards are no replacement for basic attempts at effective governance—especially as the wealth of a new political elite within the organization grows—the party’s goal of securing its political future through ballots, not bullets, will remain elusive. 

(Pictured: Gaza Youth Breaks Out's logo.)

"F**k Hamas. F**k Israel. F**k Fatah. F**k UN. F**k UNWRA. F**k USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!" Thus begins the Gaza Youth's Manifesto for Change, as posted on Gaza Youth Breaks Out Facebook page, which over 8,000 Facebook users "like." As the Guardian reports, the document details "the daily humiliations and frustrations that constitute everyday life in the Gaza Strip."

Equal-opportunity dissidents, the members of Gaza Youth Breaks Out are almost as outraged by the heavy hand of Hamas as by Israeli oppression. 

We barely survived the Operation Cast Lead. . . . During the last years, Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want.

Recent months have seen the emergence of another unlikely source of outrage: 93-year-old former French Resistance fighter and Buchenwald survivor Stéphane Hessel. His slim volume -- actually a long essay -- Indignez-vous! (Get indignant!) has spent two months atop French bestseller lists. Another Guardian article reports:

Hessel's book argues that French people should re-embrace the values of the French resistance, which have been lost, which was driven by indignation, and French people need to get outraged again.  

Among his personal hot-button issues:

. . . the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France's shocking treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, protecting the environment, the plight of Palestinians and the importance of protecting the French welfare system. 

It's easy to lament how sad it is that Western public needs to be told to become indignant. But one might look at someone in Hessel's position -- not exactly the French Michael Moore, he once served as his country's ambassador to the United Nations -- as providing the populace with the permission it subconsciously feels it needs to express outrage. 

Allow me to qualify that by explaining that the disinclination of 90% of the population to refrain from rebellion does not make them sheep. They may just be hard-wired to support the society and government into which they're born. In his version of the the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, nutritionist and renaissance man Gary Null called them "adaptive-supportives." That's not so bad, is it? (For more, see my January 2010 piece for Scholars & Rogues Is apathy socially redeeming?)

But do Westerners, Americans especially, and not just youth, but adults, need to be reduced to straits as dire as the Palestinians in Gaza before they react as Gaza Youth Speak Out did?

One-time neocon Francis Fukuyama, the celebrated political economist who has since turned his attention to the subject of wealth inequality, wrestles with why Americans endure what we do without fighting back in the January-February issue of the American Interest. Note that, in the passage that follows, when he refers to the left he means moderates such as Obama supporters, not true progressives. Here is, to Fukuyama, the "paramount puzzle." 

Why has a significant increase in income inequality in recent decades failed to generate political pressure from the left for redistributional redress, as similar trends did in earlier times? Instead, insofar as there is any populism bubbling from below in America today it comes from the Right, and its target is not just the "undeserving rich"—Wall Street "flip-it" shysters and their ilk—but, even more so, government policies intended to protect Americans from their predations. . . . Within a year of Barack Obama's inauguration, the most energized and angry people on the American political scene were not the homeowners with subprime mortgages who faced foreclosure as a result of the crisis, but rather those who faulted the government for taking steps to protect those homeowners, and to prevent the crisis from deepening. It was a strange phenomenon that saw many of those most deeply injured by the crisis become, in effect, objective allies of those who caused it.

This, then, is the contemporary context in which we raise the question of plutocracy in America: Why, given the economic history of the past thirty years, have we not seen the emergence of a powerful left-wing political movement seeking fairer distribution of growth? [Operative word: powerful. -- RW] . . . How can it be that large numbers of congressional Democrats and arguably the most socially liberal President in American history are now seriously considering extending, and even making permanent, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003? Is this not prima facie evidence of plutocracy?

In an outstanding article at Huffington Post titled The Poorhouse: Aunt Winnie, Glenn Beck, And The Politics Of The New Deal, Arthur Delaney and Ryan Grim provide a clue. (Emphasis added.) 

[President Franklin] Roosevelt came into office a deficit hawk, pushed to balance the budget and cut federal worker pay. He quickly realized his error and turned around. He had the room to maneuver, however, because poverty had become so widespread that it lost its stigma. It could finally be addressed with a level head rather than a wag of the finger.

Before then, however, the nation was just prosperous enough for those with a little to look down upon those with less. 

In other words, the United States hasn't been reduced to the circumstances that many lived under during the Depression, nor under which the elderly once routinely lived. Delaney and Grim again.

Though there were no national measurements, in surveys taken between 1925 and 1932 in Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin, nearly half of elderly people lived on less than $25 per month, which survey administrators deemed "insufficient subsistence income." A third in Connecticut had no income at all. An attempt to quantify elderly poverty in 1939, deep into the depression, using census data, found the rate may have been close to 80 percent.

The day that poverty loses its stigma doesn't, of course, mean that it's become acceptable. It's just that it's become pervasive to the point we can no longer indulge in denial that we're about to be overtaken by it too. It's the same with, say, warrantless surveillance. Until the day comes when many of us are actually dragged from our homes and taken into custody, we'll remain in denial that our rights are being systematically abrogated. However tired, the metaphor of the boiling frog demands to be trotted out again: by the time we decide we've had enough, it's too late.

Posted as a complement to Stephen Zunes's Foreign Policy in Focus piece Israel's Dubious Investigation of Flotilla Attack.

