Gaza Flotilla: Is This a New Theory of "Direct Action"?

There are a great number of people who will have many more informed -- and obsessed -- opinions on the Gaza flotilla than I do, but even so, I have a few questions. The flotilla was led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, which some have claimed has ties to terrorists.

I'm concerned about the groups that call themselves peace and solidarity groups, however, who say they do not use terrorism, and who may use direct action, but generally don't directly use *violent* direct action. I have a question for them.

Is this a new theory of "direct action," which you wrap in humanitarian action in order to make the cause more appealing and distract from any violence or provoking of violence with the humanitarian mission?

If so, I have considerable moral queasiness about the mixing of humanitarian action with direct action, which is violent action, or non-violent action designed to provoke the use of force by authorities for the sake of a cause. I also question the extremist notion of "direct action" in the first place, for this cause or any cause -- it comes out of the theories of Marx and Lenin about revolutionary struggle, and advocates a theory that "the end justifies the means" which I find unacceptable. There is a long history of *non-violent* direct action in the United States, but this idea of wrapping in a humanitarian mantle the calculated actions that will produce a use of force strikes me as a recent -- and immoral -- innovation (I tend to think "direct action" itself is immoral, given its calculated "ends justifies the means" credo, but I'd likely find disagreement there, as many people think "direct action" can be justified if the cause is urgent enough).

Humanitarian groups spend a great deal of time distinguishing their errand of mercy from the operations of state combatants and the causes of armed militants. They are non-violent in their credo. There is disagreement, of course, as some non-governmental organizations, often those that get government aid, are willing to take armed escorts.

And human rights groups generally refrain from using or advocating violence regarding their own movement or other social movements, but this consensus, once espoused by Amnesty International's definition of "prisoners of conscience," is breaking down. We saw with Amnesty International's conflict with its gender adviser (who ultimately resigned) the appearance of a notion of "defensive jihad", i.e. militant Islamists could use violence in opposing what they saw as overwhelming force. There's a discussion to be had about the difference between that notion of "defensive jihad" and the always-disputed definition of terrorism, but these flotilla participants were not invoking any concept of "defensive jihad" when they went out (that we know of).

It's important to note as well that outside these more radical "solidarity" groups driven by different ideologies than universal human rights, that by and large, there is a sense among NGOs, that you do not mix military action with humanitarian and human rights action. No major organized humanitarian organization was involved in this Gaza flotilla, possibly because they may have wished to avoid appearing with an action that planned a violent confrontation. There were no CARE packages on this ship.

The various European, Turkish and other leaders of this operation make it very clear that the humanitarian mission -- bringing tons of food, construction supplies, and wheel-chairs -- was in fact a kind of cover for their overwhelming purpose which was to demonstrably break the military blockade imposed by the state of Israel on the Occupied Territories.

In a statement quoted by Associated Press of Greta Berlin of Free Gaza, an organizer of the action, says:

"What we're trying to do is open a sea lane between Gaza and the rest of the world," Greta Berlin said in Cyprus. "We're not trying to be a humanitarian mission. We're trying to say to the world, 'You have no right to imprison a million and a half Palestinians.'"

Since when do unarmed people's movements open up sea lanes? That's an act that usually you can only accomplish by war, not by "non-violent direct action".

I'll set aside the arguments that people in Gaza are "imprisoned" or, as is often said rhetorically, "in an open-air prison"; whatever truth might be found about those *results* the *path for how they got in this predicament* is being wilfully ignored with rhetorical statements like Berlin's: they got there due to a blockade that was in response to Hamas' use of terrorism and shooting of missiles into Israeli territory. 

Berlin isn't trying to make an argument for a new form of direct action that uses humanitarian missions, however. She is explicit here that in fact she's not really on a humanitarian mission, although she has chosen the symbol of a boat laden with humanitarian assistance as the prop for her direct action. She appears not to be morally troubled by this mixture of political direct action and the humanitarian mission; I am. If you don't want aid to be politicized -- and it is the belief of these activists that Palestinians are not receiving sufficient food, and that it is deliberately withheld for political reasons -- then don't exploit an aid mission for political ends yourself.

The entire feel of this action for me was something like people going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. That is, they didn't exactly take up guns explicitly, but they felt they were nobly going off to fight a cause, where they knew they'd more than likely face gunfire and arrest. Tapes have emerged that appear to show even training with the use of weapons and a planned violent response. What was really the intent, and how informed were the leaders of the intents of all the participants?

The expectations of the leaders of the flotilla, unlike the expectations of those now dead, is easy to find on the Internet:

At commondreams.org you can read the missive of Ann Wright, one of the participants before the ship set sail. Here's the headline: 

"Breaking the Israeli Siege of Gaza May Lead to an Attack at Sea, Detention Camps and Deportation".

