Many of those who were on the Mavi Marmara are speaking out and what they are saying is damning of Israel. Of course, what they are saying is also contradicted directly by the video of the event. MK Hanin Zuabi was on the ship and said according to a JPost article that:
“There was not a single passenger who raised a club. We put on our life vests. From where I was standing, I didn’t see any clubs or anything of the sort. There were gunshots, I don’t know if they were live bullets or not. There were gunshots fired from the ships in our direction. A clear message was being sent to us, for us to know that our lives were in danger. We convened that we were not interested in a confrontation. What we saw was five bodies. There were only civilians and there were not weapons. There was a sense that I many not come out of it alive. Israel spoke of a provocation, but there was no provocation.”
It is infuriating to hear this, not because it is true, but because it is so far from the truth of what occurred. Zuabi may well not have seen the fighting that occurred and is clearly shown on video, but her statement will certainly be used as evidence against Israel in any probe. So here we are, once again is a situation where Israel explains what happened and so does the opposition, while those far from the event postulate not that Israel’s explanation is accurate and that eye witnesses didn’t see the truth or are biased to the point of fabricating a truth, but that the truth must be “somewhere in between.”
This is where the Goldstone Commission had no chance of understanding the truth even if everyone made every attempt to find it. This is where an “impartial independent” commission would have no chance of finding the truth about what happened on the Mavi Marmara. An independent commission would have to form biases about whom to trust in order to discern the truth and as no one is truly impartial and the people likely chosen to sit on such a commission would almost certainly not be friends of Israel, Israel can expect any theoretically “impartial” commission to be partial against it. This is where the US opposition to such a commission is of vital importance.
“There was not a single passenger who raised a club. We put on our life vests. From where I was standing, I didn’t see any clubs or anything of the sort. There were gunshots, I don’t know if they were live bullets or not. There were gunshots fired from the ships in our direction. A clear message was being sent to us, for us to know that our lives were in danger. We convened that we were not interested in a confrontation. What we saw was five bodies. There were only civilians and there were not weapons. There was a sense that I many not come out of it alive. Israel spoke of a provocation, but there was no provocation.â€
One word: taqiyya