Taking Liberty: Killing Americans To Protect Israel

On this day in 1967, the Israeli Air Force attacked an American reconnaissance ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 174. Over a period of an hour-and-a-half after Israeli pilots identified the ship as American, while the sailors battled to save the ship and their lives, the Israelis attacked the ship from the air and torpedo boats, hitting it with armor-piercing rounds, at least one bomb and one torpedo, and strafing the lifeboats. The Israelis wanted no survivors to embarrass them. Israeli jets had also targeted the antenna, to keep the ship from calling for help. But, as James Bamford recounts, a couple of radiomen:

patched together enough equipment and broken antennae to get a distress call off to the Sixth Fleet, despite intense jamming by the Israelis. "Any station, this is Rockstar," [radioman] Halman shouted, using the Liberty's voice call sign. "We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance." 

"Great, wonderful, she's burning, she's burning," said an Israeli pilot. 

But, hey, the Sixth Fleet had the message. We all know what happened next. Seen it in every movie. The cavalry was on the way. You can hear the order to American pilots: “Splash the bastards.”

Er, no. Wrong movie. (Try Exodus.) What actually happened was that the Secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara) and the President of the United States (Lyndon Johnson) twice recalled the American planes that were launched from nearby carriers to defend the ship.

Apology Excepted: Obama’s Turkish Twist

Following up on yesterday’s post about how the American media disappeared a Palestinian dissident and an American victim of Israeli aggression in one fell swoop of ideological misrecognition.

No apology

Furkan Dorgan in Turkey before he was killed by the IDF 

(from www.thiscantbehappening.net)

As this story in the New York Times (NYT) describes, in a dramatic last-minute, on-the-tarmac-before-takeoff telephone negotiation, Obama went out of his way to “broker” a deal whereby Israel would give an apology (one of those sorry for “any mistakes” non-apology apologies, to be sure) to Turkey for the killing of nine people during the 2010 Israeli raid the on the Turkish-flagged vessel Mavi Marmara in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, in exchange for Turkey’s restoration of full diplomatic ties with Israel. 

Restoring what historically has been a friendly relationship between Israel and Turkey is, you see, good for Israel. As both the NYT and the Jerusalem Post (JP) report, it means that Turkey will drop its criminal indictments against Israeli military officials, and it will open the door for Israel “to upgrade its ties with NATO, something that Turkey, as a NATO member, had continuously vetoed.“ It will also help the American-Israeli effort to, as the NYT so delicately puts it, “confront Syria’s civil war.”  Indeed, the JP reports that Syria was the decisive factor for Netanyahu, who posted that: “The fact that the crisis in Syria is getting worse by the minute was the central consideration in my eyes.”  As Netanyahu’s National Security Adviser, Yaakov Amidror, puts it: “What we wanted is to get to a situation where the relationship will be upgraded so that we can cooperate more regarding Syria, and will give Israel more freedom of action in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

More (?!) “freedom of action” for Israel. (N.B. NATO, “and elsewhere”?!!)  Just the formula for peace that the world needs.

So, in order to restore Israel’s beneficial relation to Turkey, open the door for Israel’s de facto integration into NATO, bring everyone on the same page for destroying the Syrian State, and, generally, everywhere, ”give Israel more freedom of action,” Obama used his newly-lauded “talent for arm-twisting” to get the Israeli Prime Minister to apologize to Turkey for an incident in which an American citizen was also killed – but nary a twist, tweak, word or suggestion about an apology to the United States, Israel’s uniquely generous patron. Love is never having to say you’re sorry. Or, the American Israel lobby would never allow that.

As Dave Lindorff points out in this cogent post, the American media “are full of glowing reports and praise” for Obama’s display of tough-minded diplomatic prowess.  Of course, neither would the American president “bother to demand that Netanyahu include an apology, weak or otherwise, to the American people for the killing of an American national,” nor would the American media bother to notice that he hadn’t.  Not allowed.

Some might find “the idea that this president cannot demand even a mild apology from an Israeli prime minister for the brutal slaughter of an unarmed US citizen, even as he is brokering such an apology for the killing of nine Turkish citizens … beyond appalling.”  “Some,” who will not be found – will not be allowed – in the Democratic or Republican parties, or in the mainstream media.

So after being killed by the IDF with “two shots to the face fired at close range …as he lay already gravely wounded … having been already shot in the back, leg and foot,” Furkan Dorgan, along with Rachel Corrie and the sailors of the USS Liberty, officially joins the ranks of Americans with whom, when it comes to Israel’s “freedom of action,” the President of the United States and the American media cannot be bothered.

"I feel a lot of horror"Remember Rachel Corrie

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death. Rachel was a 23-year-old  peace activist from Olympia, Washington and a student at Evergreen State College, who was crushed to death by an Israeli/American (Caterpillar) bulldozer on March 16th, 2003, while trying to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition. As Tom Wright and Therese Saliba correctly state in a Counterpunch piece, Rachel was killed resisting a "policy of mass collective punishment, and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, a war crime."

For nine years, Rachel's parents, Craig and Cindy, sought some kind of justice from the American and Israeli legal and political systems, only to confront "a powerful and deeply entrenched foreign policy apparatus that grants virtual impunity to Israel, even for the killing of an American peace activist."