A tale of two ships
Article published: Friday, February 20th 2009
I’ve been meaning for weeks to blog this snippet from January. It seemed, perhaps more than Gaza’s relentless bombardment itself, to sum up the absurdity of regarding what was happening there as a conflict between two sides with equal powers and responsibilities.
In the early hours of Wednesday 15th January, two ships were making their way towards the Israeli/Palestinian coastline.
The first, the Wehr Elbe, was a massive 33,000 tonne German-owned container ship chartered by the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command. It was carrying 989 shipping containers filled with ammunition and explosives – including white phosphorus munitions, according to charter documents. Those same charter documents specified that this ‘civilian’ vessel would be placed under the tactical command of the US Navy, and be permitted to carry up to twelve armed US military personnel. The Elbe was destined to Ashdod in Israel, to supply a US ammunition stockpile in Israel from which Israeli forces can draw down stocks with US approval.
Its quiet, violent journey down the eastern Med was only exposed after Manchester’s Omega Research Foundation tracked it for Amnesty International. When US Military Sealift Command staff in Virginia were contacted about the shipment on 12 January, off the coast of Greece the ship’s AIS transponder signal suddenly disappeared (its contract specifically permitted the US Navy to turn the ship’s transponder off – not an altogether safe thing to do in the congested shipping lanes of the Mediterranean). Amid protests from Greek trade unions and opposition politicians, the ship’s controllers appear to have decided it might be impolitic to dock at the Greek port of Astakos, where it was due to tranship some of the ammunition cargo for onward supply to Israel. Italian authorities, though, seem to have had no qualms allowing it to nip back to the Sicilian port of Augusta on 26 January – perhaps just for reprovisioning, perhaps to offload cargo to the nearby US ammunition resupply base ‘Sigonella’, from where it could be quietly transhipped at a later date.
The second ship, the Spirit of Humanity, was carrying a tonne of medical supplies from Cyprus to besieged hospitals in Gaza, along with a delegation of activists, doctors, journalists, human rights workers and parliamentarians. The voyage’s organisers say they declared to the Israeli government that they were coming, unlike the stealthy Elbe; “the passenger list and manifest were publicly released, and Cypriot authorities searched the boat prior to its departure in order to certify that it only carried humanitarian items.” At 3 a.m. they were forced to turn back when they say Israeli naval gunboats surrounded the unarmed vessel and threatened to fire upon it. The organisers claim that the Humanity was in international waters at the time, and that Israeli forces were therefore in breach of the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea.
What matters, of course, is that my boat’s bigger than your boat.
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