Reading how calculated the staging of this incident was, you have to wonder at a lot of the commentary that indicates shock or surprise of the response they got from Israel. Here's what Ann Wright tells us *before* the trip about how she believes events will unfold:

In less than 48 hours, the Israeli Navy will probably fire U.S. made ammunition and rockets in international waters over the bows of two U.S. flagged boats and one Greek boat with U.S. citizens aboard as well as citizens from 13 other countries and over the bows of the Turkish 600 passenger ship. 

The "in international waters" theme is constantly reiterated in the coverage of this incident and the statements of activists. It seems Israel is within its rights to stop ships trying to break a blockade, the question of when they can start to attempt to do this "in international waters" is one I'd like to see competently addressed, as I'm not sure there is some magic exemption for everything you want to do in "international waters". Certainly you cannot claim a charge of "piracy" (which defines only non-state actors) on a state that protects its borders during a military blockade, which appears to be within the "laws of war".

More to the point, as we can see, the activists *were expecting fire; were expecting to be shot at*. They expected that it would take the form of shots "over the bows". (BTW, the U.S. theme also resounds throughout, in this pre-trip account and in other accounts that explain the two ships were registered in the U.S., and the activists expected that the State Department would then rescue them.)

This account by Ann Wright also explains that the activists knew, from the Israeli media, and common sense, what they might face:

According to Israeli media, the Israeli military is preparing for our arrival off the shores of Gaza.  The Israeli navy has been practicing its plan for preventing us from docking in Gaza, a plan that probably includes demanding by radio that the ships change course away from Gaza, firing weapons in front of the ships, ramming the ships and sending well-armed boarding parties onto the ships.

So if you are sailing smack into a blockade, where you expect that the navy of the country imposing the blockade is going to fire guns, and "probably" send well-armed boarding parties on to the ships, you are deliberately walking into a violent situation and can't be naive about the consequences.

In this case, as in others, ironically, despite everything that they themselves claim in their literature about the past allegations of excessive force by the IDF, the activists are counting on the Israel armed forces to behave in a civilized, predictable fashion, i.e. shooting "across the bow" but not to blow up the ship, as say, Belarus might do with an air balloon sailing over its border by accident or as the Soviets did with the Korean passenger airline. They are counting on Israel not to shoot their guns at people because they are a civilized, democratic nation.

If that's *not* the case, then they are counting on something else. They're counting on being able to show up the Israel Defense Forces, because inevitably, when people who know a state will meet them with "shots across the bow" deliberately sail into a blockade, they know there will be an incident that will qualify as "excessive force" or "non-proportional force" when activists deliberately chose to walk into a violent situation and provoke it, to see what happens, and see if they can emerge looking heroic on behalf of their cause.

I personally can't endorse such a strategy of provocative and violent direct action, that goes beyond some of the strategies of escalating *non-violent* direct action in the last decades, say, chaining yourself to an embassy fence, or demonstrating without a permit in front of some symbolic building, or crossing a police blockade near the Republican National Conference. When someone like Daniel Berrigan goes and breaks into a military building, pours blood on personnel files, or hammers a missile, he expects that his "direct action" will lead to arrest on charges of trespassing and destruction of public property. People endlessly argue over what exactly "civil disobedience" is -- acting under what should be your rights, say, to demonstrate with a sign on Red Square in 1968 when it was not allowed and you'd be quickly swept away by police, or acting deliberately  so as to provoke an arrest on actual criminal charges, that you still tacitly recognize as criminal and wrong, but which you do anyway in order to make a point about a larger issue you believe in.

These activists -- they said they had "Gaza fever" -- were zealous about their beliefs and appeared to know they were deliberately trip-wiring a violent situation, but either imagined that the Israel defensive action would be symbolic, too, or they actually hoped to provoke the forces into committing some act against a civilian, so that they could portray Israel in a bad light. That's a tactic picked up from the Palestinian terrorist movements themselves, where they set kids to throwing rocks to provoke Israeli soldiers possibly into gunfire, or they lob missiles into Israeli territory, hoping to provoke Israeli forces into taking action in response that they can then report as indiscriminate. I think these tactics are morally unacceptable, and cannot be used no matter what the cause.

It's hard to know in the "fog of direct action" on this ship what exactly the intent of these many activists were, and they were likely varied, as they came from all kinds of movements and countries.

This video footage, however, indicates that unlike Ann Wright, they were expecting to repel any action by the Israel Defense Forces with direct force themselves. They don't appear to arm themselves with any heavy artillery or any kind of serious automatic weapons, but they had pistols and things like what appear to be boxes full of metal baseball bats or metal construction rods. I'm not sure people play baseball in Gaza, and whether this was part of the well-meaning humanitarian cargo (the construction rods may have been), but the speed with which they were accessed, the rapidity with which they were disseminated and deployed immediately on the soldiers rapelling down on the ship, makes me wonder. (It reminds me of the way the ghetto thugs in my kids' schools raid the sports equipment lockers for metal baseball bats and use them in gang wars.)

