Please, Israel, don’t send her back Roger Franklin
https://quadrant.org.au/short-reads/editors-corner/the-webs-hot-links/
On Thursday (Oct 2), Israel’s navy intercepted the 45-boat ‘Samud Flotilla’, the floating clown show whose professed intention ‘to deliver aid to Gaza’ appears never to have been so important as raising the social media profiles of its voyagers. Among them, playing cameo parts in support of insufferable doom goblin Greta Thunberg, were a number of Australians, of whom more below
Greg Rose, professor of international law the University of Wollongong and senior fellow with The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation, has dropped QOL a line. He writes:
‘Samud’ means ‘resistance’ in Arabic, so its name signifies the intent was political. Israel’s Foreign Ministry documented ties between Hamas and its foreign public relations arm, the Palestinian Conference for Palestinian Abroad, with the Samud Flotilla. The Ministry published a letter signed by the political chief of Hamas in 2021, calling for Hamas and PCPA unity, and it also published a list of PCPA members “some of whom are high-ranking, well-known Hamas operatives.”
The PCPA leader in the UK has been a blockade-busting flotilla organizer for over 15 years. Another PCPA member is the CEO of Cyber Neptune in Spain, described as “a front company in Spain that owns dozens of the ships participating in the Samud Flotilla … secretly owned by Hamas.”
To protect the European activists, one Spanish and two Italian naval frigates accompanied the flotilla, up to 150 nautical miles from the Levantine coast, but stressed that they would not engage with the Israeli Navy. Both appealed to flotilla activists to accept alternative means for the delivery of the ‘aid’ they claimed to carry.
Israel offered various means multiple times to deliver the purported cargo of humanitarian goods, offering the vessels an opportunity to unload at the port of Ashdod in Israel, in Greece, or in Cyprus, or to use the good offices of the Holy See to effect delivery. All these offers were refused; only breaching the blockade would suffice.
From the outset, the Samud Flotilla was controversial for its provocation against a legitimate naval blockade and its negligible humanitarian role. Humanitarian aid carried by the flotilla was very minor, which should not surprise given the little room left for it with between 500 and 600 activists aboard. Aid was the Samud Flotilla’s least effective function and least important purpose, essentially a fig leaf to cover the activists’ taunting of the Israel navy.
Israel and Egypt have each imposed blockades on Gaza since Hamas seized control in 2007. The Israeli blockade against Hamas is legal under international law, which permits the blockading of enemy vessels during armed conflict. Israel operates an exclusion zone out to 150 nautical miles from the coast. The Samud Flotilla was intercepted at 90 nautical miles. Smaller flotillas were blocked in June and July this year.
The Samud Flotilla was closely comparable to the large 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla, led by a Turkish Islamist NGO, that also sought to breach and end the naval blockade against Hamas. When Israel intervened and boarded the Turkish flotilla, those on board attacked and injured the Israeli boarding party, even knocking unconscious and seizing Israeli navy special forces. Nine jihadists died.
In a 2010 report on the Mavi Marmara incident for the UN Secretary-General, the commission of inquiry found that the Israeli blockade of Hamas was legal under the international laws of armed conflict. However, the report concluded that Israeli enforcement actions on the Mavi Marmara were ill-prepared and resulted in disproportionate harm.
In the case of the Samud Flotilla, according to Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar assured him that violence would be avoided. This time, preparation for and engagement with the would-be blockade-busters was extensive and harm was minimal, even though the operation was much more complex due to the large size of the fleet.
The Samud flotilla cost cashed-up anti-Israel activists and supporters months in preparation, weeks of sailing, hundreds of thousands of communications on social media, and millions of dollars.
But it sure was lots of fun for those who revel in media attention. For example, from France, politicians Marie Mesmeur and Rima Hassan and actress Adele Haenel came along, and, from Malaysia, singers and actresses Heliza and Hazwani Helmi, Zizi Kirana and Ardell Aryana, were on board. Of course, as always, Greta Thunberg was on hand seeking her second deportation.
Interception of the Samud Flotilla was no breach of international law. Just cashed-up and fashionable social-media warriors enjoying a Mediterranean cruise.
And Australia’s seagoing poseurs, what of them? Well — Surprise! Surprise! — they are very much of a type.
Consider the Lamonts, for instance. Mum Juliet and daughters Luca and Isla, set sail from Spain, interrupting their normal careers as public nuisances in northern New South Wales. Naturally, Their ABC provided a pulpit for whining about genocide, starvation and the wickedness of the Zionist Entity. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, so Jew-baiting must have made a refreshing change from the matriarch’s home-turf hobby of chaining herself to coal trains and the like.
Juliet and Luca also took to the treetops in 2023 to foil loggers, and in April of this year the 54-year-old swanned about with five other irritable ladies on the roof of the NSW Forestry Commission office in Coffs Harbour, a gambol for which she was fined $220 with no conviction recorded.
The Lamonts are believed to be in Israeli custody pending deportation. What a pity they’re going to be sent home. — roger franklin
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