israel seizes the rachel corrie

The MV Rachel Corrie, the Irish cargo ship that was the last component of the Freedom Flotilla, was hijacked by the Israeli Navy on the morning of June 5, forced to dock in the Israeli port of Ashdod, and all its passengers taken prisoner and then deported.

There were a few hours of high drama on Friday night (Saturday morning in Gaza), with reports circulated that the Rachel Corrie had been captured...then those reports scuttled by passengers on board who said they were only being followed, not boarded...then, finally, around 3am West Coast time, confirmation that the ship had been taken.

This final twist of the knife is not really a surprising coda to the Flotilla story, but there is something exquisitely cruel about it. The final drama played out with the ship in view of the Gaza harbor, just twenty miles offshore. There's something spectacularly mean-spirited about letting the ship get close enough that people give in and just dare to hold out a sliver of impossible hope--then snatching it away at the last moment. In a final insult, the Israeli soldiers hailing the ship refused to call her the Rachel Corrie, instead using her previous name, the MV Linda. Are they uncomfortable saying their victims' names, or just so used to denying their existence they don't even think about it?

Already the Israeli hasbara machine is trying to spin a "good activist/bad activist" narrative claiming that there was "no violence" aboard the Rachel Corrie because the well-behaved activists on board submitted to--nay, practically welcomed!--armed Israeli soldiers hijacking their ship in international waters, kidnapping them and (as far as we know) stealing their cargo. Whereas the evil violent Al-Qaeda linked jihadist Turks who dared to resist a heavily armed assault with whatever makeshift weapons they could muster had it coming and deserved what they got--30 bullets for the nine dead, plus 48 more with gunshot wounds, plus persistent rumors of at least four people still missing, fates unknown. The Free Gaza Movement has already issued a press release cutting through some of this blame-the-victim bullshit, and activists everywhere should do the same.