Indeed, everything about this footage is disturbing -- the activists summarily throwing a soldier overboard; the vicious clubbing; the rapid running around the deck grabbing things to throw and hit, etc. What, the activists think this footage is fake and don't accept it as evidence? It's like the widely circulated youtube earlier this year of U.S. forces seeming to cynically fire on a group of journalists -- footage that also showed the journalists casually hanging around with men with automatic rifles, some of whom appeared to be their escorts as they all bunched together at several points. Why is the indignation so selective, when people chose to hang out with men with guns, and chose to deliberately run into men with guns?

What ever happened to the idea of going limp when it's time for your civil disobedience show to be over, and the police, whom you expect to be more civil than you have been, come to arrest you?

That at least used to be the tactic that those engaged in civil disobedience stunts would use, even teaching the tactics in "teach-ins" -- going limp, falling to the ground, "sitting in," etc.

I don't know why the violence of these activists in repelling the landing of the troops isn't discussed in all the somber statements about this incident, nor about the overall problem of the violence of Hamas itself and its terrorist tactics. In fact, if anything, the pundits and analysts are running toward the opinion that this incident will ultimately break Israel's will on this matter, and get them to cease the blockade. I have a feeling that isn't likely to happen soon, and then activists will have contributed to a situation getting worse, instead of better.

There's another comparison being made that should inspire moral revulsion, but doesn't. And that is the likening of this flotilla's mission with the 1947 ship of Holocaust survivors trying to make it to the historic Jewish homeland. The fact that Israeli commentators themselves have raised this comparison doesn't remove the revulsion for me. I find a world of difference between weary Holocaust survivors and a ship of well-fed activists with disposable time and income enough to embark on a stunt like this to provoke violence and then play the victim. It seems to me there are already enough real victims on both sides of this conflict without the need of outsiders to stage scenes to add themselves to the list.

The UN Security Council has condemned the assault of the activists killed in the conflict with soldiers and there is the usual call for an "impartial investigation". According to the New York Times:

the Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and it proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault by passengers of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.

I'm with the Obama Administration on this one, and I bet this caused some controversy behind White House walls, but it's the right thing to say -- whatever violence came from the IDF was deliberately provoked not only in the event, by the rapid gathering of people who clubbed soldiers, but by the entire preplanned, staged "direct action" intended deliberately to provoke violence, and to then show up the provoked as inhumane if it was not perfectly executed.

Did this ship's organizers also intend to torpedo the talks between Obama and Netanyahu by staging this incident on the same day?  I don't see any indication of that but it's a question to ask. As the Times report on the SC resolution noted:

While condemnation of Israel in the Security Council is not uncommon, the criticism at the emergency session called by Turkey and Lebanon was notable for both its vehemence and for the broad array of countries demanding an independent investigation into the decision to fire on civilians in what they described as a humanitarian mission.

These questions need to be asked and will be asked regardless of what the Security Council does, but Security Council members are familiar with the issue of keeping the humanitarian and military missions separate. If activists are going to play the "humanitarian mission" card, they can't expect to be taken seriously and obtain a shield behind this mission when they make demonstrative statements ahead of time that they know they are walking into armed confrontation by deliberately running a blockade, and when they pick up metal baseball bats (or construction rods) to club soldiers and throw one overboard.

From the SC debate, you can see that on the one hand, some countries want to indignantly wave the "humanitarian mission" flag and highlight that side of the Gaza crisis, while glossing over the nature of the deliberate, planned provocation to confront armed force and provoke armed force, and then the use of clubs and other implements to attack soldiers. The Israeli spokesmen accentuate this side of it, but don't supply more information about why they chose to land on the ship when they were so outnumbered, and what led to the decision to use firearms. I think the U.S. Mission has found the right thing to say about this, but likely many will be left unhappy with it:

“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. But he also described the situation in Gaza as “unsustainable” and called on Israel to undertake a credible investigation.

According to the New York Times, the IDF was expecting passive resistance:

An Israeli official said that the navy was planning to stop five of the six vessels of the flotilla with large nets that interfere with propellers, but that the sixth was too large for that. The official said there was clearly an intelligence failure in that the commandos were expecting to face passive resistance, and not an angry, violent reaction.

I completely accept that many characterize the situation as "unsustainable" and want to take action about it. I don't feel that "direct action" is what I can personally endorse or advocate as a movement's tactics; I certainly don't think you can wrap up "direct action" in a humanitarian flag, that you let slip even in your public statements saying you aren't *really* on a humanitarian mission, yet you hope that governments like that of Turkey will keep harping on that alleged humanitarian nature of your stunt.

And I don't think after having used that sort of duplicitious technique, you can then actually take up weapons and club soldiers, instead of going limp or staging a sit-in as they come to arrest you -- which you expected all along.

A protest movement isn't just about protest; it's about making a society as you wish it to be lived, and using violence of any sort, manipulative techniques, actions to provoke violence, demonstrative victimhood to gain news coverage -- these are not actions that make for a civil society.