In a letter to President Barack Obama date June 17, 329 out of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives referred to Israel’s May 31 attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters, which resulted in the deaths of nine passengers and crew and injuries to scores of others, as an act of “self-defense” which they “strongly support.” Similarly, a June 21 Senate letter — signed by 87 out of 100 senators — went on record “fully” supporting what it called “Israel’s right to self-defense,” claiming that the widely supported effort to relieve critical shortages of food and medicine in the besieged Gaza Strip was simply part of a “clever tactical and diplomatic ploy” by “Israel’s opponents” to “challenge its international standing.”

The House letter urged President Obama “to remain steadfast in defense of Israel” in the face of the near-universal international condemnation of this blatant violation of international maritime law and other legal statutes, which the signatories referred to as “a rush to unfairly judge and defend Israel.” The Senate letter condemned the near-unanimous vote of the UN Human Rights Council for what it called “singling out” Israel, even though no other country in recent memory has attacked a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters. Both letters called upon the United States to veto any resolution in the UN Security Council criticizing the Israeli attack.

What is perhaps most disturbing is that many of the key arguments in the letters were misleading and, in some cases, factually inaccurate. 

The Israeli government had acknowledged prior to the writing of the letter that the extensive blockade of humanitarian goods was not necessary for their security, but as a means of pressuring the civilian population to end their support for Hamas, which won a majority of legislative seats in the most recent Palestinian election.  In addition, the Israeli government announced a significant relaxation of the embargo two days after the letter was written. Despite this, the House letter claimed that the purpose of the blockade was “to stop terrorists from smuggling weapons to kill innocent civilians,” thereby placing this large bipartisan majority of the House even further to the right than Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s rightist coalition. 

There was no mention in the letter than no such weapons were found on board any of the six ships hijacked by the Israelis nor on the previous eight ships the Free Gaza Campaign had sailed or attempted to sail to the Gaza Strip. In addition, even though the ships had been thoroughly inspected by customs officials prior to their disembarkation, the House letter claimed that had the Israelis not hijacked the ships, they would have “sailed unchecked into Gaza.”

Similarly, according to the Senate letter, Israel’s naval blockade was necessary “to keep dangerous goods from entering Gaza by sea” and falsely claimed that the intent of the Israeli blockade was “to protect Israel, while allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.” Particularly striking is the fact that, despite that the International Committee on the Red Cross and a broad consensus of international legal experts recognize that the Israeli blockade of humanitarian goods is illegal, the Senate letter insisted that the blockade “is legal under international law.”

The House letter insisted, despite the fact that several of those killed on the Mavi Marmara were shot at point blank range in the back or the back of the head and a video showing a 19-year old U.S. citizen shot execution style on the ground, that “Israeli forces used necessary force as an act of self-defense and of last resort.” Similarly, the Senate letter refers to the murders of passengers and crew resisting the illegal boarding of their vessel in international waters as a situation where the Israeli raiders were “forced to respond to that attack” when they “arrived” on the ship. 

The House letter also claimed that the other ships were “commandeered peacefully and without incident,” even though on the other ships, despite completely nonviolent resistance, passengers were tasered and brutally beaten and were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets. Similarly, the Senate letter insisted that, in spite of these potentially fatal beatings and other assaults, “Israeli forces were able to safely divert five of the six ships challenging the blockade.”

Even though the Israeli government has never entered Gaza to disperse aid to the people of that territory since the start of the siege years earlier and reputable relief organizations have documented that the Israelis had routinely refused to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip, these House members claimed that Israel had offered to “disperse the aid . . . directly to the people of Gaza.” And, despite the fact that the five aid ships that Israel had allowed to dock in Gaza in previous months had distributed their humanitarian cargo directly to those in need, the senators claimed that it would have otherwise gone “into the hands of corrupt Gaza officials.”

Learning what actually transpired in the tragic incident was apparently of little interest to the 87 senators who signed the letter defending the attack. Despite the apparent whitewash forthcoming in the internal Israeli investigation, the senate letter supported Israel’s alleged intention to carry out “a thorough investigation of the incident,” insisting that Israel “has the right to determine how its investigation is conducted.” This comes in spite of a recent public opinion poll shows a clear majority of Americans — including 65 percent of Democrats — favor an international inquiry over allowing Israel alone to investigate the circumstances of the attack . 

Ironically, a number of progressive organizations, web sites and list serves have called on the peace and human rights community to support the re- election of some of the very senators who signed this letter, including Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, and Russell Feingold. MoveOn, Council for a Livable World, and other progressive groups with PAC money have been are calling on their members, many of whom are peace and human rights activists, to donate their money to these right-wing Democrats who defend attacking peace and human rights activists and lie about the circumstances to justify it. They have no problems with supporting the re-election of those who lie and mislead their constituents in order to defend illegal actions by allied right-wing governments, even when they kill and injure participants in a humanitarian flotilla on the high seas.

There may be an underlying current of racism at work here. It is unlikely MoveOn, Council for a Livable World and other groups would defend such actions if, for example, if the activists were helping those under siege in Sarajevo in the 1990s or West Berlin in the 1940s, who happened to be white Europeans.

It is important to remember that the majority of Democrats joined in with Republicans in supporting the Salvadoran junta in the early 1980s and the Suharto regime in the 1990s until voters made clear they would withdraw their support from them if they did not change their policy. AIPAC and other right-wing “pro-Israel” groups are only as powerful as the absence of counter-pressure from the peace and human rights community. Letters like these will continue to be supported by most Democrats only as long they know they can get away with it.