The New Dark Age

* Israel arrests Free Gaza chief * Noam Chomsky Interview: speaking of truth and power * Graham Usher: No change at the UN * British survivor of Gaza flotilla raid: ‘Israelis ignored SOS calls’ * Hamas officials given one month to leave Israel * Charles Glass: The Gaza Flotilla and Israels Many, Many Rights * Sasha Polakow-Suransky: Time for Peres to come clean * Merav Michaeli: Nothing to investigate – Everyone knows what was wrong about the flotilla attack

Israel arrests Free Gaza chief
Israeli forces arrested the chairwoman of the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla at Friday’s demonstration in Bil’in, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, supporters said. Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American from Michigan, is a human rights activist who was on board the aid flotilla that came under attack Monday, in a raid that left nine dead.

Noam Chomsky Interview: speaking of truth and power
Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime… For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years. Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.

Graham Usher: No change at the UN
[T]he blockade has been a colossal moral, political and diplomatic failure. Not only has it wrought a humanitarian catastrophe on Gaza’s 1.5 million people: it has so strengthened Hamas that it alone could claim the high ground in the wake of the flotilla debacle. It was that moral weight that compelled Egypt to open Gaza’s Rafah crossing into the Sinai on 1 June.

British survivor of Gaza flotilla raid: ‘Israelis ignored SOS calls’
“We can’t sit by and watch Israel violate international law every day. We want the British government to take action, ensure there is no future attacks on humanitarian aid convoys, to ensure there is a search carried out for those that remain missing, to ensure that those people who have been detained illegally will be released and most importantly to end the siege of Gaza.”

Hamas officials given one month to leave Israel
Jerusalem police confiscated the Israeli identity cards of four Hamas legislators overnight on Thursday and gave them until July to leave the country.

IOA Editor: This Haaretz headline is, of course, misleading. The Palestinian leaders were given a month before they’d be forced out of East Jerusalem. In all likelihood, their presence in Jerusalem predates Israel by centuries.

Charles Glass: The Gaza Flotilla and Israels Many, Many Rights

I now list the rights that Israel is entitled to exercise now and forever with the full support of its true friends, mainly in America, but wherever else they may be found. Perhaps not, at the moment, in Turkey. Israel has the right to kill anyone, anytime, for any reason it chooses. This includes those it designates as terrorists or terrorist supporters in Israel itself, in the occupied territories, in Dubai, on airplanes, in cars and on ships.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky: Time for Peres to come clean
The revelations in my book, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Alliance with Apartheid South Africa,” have angered Israelis across the political spectrum… President Shimon Peres has said “there exists no basis in reality for the claims” put forward in my book. Beilin… has decided to stand by his former boss… as he told The New York Times: “The president’s denial puts an end to the subject.” It does not.

Merav Michaeli: Nothing to investigate – Everyone knows what was wrong about the flotilla attack
Israel’s entrenchment is so deep-seated that it has announced it will certainly not lift the blockade on Gaza. Its blindness means that there is sure to be another round… There is nothing to investigate. This is the situation; everyone knows it. We just have to decide whether to go on like this, or take a deep breath and choose a different path.

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