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For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Anti-War Radio.
And now we turn to Paul Laudry.
He is the co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement, and they've put together another flotilla and are about to attempt to sail to Gaza to break the Israeli blockade.
Welcome to the show, Paul.
Pleasure to be with you, Scott.
Well, it's great to have you here, and a note for the audience, maybe a little bit of background noise.
We have Paul on the phone live from the JFK Airport, where you're on a layover waiting to head out to the Mediterranean Sea region, if I got that right.
That's absolutely right.
And then, as I said in the introduction there, you are the co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement, and can you tell us, Paul, what exactly is your involvement in this newest effort to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza with this new flotilla?
So, yes, we have a delegation of U.S. citizens that it's only five that are participating.
We were expecting to have 15 originally, but we had to revise that because of problems in procuring the vessel that we wanted.
Better known is the U.S. boat to Gaza.
We have more passengers on board.
They're exclusively an American ship, and they're flying.
It's an American flag vessel.
But we're participating in an international ship.
That is to say, the ship represents multiple nations, and so they need a delegation of U.S. citizens as part of that, and so that's what we're doing.
I see.
Yeah.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Paul Laudry.
He's co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement.
Now, how many people altogether on the different boats, in fact, how many different boats are involved in this latest flotilla effort, Paul?
Well, even at this late date, it's difficult to give you a precise figure because some boats are running into difficulties with authorities, and we may yet run into difficulties, and at the same time, some boats are being in the process of coming in.
So let's say probably between eight and ten boats will be in the flotilla.
And now I read that you participated in the flotilla that broke the blockade back in 2008, and you also were a victim of the Israeli attack on the Mavi Mamara and Associated Ships a year ago.
Could you tell us those stories briefly?
Okay.
Just a quick correction.
I was not on the Mavi Mamara itself.
I was part of the flotilla, and yes, we were all attacked by Israeli soldiers.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the Mavi Mamara was the only ship that sustained casualties, but we all were treated rather roughly, let's say.
Maybe in some cases, brutally.
As far as the first voyage into Gaza in 2008, there are about five of us who worked together in order to plan and create this, and of course, obviously, we grew over time.
And we, to some extent, surprised ourselves with the success of getting into Gaza at that time.
There were two small boats that we took in there, and it was successful in breaking the siege.
And then there were four other successful voyages into Gaza with one ship, one small boat, relatively small.
And then the Israeli invasion of Gaza took place in late 2008 and early 2009, and the same ship attempted to return to Gaza during that invasion, and it was rammed before it reached Gaza and almost sank on the spot.
It actually did sink later.
So those first five voyages were the only ones that were successful in getting into Gaza.
There were several others later, always with one ship, until last year, when the flotilla of six ships, followed by a seventh a week later, attempted to get in.
And of course, we know that it was an attack, and more than 700 people were taken prisoner and deported, and there were nine fatalities and quite a few wounded, some of them quite seriously.
Well, I don't want to divert off the subject too much, but when you talk about the Mavi Mamar case and that entire flotilla and what happened there, I think it's worth at least giving you an opportunity to talk about the official story as it came out in the media for the first week, week and a half or so, and then really the way it seemed from this end was that by the time the truth started coming out, by the time the prisoners started being released and telling their side of the story, it was no longer a news issue.
But really, the exact opposite of the truth was delivered to the American people for a week straight on all the cable TV news, for example.
Yes, that's true.
We did have a few choices.
Our delegation, we asked two of our people.
This was Ambassador Ed Peck and Joe Meadors of the U.S.S., who was a veteran of the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967, to sign whatever the Israelis told them to sign and just get out so that they could speak to the press, and that worked out pretty well, although for the first 24 hours they did not get out.
But once they did, they were at least one voice that could be heard in contrast to the Israeli story.
And then later, when we were all released, as you say, we were able to offer a different version, but by that time the story had died down and our voices didn't carry very far.
However, the situation, I think, is not quite the way it has been told in many cases.
I think that it's possible that the Israelis attempted to board the Mavi Marmara by sea first from the small boats that pulled alongside, and when that failed, they brought in the helicopters.
And the helicopters also failed initially because of the nonviolent work of activists, for example, taking the cables that were dropped from them and tying them to the ship.
And since that made it impossible for the soldiers to get down, they brought in the THUG, which was the Grazi Brigade, and they began assassinating people, presumably in order to clear a space for the soldiers to get down on deck, and it was effective in that regard.
And from then on, I mean, they initially apparently killed, assassinated two people on the spot in order to keep people away, and then once they got on deck, there was further mayhem.
But they were not about using brutality, and our people were entirely nonviolent.
Some people made makeshift defensive weapons after they saw their comrades being killed because I guess they decided they weren't going to go down with some kind of a fight.
