>>Hello Mike, When you write about the hijacking of ships, are you referring to the boat filled with weapons that was seized a few months ago and which Arafat said he knew nothing about even though everybody on the boat was Palestinian?
Laurent<< No, I was thinking about the following incidents, in fact. All secondary references are to Chomsky, as you may have guessed. ...There is no doubt that Israel has been carrying out hijacking operations and kidnapping at sea for many years, with little notice and no concern in the U.S. over this crime, which arouses great passion and anger when the perpetrators are Arabs. It was not even deemed necessary to report the fact that the Israeli High Court in effect gave its stamp of approval to this procedure. In the case of an Arab who appealed against his imprisonment on grounds that he was captured outside of Israeli territorial waters, the High Court ruled that "the legality of sentencing and imprisonment is unaffected by the means whereby the suspect was brought to Israeli territory," and held (once again) that an Israeli court may sentence a person for actions outside of Israel that it regards as criminal... (Ha'aretz June 12th 1986) ...In 1976, according to Knesset member (General, ret.) Mattityahu Peled, the Israeli Navy began to capture boats belonging to Lebanese Muslims - turning them over to Israel's Lebanese Christian allies - who killed them - in an effort to abort steps towards conciliation that had been arranged between the PLO and Israel. Prime Minister Rabin conceded the facts but said that the boats were captured prior to these arrangements, while Defense Minister Shimon Peres refused to comment. After a prisoner exchange in November 1983, a front-page story in the Times mentioned in its eighteenth paragraph that 37 of the Arab prisoners, who had been held at the notorious Ansar prison camp, "had been seized recently by the Israeli Navy as they tried to make their way from Cyprus to Tripoli," north of Beirut, an observation that merited no comment there or elsewhere. (New York Times Nov 25th 1983, Jan 26 1984) ... In June, 1984, Israel hijacked a ferryboat operating between Cyprus and Lebanon five miles off the Lebanese coast with a burst of machinegun fire and forced it to Haifa, where nine people were removed and held, eight Lebanese and the ninth Syrian. Five were freed after interrogation and four held, including one woman and a schoolboy returning from England for a holiday in Beirut; two were released two weeks later, while the fate of the others remains unreported. (Chomsky, p.64) ... The London Observer suggested a "political motive": to compel passengers to use the ferry operating from the Maronite port of Jounieh instead of Muslim West Beirut or to signal to the Lebanese that they are "powerless" and must come to terms with Israel. Lebanon denounced this "act of piracy," which Godfrey Jansen described as "another item" in Israel's long list of international thuggery." "To maintain the maritime terrorist fiction," he adds, "the Israelis then bombed and bombarded a small island off Tripoli which was said to be a base for PLO seaborne operations," a claim that he dismisses as "absurd." The Lebanese police reported that 15 were killed, 20 wounded and 20 missing, all Lebanese, fishermen and children at a Sunni boy scout camp which was the "worst hit" target. . (New York Times June 30th, July1st 1984; Middle East International, Boston Globe, Middle East Reporter, London Observer also at these dates) ... In its report on the Israeli "interception" (more accurately, hijacking) of the ferryboat, the Times observes that prior to the 1982 war, "the Israeli Navy regularly intercepted ships bound for or leaving the ports of Tyre and Sidon in the south and searched them for guerrillas," as usual accepting Israeli claims at face value; (Chomsky, p.64) ... Similarly, Israel's hijacking of a Libyan civilian jet on February 4, 1986 was accepted with equanimity, criticized, if at all, as an error based on faulty intelligence. (Thomas Friedman, New York Times Feb5th; Los Angeles Times, same date) ...On April 25, 1985, several Palestinians were kidnapped from civilian boats operating between Lebanon and Cyprus and sent to secret destinations in Israel, a fact that became public knowledge (in Israel) when one was interviewed on Israeli television, leading to an appeal to the High Court of justice for information; (News from Within, Jerusalem Nov 1 1985) ... Even terrorism against Americans is tolerable. The Israeli terrorist attacks against U.S. installations (also, public places) in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to exacerbate U.S-Egyptian relations and abort secret peace negotiations then in progress were ignored at the time and are barely remembered, much as in the case of the attempt to sink the U.S. spy ship Liberty in international waters in 1967 by Israeli bombers and torpedo boats that even shot lifeboats out of the water in an effort to ensure that no one would escape, with 34 crewmen killed and 171 injured, the worst peacetime U.S. naval disaster of the century, but dismissed as an "error" - a transparent absurdity - and barely known. (See James Ennes' 'The USS Liberty: Back in the News', American-Arab Affairs, also A Journey Through the Cold War Brookings Institute 2001) Chomsky notes that Raymond Garthoff, a highly respected scholar with close intelligence connections and personal experience, writes that "Our military and intelligence agencies were unanimous in finding it to have been a deliberate and unprovoked Israeli air and sea attack, but President Johnson was determined to accept belated Israeli apologies and claims that it had resulted form misidentification of the US ship, no matter how lacking in credibility these excuses were" (Chomsky footnote 106 , p198) ...Similarly, torture of Americans by the Israeli Army in the West Bank and southern Lebanon is barely noted in the media, with Israeli denials highlighted and verification by the U.S. Ambassador in Israel ignored. (see Middle East International May 16 1986, Boston Globe April 15, NYT April 16 1986. See Houston Chronicle May 18, 1984 for details of businessman Mike Mansour's detention and torture) To finish with a comment on airplane hijacking, Chomsky states that "The first airplane hijacking in the Middle East was carried out by Israel in December 1954, when a Syrian Airways civilian jet was intercepted by Israeli fighters and forced to land at Lydda airport"... Prime Minister Moshe Sharrett wrote privately that "we had no justification whatever to seize the plane" and that he had no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the US State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice." None of the above prevented Benjamin Netanyahu going on national television and accusing the PLO of "inventing the hijacking of airplanes and the killing of diplomats". As for killing diplomats, what about the assassination of UN Meditator Folke Bernadotte in 1948 by a terrorist group led by Yitzhak Shamir? >>Never heard about Israel in Latin America. Could you please elaborate.<< I'll get to that in a day or two. mike in barcelona
