Biden owes an Apology to the Volunteers of the Mavi Marmara, the First Aid Flotilla to Gaza
Juan Cole 03/11/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Biden owes an apology to fellow American Furkan Doğan, whom Israeli commandos murdered on May 31, 2010, as he videoed their illegal attack in international waters on the aid ship Mavi Marmara. At the time, Biden justified the massacre.
Doğan and other volunteers were trying to bring food and medical aid to Gaza. After their cargo was seized by the Israelis, the latter actually delivered it to the UN for distribution in Gaza. This act served as an admission that the cargo was inoffensive, and there had been no reason to kill all those volunteers.
Doğan’s impulse has been vindicated by President Biden’s decision to send a US Navy flotilla to Gaza to succor the starving Palestinians. Biden’s action has the same legality as that of the crew of Mavi Marmara. Since Biden seems now to agree that someone should do something to stop Israel’s government from starving the Palestinians, he should give Doğan a medal for having thought of it first and having tried to do something about the food insecurity imposed by Israel on Gaza from 2006. Doğan gave his life at the age of 19 for a cause that Biden is now implicitly admitting was just.
On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos boarded five humanitarian aid ships in international waters, whose crews and aid workers had expressed the intention of sailing to Gaza to break the Israeli embargo on aid to its occupied territory. The occupation of four of the five ships went smoothly, but it may be that some aid workers put up a fight on the fifth, the Mavi Marmara, finding anything to hand to fend off the Israeli parachutists. They had no firearms or formal weaponry. Since the ship was in international waters, they were within their rights to attempt to prevent the boarding of their ship. Encountering opposition, the Israeli commander ordered his troops to open fire on these unarmed civilians, killing ten noncombatants. One was Doğan, the American citizen, and the nine were Turkish nationals. The American was a journalist. No weapons were found aboard the ship, despite complaints by the Israeli military that a ship had some iron bars on it, which were wielded as bats. The world’s most whiny army initially tried to depict the ship has having had arms (it didn’t) and charged that the volunteers were terrorists (they weren’t, except insofar as having sympathies for oppressed Palestinians makes you a terrorist.)
A UN Human Rights Council report found the attack on the aid ships “clearly unlawful.” The report said that “there is clear evidence to support prosecutions of crimes such as wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, and wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.”
The UN concluded, “Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old with dual Turkish and United States citizenship, was on the central area of the top deck filming with a small video camera when he was first hit with live fire. It appears that he was lying on the deck in a conscious, or semi-conscious, state for some time. In total Furkan received five bullet wounds, to the face, head, back thorax, left leg and foot. All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound which entered to the right of his nose. According to forensic analysis, tattooing around the wound in his face indicates that the shot was delivered at point blank range. Furthermore, the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back. The other wounds were not the result of firing in contact, near contact or close range, but it is not otherwise possible to determine the exact firing range. The wounds to the leg and foot were most likely received in a standing position.”
The ships were attacked to maintain illegal Israeli control over the Palestinians of Gaza.
Israel had withdrawn troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but retained control of its land borders, its air space, and its seacoast. After Hamas won the 2006 elections, Dov Weisglas, spokesman for the prime minister, explained of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” As a result of this policy of limiting aid into the Gaza Strip, a majority of the population was reduced to food insecurity.
The BBC reported that after a few years of this blockade, an Israeli report on it was released by court order: “The report cites a number of ailments suffered by Palestinian children in Gaza. Ten percent of children under 5 have stunted growth due to prolonged exposure to malnutrition. Anemia, caused by an iron-deficiency, affects 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, 68.1 percent of children nine to 12 months old and 36.8 percent of pregnant mothers.” That was in 2012.
Since the Israelis were allowed to get away all those years with half-starving the Palestinians, the Netanyahu government appears to have decided that it has carte blanche to up the ante from putting them on a diet to actually starving them to death. Biden has been forced by public outcry to at least try to put a band-aid on this problem by sending in the US navy with food aid. It is too little too late. If Biden had had Furkan Doğan’s empathy and decisiveness, we would not be in this mess.