31 May 2010
War Resisters’ International – an international pacifist network with more than 80 affiliates in more than 40 countries – condemns the murderous Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza and calls for an immediate lifting of the blockade on Gaza.
The Israeli state has been responsible for many outrages in its history, especially against the population of Gaza. To put it at its mildest, as reported last week by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, after a thousand days of the Israeli blockade, 61 per cent of the households of Gaza are “food insecure”.
The international nonviolent activists killed in the attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla did not regard their lives as more important than those of Palestinians – not more important, but nevertheless more visible. The ruthless criminality of this attack on an unarmed flotilla of nonviolent activists bearing humanitarian aid demonstrates for those who did not know before just to what extent the state of Israel regards itself as immune from international norms.