Well, I'm here to tell you, I don't know, Paul, if you got back to the States in time to see the propaganda, but the way the story was told was that a bunch of terrorists attempted to invade Israel, armed with sticks, and they forced the IDF to defend themselves.
Actually, I think the idea that humanitarian aid workers and human rights observers, unarmed but violent, were on their way, and then they attack a group of Israeli commandos, armed to the teeth but nonviolent, I think if they can sell that to people as the truth, then it's an amazing propaganda effort.
Yeah, well, and they made it a really complicated story.
See, half of y'all were Hezbollah under Nasrallah, and the other half Al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Right.
It was very sophisticated propaganda.
Yeah.
Sorry.
All right, so I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio here on KPFK in L.A., and I'm talking with Paul Laudry.
He is co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement, and I'm sorry because I haven't been giving out the name of your website here.
It's freepalestinemovement.org, correct?
That's it.
Right.
And now tell us, I know that a year ago y'all were attempting to bring medicine, food, sacks of concrete, reconstruction supplies, those kinds of things, to the Gaza Strip.
Is that the same deal this time, or can you elaborate?
It is.
Of course, even when we had 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid that we were bringing last year, it's still really a drop in the bucket.
Let's face it, the whole effort is symbolic, but we're trying to build a movement so that each time it gets bigger and bigger.
And indeed, I think that with all the land convoys that are going, the demonstrations that took place along the border, and other projects such as the fly-in that is planned for July 8th into Israel, and an even bigger one.
We're hoping for a million people to congregate at the borders in November and walk to Jerusalem.
It's a matter of growing the movement in order to put increasing pressure and to bring attention to the people of the world that they need to do something.
Obviously, it's not the governments that are doing anything.
But the people of the world can do something, and that's what we're attempting to show with these efforts here.
Once the people feel empowered, we think that they will carry the day much as they did with the anti-apartheid movement and other movements in the past.
Did you see the State Department warning that, hey, the last time people tried this, the Israelis killed them?
Be careful.
Yes, that's very kind of them to be concerned for our welfare.
We know what the risks are.
We're in a better position than most to understand that.
And, of course, they are assuming that our government is not in the business of protecting its citizens, so they have decided that they're not going to protect us.
Well, we are going to go anyway, and eventually we think that the people of the United States will demand that their government protect its citizens, especially when those citizens are doing absolutely nothing harmful.
What is the harm in anything that we are doing?
So it's up to our government to protect us, and if they're going to abdicate their responsibility, I think we'll find ways to keep them accountable.
Yeah, I mean, it really is amazing to me that they would just state as a matter of fact like that.
By the way, there's no way in the world that we'll do anything to protect you from the Israeli government.
So you're taking your life into your own hands.
That's the subtext of the whole thing.
Well, they're playing to their true constituency.
Instead of their constituency being the American people, it's the Israeli government, the Israeli regime.
It's not even the Israeli people.
So we know who they work for.
All right.
Now, I think a lot of people, especially if they depend on TV or talk radio news to find out what's going on in the world, might not have much of an idea about what the situation is like in Gaza for the average person.
And I guess if there's a little bit of time, maybe we could go back and talk about the politics and how it got this way and the state of the current siege and that kind of thing.
But really, I was hoping at this point you could help get across to people exactly what is the situation in Gaza?
What does it mean, this siege?
Well, a very brief background is that Hamas was a political party and a resistance organization that finally decided to call a ceasefire, a unilateral ceasefire, in late 2005 and run as a party in the Palestinian election.
And in January of 2006, they won those elections.
So they found themselves in power because the other governments had been ineffectual and there had been a lot of corruption.
So after they went into power, instead of recognizing a very democratic process which put them into power and respecting the decision of the Palestinian people, the Israeli government and the American government and the European government also, to a large extent, cut off all aid and relations to this new government.
In the following year, Hamas, in a sense, made allowance for that by saying, never mind, we won, but let's share power.
Let's bring in all the parties that ran for power.
And they shared power with Fatah and other parties in, I think it was January of 2007.
But this was an accord put together in Saudi Arabia.
But still, the U.S. and the West and Israel refused to deal with the government, even though there were the representatives of that government.
Many of them were from the Fatah party who recognized Israel.
And Hamas pledged to accept the will of the American people and the consensus of their government in doing this.
It wasn't good enough.
The Israelis and the Americans decided that Hamas had to go, and so they provided arms to basically some thugs.
Hamid Dahlan, who worked with the Fatah party, was provided with these arms, and they attempted a coup in Gaza over the Hamas government.
And then the government, Hamas, staged a countercoup, defended themselves, and drove out the coup plotters.
