Swedish novelist Henning Mankell writing in Ha’aretz:
We will return with broader support and a bigger flotilla, and I promise that the Israeli regime won’t have a quiet moment until this illegal blockade is broken. Our action has had more impact this year – unlike last year when the media didn’t pay attention until the commandos started killing people.
Even though our ships didn’t move an inch, this is yet another failure for Israel. The regime’s desperate fear increases the opposition against human rights violations in Gaza. According to basic international law, it’s illegal to collectively punish people as is done in Gaza.
In the same way I always claim that Gilad Shalit should have been released long ago and that Hamas’ rocket attacks against Israel must stop, I claim that we must look at this situation from this perspective: What comes first, oppression or rebellion? Not even Israel’s intellectuals can wave their magic wand and make reality disappear – the reality that the Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens in their own country. The Gaza blockade is not mainly about concrete, diapers or medicine. It’s about the human dignity that Israel deprives its own citizens of. Thus, it provokes desperate actions.
But for me the biggest mystery is that the Israeli regime doesn’t realize that it’s digging holes for itself, and that the situation in the end will be unbearable. Why are they blindfolding themselves?
