Midnight On The Mavi Marmara

At 4.30am on May 31 Israeli troops stormed the Mavi Marmara, the largest of the ships that formed the international Gaza Freedom Flotilla, in international waters. Within hours nine activists lay dead.

The flotilla had set sail in order to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to the bombed and malnourished population of Gaza, the most densely populated place on earth and often referred to by Palestinians as the world's biggest prison camp.

The 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza, over half of them children, and over two-thirds of them living in refugee camps as a result of earlier campaigns of ethnic cleansing by Israel have been subject to an Israeli blockade which allows in only the most meagre supply of aid and brooks no exports at all, effectively destroying Gaza's economy.

Since concrete is one of the many banned items, it has been near impossible to rebuild the one-eighth of homes that were destroyed in last year's winter blitzkrieg. Due to withheld food supplies, 13 per cent of children under five now suffer stunted growth from malnutrition.

The UN's Goldstone report into the Gaza massacres labelled the blockade a crime against humanity.

This is the context in which the flotilla set sail with two goals - to deliver its aid and to raise awareness of the vicious blockade.

Midnight On The Mavi Marmara presents eyewitness accounts, comprehensive rebuttals of Israel's arguments in justification of the raid, and in-depth analysis of the impact of both the blockade, and the attack.

The combined result of the flotilla attack, the blockade and last year's blitzkrieg have fed into growing international outrage towards Israel, but the activists who have contributed to this volume are divided over whether this will translate into any tangible improvements for Palestinians anytime soon.

On the one hand Ali Abunimeh, editor of the excellent electronic intifada website, sees reasons to be optimistic. He argues that "growing public outrage will eventually push (world leaders) to impose official sanctions."

Indeed, Bayoumi notes, some governments are acting already. Turkey, Ecuador and South Africa recalled their ambassadors after the raid. Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Greece and Sweden summoned theirs for consultation and Nicaragua cut off diplomatic ties altogether.

Israel's relations with Turkey have been damaged and the US is looking increasingly isolated in its unconditional support for Israel.

US journalist Daniel Luban and Norman Finkelstein both argue that even in the US itself Israel's support among the younger generation of Jews is shifting.

Fewer are willing to identify themselves with Israel with every new atrocity.

One place where attitudes seem to be going in the opposite direction, however, is Israel itself.

Neve Gordon, professor of politics and government, writes about the student-led Facebook campaign to have him expelled from his teaching post at Ben-Gurion University for voicing opposition to the flotilla raid.

He also notes that every protest against the flotilla attack was met with far larger demonstrations in support of it.

Elsewhere opinion polls suggest that 92 per cent of Israelis supported the attack - almost as high as the 94 per cent that supported the Gaza massacres.

To enter the Israeli mindset is to enter a world in which the proposal of a single democratic state for all inhabitants of historic Palestine is presented as the epitome of anti-semitic intolerance.

It is to enter a world in which those who sympathise with the brutalised and murdered aid workers are not only branded but perceived as modern-day nazis.

Elsewhere, Sara Roy argues that donor organisations and countries, especially US and European, are actually becoming more rather than less complicit in the Israeli occupation, actively participating in the blockade of Gaza and accepting ongoing colonisation of the West Bank.

Change, therefore, should never have been expected to have come from US or European governments nor yet from Israelis themselves.

Indeed, the very fact of Israel's senseless lashing out and the public support for it demonstrate a despair common to all illegitimate regimes which have realised their time is almost up.

The worst massacres in both apartheid South Africa and in the lands occupied by nazi Germany during World War II happened in their very last years when defeat was clearly inevitable.

The real hope for Palestine lies not with Israel's Western allies but elsewhere entirely - in the solidarity of ordinary people, as demonstrated by actions such as the freedom flotillas, in the growing influence of a rising third world and, most of all, in the ongoing struggle of the Palestinians themselves.