Alex Harrison gives an eyewitness account of the vicious Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla – and all those aboard.

The Freedom Flotilla sailed peacefully to break the siege of Gaza, not to see friends killed. Aboard the Spirit of Humanity last year I experienced Israeli abduction and imprisonment and although they have killed peace activists and thousands of Palestinians, I did not believe they would fire on us.

At 2am the Sumoud (which means Steadfastness), which I was on, was the last ship to join the flotilla. The Mavi Marmara lit up like the Blackpool Illuminations for us and every captain radioed a welcome. As all three of the Free Gaza Movement’s vessels had suffered unexplained mechanical problems, reaching the other ships felt like victory. We even stopped for a swim.

When we lost our GPS that evening, we knew the Israeli operation was on. Warships appeared and at midnight they began to radio the familiar vague threat they had repeated over 13 hours last year. “This is the Israeli Navy. You are entering a blockaded area. The responsibility of your actions will be on the captain and crew.” We were still over 100 miles from Gaza. The warships drew closer and were joined by aircraft. We stayed near the Marmara for safety, steering away from the Israeli coast. They never warned us they’d use arms against us.

During the dawn prayer, while we were still 80 miles offshore, they launched zodiacs (speedboats each carrying 15 heavily armed, masked men). They surrounded us as two tried to attach to the Marmara. The passengers hosed them with water and the journalists on the Sumoud photographed the smoke of the explosives the Israeli military had launched. I doubt many of those on board were able to identify what was being fired at them.
We saw the helicopter descending on the Marmara and heard the crack of live gunfire. We radioed Captain Mehmet: should we stay near, for solidarity? “We are being brutally attacked. Carry on, try to get the footage out,” he said. What he didn’t tell us was that he knew that two of his passengers were dead.

We sailed on. The two helicopters on the horizon behind us were far apart and we knew another ship was under attack. Our zodiac accompaniment left. Were we being allowed through? A new warship appeared ahead. It sped at us. We braced. During Free Gaza’s sixth voyage The Dignity had been rammed three times by the Israeli navy and later sank. This warship swerved, sped at us and swerved again. Then it launched more zodiacs.
Although the 17 of us on board resisted only by standing on deck, the masked gunmen opened fire even before they boarded. Women were pelted with rubber bullets (one suffering facial injuries), were tackled and pulled down onto broken glass, and bound with cable ties. Two were hooded. The journalists were identified and tasered. The degree of violence used was so unnecessary it was cartoonish.

Yet the military attack is not the memory I dwell on. Perhaps violence and death on that scale is basically incomprehensible. My outstanding memory is of their contempt and how they humiliated us at every moment until our flights departed. Commandos snatched all our possessions, everything down to our wristwatches. They watched us on the toilet. They screamed and hissed, dragging us from the boat to parade us before jeering soldiers and photographers. We were bruised, abused and forcibly strip-searched at the dock, then taken to a prison compound and held incommunicado.

Only when the women from the Marmara arrived, staring and red-eyed, did we learn what had happened on that boat. We were given no news of the missing and injured. The Israeli officials were hateful, denying us the rights their law affords. The widow of a slain passenger was shown a photograph of him. Bloated and shot in the head, she recognised her husband only by his mouth. She was then sent back to the cells.

Those of us who refused illegal deportation and wanted to go before a court were tricked into boarding vans and held in an airport cargo bay. A soldier, unprovoked, beat two of the women. His colleagues held the rest of us back to facilitate it. Our pen had a view of men being beaten by a dozen soldiers at a time, one so severely he was unable to travel. A senior officer, seeing I’d salvaged one possession, my phone, broke it and binned it in front of me. Abusive. Unnecessary.

The epitome of their inhumanity was their treatment of the injured men. On Wednesday night most were still clothed in what they’d slept in on Sunday, bloodstained and torn. One, who was having a blood transfusion, walked carrying the blood bag in his hand. I couldn’t ask the hobbling men with bandaged feet how they’d been injured. If they spoke, they were beaten. They’d been shot in the tops of their feet but the Israelis wouldn’t give them wheelchairs or crutches. Anyone offering the injured an arm for support was smacked and dragged away. The soldiers watched, forcing the men to hop unaided to the aeroplane.

