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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Live from noon to two eastern time.
Weekdays here on No Agenda Radio.
And our next guest is Ann Egan.
I'm sorry, Ann, was that close enough?
Yeah, that was close enough.
Thank you.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm happy to join you.
Am I in Texas now?
Yes, you are.
You're in Texas and a lot of other places.
I don't even know, but yeah.
Okay, so now you are involved with the group that put on this mission to try to break the Gaza blockade and deliver humanitarian supplies to the siege, break the siege of the Gaza Strip.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
Okay, so.
I'm in the steering committee, as we call it, of the Swedish Ship to Gaza organization.
But as you might know, we do this also as an international work, so it's a part of what we call the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
Okay.
Well, let's just start with your role in the organization.
Okay.
I'm a spokesperson, but we have four spokespersons in the Swedish organization, and I'm a part of the board, you might say.
The Swedish organization is a general membership organization.
We become a member and we take decisions through members, you know, giving us different tasks to do in the steering committee and so on.
And the Swedish Ship to Gaza organization has been there since 2009, and we've also participated in different international flotilla missions.
Well, and I've been working with this for a long time.
I've got to tell you and everybody else also that I was not one of the people on the last leg.
I have been sailing the boat this summer, but not this last leg.
So I'm in Sweden now and preparing to welcome friends and activists home right now.
Well, there's already big controversy about the actual seizing of the ship and all these things, but, you know, I'm afraid to admit to you really the truth of how ignorant I think the average American is about the situation of what the Gaza Strip even is, where it even is.
And I won't ask you to give us, you know, sixth grade on level education about it, but could you please explain why you feel this needs to take place?
What's so important that you have to sail a ship full of aid to this little strip of land and try to, you know, risk in a different case, of course, your own well-being and these other people in your organization are risking their well-being in order to do this?
What's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that, you know, for most Europeans, the situation in Israel and Palestine is important in different ways.
We feel that it's a part of the European history, you could say.
Now, Palestine as it is today is an occupied country.
It's not recognized as a state by all countries in the world, but a lot of countries have recognized Palestine.
And Palestine constitutes of two parts.
It's the West Bank and it's the Gaza Strip, and they are separated.
They are separated by Israel, so it's like two pieces of this land.
Now, the Gaza Strip, you might say that Israel has for a long time, since the beginning of the 90s, been doing politics of separation, trying to keep those two entities.
And they're not far from each other, but try to keep them separate so that it's hard for people to travel between.
It's hard to keep up your family ties or professional economic ties, whatever.
And since 2007, when Hamas, which I think a lot of people know about, they won an election in the Gaza Strip.
There was a lot of conflict, and they came into power.
Then Israel started politics of proper siege, which means that they control everything that comes into this Strip.
They control all the border crossings, and most of them are basically closed by now.
And for several years, Gaza was what we often speak about, and rightly so, like a big open-air prison.
It's a small piece of land, but now there's 1.7 million people there.
Most of them are children, you know, under 18.
Over 50% of the population are children and young people.
Now, since a little while, it's been easier to travel as a person between Egypt and Gaza.
But basically, it's very hard.
So we decided that we can't just watch.
We see it as our government, by not demanding for this policy to start.
They are making us accomplice in this.
So we thought, because one part of this is that Gaza is by the Mediterranean Sea.
It used to be a lot of fishermen working, have kind of a thriving economy in that sense.
And it's located for all navigation, for all sailing.
So small boats can go out, but only three nautical miles.
And very often, they're also persecuted.
Fishermen get shot, et cetera, because they're suspected of going too far.
And anybody who lives by the sea knows that three nautical miles is not much.
So we decided we're going to do civil obedience against this.
We're going to sail there anyway.
We're going to say that international waters and the high seas are for everybody.
And Gaza and Palestine have the right also to have ships coming in, ships coming out.
And that's what we're doing.
The first time, I mean, there was more.
There's been several projects since 2007.
Several boats actually got through.
And there was a lot of American activists involved in that.
Smaller boats that actually managed to sail into the Strip and be one of the first ships that ever reached the area for decades.
But in 2010, we formed like a bigger international coalition, where one ship was a ship which has been famous since then.
That was the Turkish-owned ship called the Mavi Marmara.
And it became a very big convoy.
And that convoy was attacked by Israeli Navy in the middle of the night when it was sailing towards Gaza.
It was attacked on international waters.
And on this big ship, the Mavi Marmara, it's like a big passenger ferry, nine activists were killed.
One of them was actually American.
The others had Turkish citizenship, all of them.
