Lifting veil of secrecy

MAXIMUM respect is due to the international activists under the Free Gaza Movement banner who shamed Israel into allowing their two small boats to sail into Gaza City at the weekend.

When spokesman Arye Mekel disclosed that Tel Aviv had decided "to avoid the media provocation" that he said the campaigners were seeking, he understood that the eyes of the world were on Israel.

It would have been embarrassing for Israeli forces to be seen boarding the Liberty and the Free Gaza, arresting all on board and taking them off to Israeli jails. So it minimised the bad publicity by allowing them to breach Israel's blockade and to be welcomed by thousands of joyful Palestinians.

The symbolic act was redolent of the Friendshipment caravans organised by the Pastors for Peace in north America to challenge the US blockade against Cuba.

The Pastors for Peace, led by Reverend Lucius Walker, refuse to validate or accept the blockade, relying on moral strength and courage to compel customs authorities to allow them to take material aid to Cuba.

The Palestinians' resistance to Israel's avowed intent to enforce a collective punishment on Gaza's population of 1.4 million Palestinians, while imposing a peace settlement that includes abandonment of the Palestinian refugee diaspora and annexation of east Jerusalem and much of the West Bank, has not attracted the international support won by Cuba.

Their Arab neighbours, notably Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have prioritised military co-operation with the US to secure their own corrupt dictatorships over the national rights of the Palestinians.

This is the same US that underwrites Israel's flouting of countless UN resolutions, finances its military strength and supports its illegal ethnic cleansing and colonisation of the West Bank.

And the European Union is no better, offering Israel preferential trading conditions that serve as encouragement for its lawless behaviour.

The Palestinians should not have to confront a choice of either surrender or military conflict against a ruthless and much more powerful enemy.

They should be able to expect and to witness a growing international awareness of their plight and a determination to do something about it.

The howls of anguish that always accompany decisions to break links with the zionist state indicate that cultural and trade boycotts are a tactic deserving of greater use.

And Israel's tactical decision not to react with typical violence to the Liberty and Free Gaza sailing into Gaza City offers a new imaginative example of how to highlight the injustices inflicted on the Palestinian people.

It is unconscionable that the US and the EU imposed sanctions on the dispossessed Palestinian people and collaborated in Israel's effective imprisonment of the entire population of Gaza because they voted for Hamas in protest against the corruption and ineffectiveness of the previous Fatah government.

The Palestinians' right to vote for the government of their choice is as inalienable as their right to national self-determination.

The Israelis must be deprived of their key tactic of immediate recourse to overwhelming military force by the real international community lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding the Palestinian cause and organising to challenge the US-EU-Israeli denial of it.