That's when Israel shut the borders of Gaza and cut off essentially all traffic, even for a long-time humanitarian aid.
But there are, to this day, no imports or exports to support any kind of economy in Gaza.
The economy has essentially ground to a halt.
And, of course, we know that in late 2008, early 2009, they invaded Gaza, and the outcome of that was more than 1,400 Palestinian deaths and 13 Israeli deaths, four of whom were friendly fire.
There were no battles at all that took place during that invasion.
It was simply laying waste to Gaza and destroying or damaging fully 10% of all the buildings in Gaza.
So what you have is a giant concentration camp or prison where the Palestinians in Gaza are made to fend for themselves.
And the policy of the Israeli government has been to, as Dov Weissblatt, the advisor to the Prime Minister, said, put Palestinians on a diet.
In other words, not to make them die, but to make them really suffer, to be in misery from lack of a lot of things that people normally are able to live with.
Well, and that's the real point right there.
The Washington Post and the New York Times tell us all day that this is just about keeping arms out.
Netanyahu and the government over there claim this is about keeping arms out of the hands of the Gazans.
But, as you say, Dov Weissblatt talked about keeping the people of Gaza on a diet.
And then the WikiLeaks have State Department flunky reporting back to D.C. the exact same kind of language that the Israelis say their goal is to keep the people of Gaza hungry, but not starving.
Never mind how criminal that is under various national and international laws.
It's the height of immorality, and it just goes to show that they don't mean what they say when they pretend that this is simply a security concern here.
It's like Madeleine Albright admitting that her policy was to strangle the civilian population of Iraq in order to get them to turn against Saddam Hussein.
That's right.
There's an interesting story here.
First of all, the Israelis are saying that international law is on their side, that they have the right to maintain this blockade.
Actually, what international law says is that they have the right to block armaments, as you say, weapons from going in, and they do not have the right to block anything else from going in.
So we are actually assisting Israel in assuring that weapons do not go in, because we are fully inspected by the countries from which we originate to assure that there are no weapons on board.
Believe me, the last thing we want is for anyone to discover weapons on board our ships.
And so we go to great lengths to make sure that's the case.
And on the first voyage into Gaza, when Israel did not in fact stop our boat, although they tried in many ways to prevent us from going in the first place, when we finally got in, the spokesperson for the Israeli government, Aryeh Mekel, was asked, why didn't you stop them?
And he said, well, these people are troublemakers.
If we stop them, it's a big story, and that's exactly what they want.
And besides, we knew, we knew that they did not have anything dangerous on board.
How did we know?
Because the Cypriot government inspected them before leaving, and we know and trust the Cypriot authority.
Well, that is what we've done every single time.
Of course.
Not only the Cypriot authority, other authorities.
But they said, their own government spokesperson said that we fulfilled their security requirements.
So what more do they want?
Well, I've got bad news for you.
We're in the past, in the case of the USS Liberty, Rachel Corey, Furkan Dogan, the American citizen who was killed a year ago in the Mavi Mamara raid.
Those were all kind of carte blanche, permission, impunity after the fact, accessory after the fact type behavior on the part of the Johnson and Bush and Obama administrations.
But now, just in from Mondoweiss.net here, Paul, bad news for you.
Hillary gives Israel green light to defend itself from flotilla.
Quote, and we think that it's not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.
Clinton said, the American secretary of state just gave the green light to the government of Israel to kill you, Paul.
I see.
Well, if they hadn't, I'm sure that would have made a huge difference.
Yeah, well, there's that too, right?
That is amazing, though.
I mean, silence is one thing, but carte blanche, permission like this is just incredible.
Yeah.
Well, as I said, they have to respond to their constituency, and their constituency is in Tel Aviv.
So we're not their constituency.
Yeah, apparently not.
Well, geez, good luck to you.
I sure hope that you guys got some stealth.
You can sneak in there and get some food to some youngsters that need it in that gigantic Attica prison that is the Gaza Strip right now.
And do please take care of Ray McGovern for me.
We'll do our best.
We're guided by the Freedom Riders of the 40s and 50s, who segregation did not melt when the first bus came in, and we're planning to keep going until Palestinian human rights can be exercised to the same extent as Israeli human rights and the human rights of all people.
Yeah.
Well, on behalf of the rest of those of us who aren't willing to take the risk to go with you, thank you.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Paul Laudry.
He is co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement.
That's freepalestinemovement.org.
And he and a lot of other Americans, as well as a lot of other people from around the world, are gearing up to float another group of boats to Gaza to try to break the Israeli blockade.
And we'll be keeping up with every detail of that story, of course, at antiwar.com.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this evening.
Thanks very much for listening.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 o'clock on 90.7 KPFK in L.A.
For more information visit www.freepalestinemovement.org