And that was like the first big Zotilla mission, you might say.
It's okay for you, Scott, to interrupt me.
Well, no, I'm listening intently, and I'm imagining that my listeners are listening intently as well, that they're enjoying this.
And hopefully, if they're new to this kind of thing, they're realizing that it's really not too hard to learn all about this and care about it.
It really is, as you described, it's just collective punishment because the wrong guy won the election.
Yeah.
One common accusation, because it's always meant and formulated as an accusation, is that you do this to support Hamas.
Now, for me, and for most of the people I know that I work with, none of us would ever, if we were allowed to, would have voted for Hamas.
On the other hand, the internal policies, who votes for who, that's a matter of the people who live there, and I'm not really going to interfere into that.
I would personally never vote for that.
But this is about general human rights.
It's about recognizing that these people have the same rights as anybody else, to be recognized as human beings, to be able to live in their own land, to be able to...
I mean, the thing is, I think that there's a big and important economic aspect to this.
Also, and we've seen this, there's been a lot of reports released recently that shows what we knew, that this is a very fine-calibrated policy by the Israeli government, where they're trying not to starve people, but to keep them just over the level of starvation, and with some strange idea that this could just go on, that they could uphold what they believe to be security for their population by constantly punishing, and in a low-intensive, for the Palestinian population, very deadly war, just keep them in place.
It's so funny, you know.
It's very unfair.
If I didn't already know that that was true, that those stories are coming out just in the last week or so, and that they've come out in the past, they're in the State Department cables, heroically liberated by Bradley Manning and uploaded to WikiLeaks, and then there was a statement from one of Ehud Olmert's right-hand aides back during the Olmert years, that that is, in fact, their policy, keep them on a diet, count their calories, keep them hungry but not starving, and that kind of thing.
That sounds like a damn lie, except for the fact that it's true, right?
Like, how could anyone accuse Israel of being so cruel that they would have a deliberate policy of keep them, oh, on the edge of hungry but not starving?
How dare you accuse, oh, oh, it's right there in the WikiLeaks, oh, oh, it's right there, the open statement of the vice president of Israel.
Yeah, it is actually true.
And, I mean, another part of this for me as, I don't know, a Swedish person, and, I mean, Sweden has for a long time been engaged in aid policies where Palestine, the Palestinian territories, and people in refugee camps and so on have been, you know, one population of recipients.
But what we see here is also, you know, that a lot of European countries, also Americans, pay to help these people to live in any way, you know, in any dignity with schools and medical care and stuff like that.
And then we let Israel destroy the infrastructure that we have financed, like, well, like, I mean, Gaza had an airport which built partly by Swedish, not only at all, but partly by Swedish aid money.
And it's just bombed and destroyed and never, ever used.
And if Israel gets to decide in the manner that they are working now, in the line of policy that they're working now, it will never be used.
Right.
Okay, now, we keep going further and further afield from the boat, and we've got to get back to it.
But I wanted to mention, too, as long as we're talking about, you know, and how it got this way in the first place, sure does make it unfair.
It was the Bush administration and the Olmert administration that had a policy that they don't have to talk to Yasser Arafat because he's unelected.
And the only legitimate kind of politician in the world is an elected one, and so he has to stand for election.
But then the Israelis kept all his tax money that he needed to buy his votes with and wouldn't turn it over to him, like in the deal, and so he lost to Hamas.
And then, according to David Rose's article, The Gaza Bombshell, they tried to arm up, they still had a coalition government in Gaza where it was Fatah, who they prefer, along with Hamas, and they tried to arm up Fatah in order to kill Hamas and take over violently, exclude them from the coalition and take over the Gaza Strip, and it backfired.
And Hamas got the guns and whooped them and chased them off into the West Bank, and it just blew up in their face.
So it was American and Israeli and Egyptian, at the time, uberic policy that created this situation.
And then they used the excuse that Hamas won to say, well, oh, history began on the day Hamas won, and, oh, they're terrorists.
You don't have to deal with them.
They're terrorists, and who cares if they won an election?
That doesn't mean anything.
Now we're going to put them, basically put a siege on them and reduce their land to an open-air prison by the sea.
And no one ever tells a narrative like that.
Correct me if I, you know, screwed any part of it up, but it seems to me like it's pretty unfair when it was outside actors, the Americans and the Israelis, that put them in this position in the first place.
No, but I'm exactly down your line in that sense.
I mean, you could call it the double standard.
If you want to, you can call it hypocrisy that we don't really see that this is the way it is because the thing is basically that, you know, so there's a calculated Palestinian diet, but there's no freedom calculated into this, you know.