I finally embarked, joining colleagues who had been on board for 14 hours. I continually recall the stench of three day old dried blood mixed with fresh blood and the stale, noxious adrenaline sweat produced when a person truly fears for their life.

The hostility wasn’t over. Denied radio by the control tower, the Turkish planes had to communicate by using the crew’s mobile phones. In a final insult we were told our belongings were in the cargo hold. They weren’t. They’d been looted. Credit cards and mobile phones taken from my boat were used in Tel Aviv over the following week. Despite assurances from our Foreign Office, the British passengers discovered nearly three weeks later that the Minister had yet to address the matter with Israel.

Safely back in the UK, how do I feel? Undeterred. What happened to us was only a fraction of what Palestinians experience. We cannot let the sacrifice of nine lives be in vain. We’re determined to work even harder. We’ve returned to immense support. In whatever way you support Palestine, throw in all your energies because right now it counts for more. Free Gaza have sailed nine voyages in under two years and we’re already preparing to sail again. We’ll go as soon as we’ve raised enough money for the boats and we will sail until Palestine is free.

From BAd to worse – then a bit better! by Jerry Hicks

In the week starting 17th May, all eyes were on the High Court in London. As if to rival Eastenders, the British Airways/Unite “High Court, the Soap Opera” had moved to a new twice-weekly slot.

Monday’s cliff hanger saw British Airways win another injunction on yet another technicality. Within the thousands of votes cast, the overwhelming majority of which were in favour of strike action, there were eleven spoilt papers and this was not conveyed to all those who took part in the ballot. Unite called the strike off and appealed. Thursday’s episode saw the injunction overturned. It appears the original decision was too much for the ruling class to justify.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so serious. That employers like BA use anti-union laws to stop strikes is no surprise. The National Union of Journalists and the RMT have both recently lost court cases on technicalities. The scandal is that employers are still able to use the courts to block strikes.

Where are we now with BA? Willie Walsh has sacked five Unite members, suspended at least 50 others and now we hear that some who cheered at the High Court when the injunction was overturned are suspended as well. This is a blatant attack on the union and its members.


*Jerry Hicks is a candidate for General Secretary of Unite. For more information about Jerry’s campaign, including the election timetable, visit http://jerryhicks.wordpress.com/.

The sovereign debt crisis roiling financial markets is just one of three major risks facing the global economy and threatening a double dip, explains economist Graham Turner.

House prices have started to fall again in the US. At the end of March, a record 10.1% of homeowners with a mortgage were in arrears. Repossessions have continued to rise, with 92,432 homeowners evicted in April alone. Attempts to cool runaway property speculation in China have triggered a steep reversal in share prices for property companies.

However, it is Euroland that has been dominating the headlines. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer made much of Greece’s travails during the election campaign, and George Osborne will cite the country’s inability to borrow on capital markets when he unveils his emergency budget in June. Many countries, including the US as well as Japan and much of Europe, have indeed hit the Keynesian buffers.   

Gordon Brown – and the Liberal Democrats – campaigned against early cuts in the deficit during the recent election, arguing that the recovery was too fragile. At first glance, they appeared to have a case. Consumer spending has slowed sharply this year, partly in response to the VAT reversal, but also because real pay is still contracting.

Andrew Fisher, LRC joint secretary, analyses the 2010 General Election result which could have been so much worse.

From some of the post-election analysis you’d be forgiven for thinking Labour had been a doughty fighter holding its own, resisting until the end, but just edged out in a contest from which it could walk away with its head held high (and other such tedious clichés).

The reality is somewhat different. Labour’s share of the vote fell from a poor 35.3% in 2005 to 29% in 2010. The number of Labour voters was reduced from 9.57 million in 2005 to 8.61 million in 2010, even though the turnout increased in 2010 – up from 61% in 2005 to 65% in 2010. In 2010, Labour polled five million fewer votes than in 1997. By comparison, in the 1983 General Election (entered in folklore as Labour’s darkest hour) Labour polled 27.6% and gained 8.46 million votes.
There has been a large decline in support for Labour since 2005 – as has been shown by election results in the intervening period. Despite the higher turnout, the average Labour candidate polled 13,643 votes in 2010 – 1,475 fewer, on average, than in 2005. Their share of the vote also declined by 5.5 percentage points to 31% (excluding Northern Ireland). This decline saw the net loss of 91 seats, the most lost by Labour since 1931.