How did it feel for the last few days to be on the US Boat? Here are some excerpts of Joseph Dana’s reporting from Athens, for the Nation:
On Thursday, the passengers of the Audacity of Hope, the US boat in the “Freedom Flotilla 2” to Gaza—a convoy of ten boats, two cargo ships and some 300 civilians—emerged from their hotel on the edge of an Athens turned upside down. The air was heavy from the stench of garbage and tear gas, after two days of a general strike and fighting between police and demonstrators protesting the latest austerity measures. But the dramatic urban landscape barely caught the passengers’ attention as they boarded a chartered bus to a distant Athenian port, kept secret until then due to security concerns….
Standing in front of more than seventy journalists from around the world, the thirty-five passengers called on the Greek government to allow their boat to sail. The idea was that if the government were to continue its efforts—coming after intense Israeli lobbying—to prevent the boat from sailing, it would be forced to do so in front of the world media, and thus might back down. But just one hour before the press conference was set to begin, the captain of the US boat announced that he was abandoning the mission, saying that he risked losing his maritime license and could face jail time if he didn’t. But this was only the latest setback for the flotilla….
Israeli officials claim the mission is an “anti-Israeli public relations stunt.”
If that’s the case, then the PR battle has resulted in largely positive exposure for the flotilla organizers, who have maintained the upper hand in the media war. Careful not to leak any sensitive information, the US organizers have been inconsistent in dealing with journalists planning to travel on their boat. And the gulf between the Israeli government’s organized media campaign and the haphazard and largely disorganized campaign of the US organizers has been evident. But the bellicose Israeli strategy has helped to publicize this story in ways the flotilla organizers could never have orchestrated themselves.
…Central to the Israeli strategy have been efforts to associate the passengers with violence. On Monday the Israeli press reported that flotilla passengers planned to use chemical “substances” against Israeli soldiers sent to intercept their ships. These unsubstantiated rumors attributed to “military sources” were presented as fact in the Jerusalem Post as well as in Yediot Ahronot, the most popular daily. Some military officials publicly challeged the accusations the day after the story entered the news cycle, but the damage had already been done….
Many passengers believe they have already achieved a major goal of their mission: to raise awareness about conditions in Gaza. Robert Naiman, a US boat passenger and policy director of the Washington, DC, think tank Just Foreign Policy, said, “The fact of the matter is that we have already won. The international press is talking about the blockade and Gaza. The contradiction between the world of the Israeli military officials and the world in which the rest of us live is exposed for all to see.”…
Alice Walker has become an icon and anchor of this diverse crew of Americans willing to risk their lives to highlight Israeli control over Gaza. At the flotilla’s only international press conference held so far in Athens, she expressed a widely shared sentiment when she said, “My government has failed us, and is ignorant of our own history.” Visibly exhausted from the last week in Athens, she added, “When black people were enslaved for 300 years, it took a lot of people from outside our community to help free us. This is a fine tradition—going to help people who need us anywhere on the planet. I look at you in the room; if we have salvation as humankind, it is in this room.”