They're not supposed to have freedom, and we're not.
And I think, I mean, this is also a way to get back to the boat because another argument that has been used against this boat, which is called the Estelle, but also against the other boats and flotilla projects, have been to always call it a provocation, you know.
This is only a provocation.
It's a way of, and Benjamin Netanyahu often says, you know, this is just to slander Israel, and it is a provocation.
And I'm going to say that I think that the blockade is a provocation.
It's a provocation of my sense of justice.
It's a provocation to make, you know, by upholding this and when other governments back off and don't demand sharp and strong for the siege to be lifted.
We are letting ourselves be provoked, and Israel kind of moves that limit outside itself.
I mean, to me, it's visible on the map with those phones they have where they say that people cannot sail.
They claim it's their waters, and then they claim also that they have the right to intercept, as they say, boats far out on international water.
It's been done before, and it happened just as well from European times, the night between Friday and Saturday or in the morning on Saturday.
They then seized our boat.
Also out on international waters.
Now, this time, the boat, and I think it's interesting to speak about that, because we've had, you know, done short flotilla missions, starting from Greece or from Turkey, from Cyprus, places in the area.
And what we decided to do in Sweden this time was, okay, we'll get the boat up here in Scandinavia.
We will buy it here, we will equip it here, and we're going to sail it all the way through Europe.
And, you know, okay, so what's the point?
Well, the point was to stop in many places and always speaking about the speech, always speaking about the Palestinian problem, if you so wish, and make this, you know, a vehicle for the solidarity of people all over Europe.
And, I mean, that was our plan, and I am today, even though the boat is, you know, it's stolen.
It's in Ashdod.
People have been imprisoned, people have been deported.
So I could have been sad, but I'm not sad, because this mission has been a tremendous success in that way, that we have interacted with so many people.
And even if it's a small boat, normally you're only like 17 people on the boat maximum.
But we've been changing, you know, passengers and people from port to port, from harbor to harbor.
Of course, I mean, there's like, you know, a nucleus of some professional people who knows how to sail the boat.
But activists have been able to go on, politicians have been able to go on, cultural personalities, musicians, whatever, people that want to speak out for breaking and ending the siege.
And that has been amazing.
So we started in Finland in May and went to Sweden, and during the summer went to a lot of ports.
And then we went to Norway, we went to France, we went to Spain, we went to France again and to Italy, and took off for Gaza.
It's been an amazing journey, and to me it's been a tremendous success.
There are thousands and thousands of people that's been on this boat, that's seen it.
You know, people have, families have come on.
They can, you know, watch our, the cargo rooms and everything.
So many people know the Estelle now, and that's fascinating, I think.
Right, yeah, that's absolutely wonderful.
It's just this kind of thing that gets people's attention, even if you can't get through and actually deliver your humanitarian supplies.
Now, so tell us about the seizing of the ship.
Did they get anywhere near Israeli waters, or were they seized in international waters again?
They were undoubtedly seized in international waters.
You know, I mean, when it comes to, I don't accept anybody who claims that the blockade or the siege itself is legal, but there's a lot of things you can discuss in international law, if this paragraph and that is, and so on.
Right, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that Gazan waters are necessarily Israeli waters either, although it did kind of sound like that.
I'm sure you didn't, but I mean, there's a lot of things that you could discuss in terms of international law, but nobody could discuss that the place where our boat, where Estelle was intercepted, that was international waters.
Now, this time it was done in open daylight, not at night as when they took the Mavi Marmara, but it was in international waters.
And what happened was that, well, together probably around 15 ships were, as I understand, around six really, you know, big warships, and then a lot of smaller boats, like zodiacs and that kind of boat came around.
There's pictures out there, there's footage and films, shorter films at least, out now on the internet of this.
But, so you can see that there's a lot of soldiers coming, and they are armed, they are masked, you know, with like black masks and helmets and everything.
And there's like on this small ship, it's 90 years old, it's got three masks and a lot of sails and looks kind of beautiful, you know.
There's 30 peace activists on board, and they use this massive amount of soldiers.
And they go on board, even though people say, get off our boat, you know, this is international waters, you're actually committing piracy if you get on here.
But they did get on.
And they also did, Israel says that this was peaceful and calm.
And it's true that nobody died.
It's also true that at least physically nobody is severely damaged now.
But they use, you know, what do you call them?
We call them tasers, I think.
Sun guns.
You know what I mean?
Oh yeah, like the cops electrocute people to death with here.
Right, exactly.
That one.
