Ali Abunimah writing on Aljazeera.net:
Since Israel’s invasion and massacre of over 1,400 people in Gaza 18 months ago, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, global civil society movements have stepped up their campaigns for justice and solidarity with Palestinians.
Governments, by contrast, carried on with business as usual, maintaining a complicit silence.
Israel’s lethal attack on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza may change that, spurring governments to follow the lead of their people and take unprecedented action to check Israel’s growing lawlessness. . .
It is a cumulative process – each successive outrage has diminished the reserve of goodwill and forbearance Israel enjoyed.
Even if most governments are not quite ready to go from words to effective actions, growing public outrage will eventually push them to impose official sanctions.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, may have hastened that day with his fulsome pride in, and praise for, the slaughter at sea even after the outpouring of international condemnation.
Despite its intensive efforts to hide and spin what happened aboard the Mavi Marmara in the early hours of May 31, the world saw Israel use exactly the sort of indiscriminate brutality documented in the Goldstone Report.
This time, however, it was not just "expendable" Palestinians or Lebanese who were Israel’s victims – but people from 32 countries and every continent. It was the day the whole world became Gaza. And like the people of Gaza, the world is unlikely to take it lying down.
