Yes, and the Empire was giving away other people’s land. As we often found out, oddy enough the colonised didn’t much care for that, and it had long-term bad consequences, although under imperial logic of the moment it seemed like a good idea.
It’s hardly surprising that a traditional and long marginal population was not enthusiastic about a huge influx of foreign settlers, in their eyes closely tied and allied to the Imperial power, with a view of creating their own homeland. One can engage in tendentious argument about Ottoman laws, but I should think looking at American reactions to Mexican immigration in Arizona rather illustrates the very human reaction.
Extraordinary one has to put refugees in scare quotes. Utterly unnecessary scare quotes. I note that the myth of the Arab leadership calling for Arabs to leave Israel is repeated. That has been falsified for a good long time by Israeli historians themselves. There was indeed ethnic cleansing, and the percentage was significant by impartial accounts.
But this just underlines the sickness that underlies all the discussion around the subject, both sides (or influential portions of both) are so deeply committed to denying any legitimacy to the other at all. Arabs of course do the same thing, mirror image.
Again the scare quotes.
Palestinians in rational discourse, not aggressive ultra nationalist propaganda and spin, which the majority of this note represents, do not need scare quotes. this kind of discourse is merely a polite mirror of the ugly anti-Israel rhetoric questioning the Jewishness of “European Jews”… Both are ugly bits of tribalistic racism.
In any case, rather off the topic.
The reality is that Israel has engaged in something that is, to use that fun little de Talleyrand quote, “worse than a crime, a blunder” here.
It has now been several days and the highly selective release of video by the Israelis and the continued detention of at least some journalists rather suggests that the story line is less black and white than their version (it seems self-evident it is also not in accordance with the emotional renditions of the activists either).
At the same time, the incident reminds one of The Exodus incident - in which peaceful-ish Jewish passengers also fought back against what they viewed as unjust action by the British navy:
The parallels are interesting, of course imperfect. But that was a blunder by the UK, this was a blunder by Israel.
This comment from the US makes the point:
As well as this:
I’d suggest that Israel, by falling into a blind habit of treating every portion of its security and neighbourhood problems as if it were an existential threat (and not all are, only a few), has backed itself into blindly self-destructive habits. The Gaza blockade, which is so painfully clearly collective punishment of the population for voting in Hamas, is like this event, “worse than a crime, a blunder.”
Obviously the accounts from the activists are true when they said they saw commandos aiming and firing at already wounded men lying on the deck. That was why they raised the white flags and one doctor got the loudhailer to tell the commandos to stop shooting as they had all surrendered and that was minutes into the attack when they saw a few lying shot on the deck but they kept on shooting regardless.
You don’t get 4 bullets to the head unless you are already dead from the first one.
IDF liars are all over the media here trying to justify this and thousands of Israeli’s are out in the streets of Tel Aviv in support of the attack.
It’s quite unbelievable.
It must be quite disturbing to Erdogan to see this display when he has buried 9 dead yesterday and today and many more are in hospital with bullet wounds.
You refer to one of my posts as being from a Jewish site, but you posted numerous Palestinian cites. BTW, my quote was from an old Honest Reporting cite.
The American/Turk who was killed was hailed as a matyr by his relatives, which means that there was expectation that he would be killed. Sorry, I lost the cite, but it’s current news.
seems to be the one that the female activist who was interviewed yesterday said that she was standing beside him as he was filming the commandos dropping down and he was shot inches from her in the middle of the head.
Can’t be sure but the bullet matches her story from yesterday.
He was obviously a cameraman, and had to be eliminated, as was Hassan Ghani reporter who was as he said in the crosshairs of a commando but managed to open a door to the inside of the ship to escape being shot.
If this is what they do to the foreign activists just imagine what the autopsy reports must show for the Palestinians!
And they get shot every day and until now no one seemed to bother.
I checked and American TVs are pretty much all oil-spill all the time these days. This latest skirmish in the endless Israeli-Arab showdown was been front-page news in the papers and on blogs for a couple of days but certainly not on TV. On the day it happened I watched ABC and it was the third story. Oil-drenched pelicans are trumping commandos and angry sign-wavers nine times out of ten. Bad timing.
You’ve seen no such footage and no such footage is available, there is not a complete video of the event from start to finish. You are referring to a propaganda clip provided by the IDF, they have the complete video and until you see that, you can’t really claim to have seen anything or say that we have footage that disputes what eyewitnesses have said that has happened.
Sure we do, and you admit it before you try to deny it because its “IDF propaganda”.
We have video footage that shows that the IDF commandos were not shooting anybody as they rappelled down, even though they could have assisted their comrades who were being hammered with crowbars.
Your claim is essentially that IDF troops started rappelling down while randomly shooting people, and then stopped shooting people and let themselves be brutally beaten with crowbars and, in fact, re-holstered their sidearms and kept using their paintball guns. And that even the reinforcements who were repelling down also weren’t firing at anybody.
In order for your claim to be at all plausible, trained commandos would have had to have descended onto the deck, firing while they did. And then let themselves get surrounded by people using lethal force. And then have had their backup descend with ineffective weapons.
Not particularly. But one should care because of the politics. Slapping the label terrorist on your enemies may be emotionally satisfying, but doesn’t get one far.
As we learned with Sinn Fien and the IRA, adult nations know how to proportionally engage.
This editorial from FT’s Stephens is apropos of how the civilised world sees this event, whatever the rather sad spin by IDF to justify its incompetence and grotesquely excessive use of force due to said incomptence:
No, it is not clear from the activists claims exactly where shots may have come from. There is simply not enough of a record to clearly know what the sequence of events was from the selective video release. I don’t give particular credence to the activists claims, but neither is the video record without problems.
Apparently, you maintain the ability to be surprised by Israeli Government Apologists. Good on you I suppose – I’ve abandoned all hope of profitable exchanges long ago.
You’re welcome to reply to my actual argument about what we see on video, what that shows us, and why an alternate explanation that they came down already shooting makes no sense.
Ahhh, a YouTube video. Finally!
Of course, despite the fact that it’s not a transcript and it’s a half hour long (:rolleeys:) people really should watch the relevant parts of it, as it contradicts your claims. Why you cited it is beyond me. People really, really should check it. Around 4:00 in, I think is where she starts, give or take, and she was evidently not even present for the initial clashes but does state that they used gas and flashbang grenades, both non-lethal methods. And not that they’d started by opening fire.
Her other claims then are the same that Marmite made above, that are irrelevant; namely that they broadcast messages in one form or another that they weren’t resisting… while meaning we have video proof of them resisting.
Her account is in accord with everything we know about what happened.