Which is, of course, you know, totally non-violent and just fun.
And they use them quite frequently.
And we're talking about, you know, people around 60, 65 that was, you know, electrocuted with those sun guns over some of them at least five, six times.
And I think things have been quite an unpleasant.
This didn't happen to all the passengers, but to many of them.
Well, at least nobody got killed this time, right?
No, nobody got killed.
But I'm just, you know, I think my point is that, okay, and that's good.
Of course it's good that they didn't use live ammunition or anything like that.
Yeah, well, I'm not trying to give too much credit for it, you know, just.
No, no, but it is good.
But you also, I mean, what is violence and what's not violent?
To take a boat and to force it into a port where it doesn't want to go.
I mean, oh, that's kind of violent in my eyes, actually, what they did in that sense.
But anyway, they overtook the boat.
They were, as I understand, harsh to the Israeli activists, because there were three Israeli peace activists on the boat.
And they were handcuffed and they cuffed their feet and so on.
They were more brutal towards those three people.
That's what everybody I've been talking to have told me so far.
But then they took them to Ashdod, which is a port in Israel.
And they, well, it wasn't nice to be in prison.
That is totally, you know, everybody says so.
But also, of course, all those people that did this, I mean, they don't want us to pity them now.
They did this knowingly of what they did.
But, I mean, I think we should see that there were quite a lot of more elderly people.
There was, for example, a Canadian former MP and minister who's called Jim Manley.
Now, he, well, I don't say that he's elderly.
Well, he seems to be a very fit guy.
But he, you know, he really put himself through all this.
And he sailed from Naples almost all the way to Gaza.
It ended up in Ashdod.
But anyway, so that's what's been happening.
And then they started sending some of the people home.
We should note that there were five European members of parliament on the boat.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
One Norwegian, one Swedish, two Greek, and a Spanish MP was on the boat.
And, I mean, this is also a matter of, okay, what kind of reactions do we get on this?
I mean, they take those people also.
They were very equally locked in and eventually deported.
And very ugly deported, you know, because of having broken Israeli immigration law.
Where, in fact, nobody wanted to go to Israel.
Right, yeah, they were kidnapped on the high seas and brought there in the first place.
Yes, and brought back.
And in return they get a 10-year deportation.
Yeah.
Amazing.
So this is what happened, and we are gathering the stories.
Not everybody has left Israel yet.
That's important.
But most of the Swedish crew haven't.
They are probably now waiting at the Ben Gurion airport.
But they haven't really left yet.
Yeah, well, so I don't know.
Do you think that, well, how much effect do you think that this has in general?
I mean, obviously you talked about, you know, meeting people on the way and making a difference and that kind of activism.
But on the political level, you know, certainly in Europe more than America, do you ever hear politicians complain about Israeli policy?
Are they ever going to change their policy toward Israel in a way to try to affect change at all?
Well, the thing is that I know this difference.
It's interesting to work with these kind of issues when you work internationally because then you also understand the very different contexts that are, you know, for different countries, obviously.
But I mean, okay, let's have it this way.
The Swedish Foreign Department, what do you call it?
The State Department.
Hillary Clinton and them?
Yeah.
Yeah, the Foreign Service, yeah, the State Department.
Okay.
Well, the Swedish State Department says, and this is when people are still in jail and everything and the boat has just been attacked.
Well, then they say that, well, basically, now this is outrageous, basically and coincidentally our line in terms of the blockade of Gaza, it coincides with Ship to Gaza.
And they say, yeah, they say that because we think it's a bad humanitarian situation in Gaza.
We think that the siege is bad and it's unproductive.
It's not creating security for Israel.
And principally we think that the boat should have been let through.
That's exactly what they said.
And also the Finnish State Department has been quite clear.
They say that, of course, we cannot recommend people to do things like this.
It's dangerous.
But they share our view on the blockade and that it should be broken.
And I think this is really, for us, it's a step forward, absolutely.
And we've also seen that by sailing through different ports, it's not only that activists come and wave Palestinian flags and we do what we do, but it's also that we've been welcomed by mayors and local governments and so on.
And I think that is important, too.
That foreign policy is something that is done in many levels in that sense.
So I think that we've made a difference.
Yeah, the siege is still there, and there's a lot of people that will be going and working with it.
But I'm also very sad to know how many more years.
I mean, I think about all those young people in Gaza.
How many more years will they have to go on?
You know, maybe surviving, but not really living in a sense.
Right.
All right, everybody.
That is Anne Iga from ShipToGaza.se.
Thank you so much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you.
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