FLASHPOINTS

by Dennis Bernstein and Jesse Strauss

Much to the dismay of the Israelis, Rachel Corrie is on her way back to the Gaza Strip. Of course we’re not talking about the young woman who was crushed under an Israeli bulldozer driven by the IDF in 2003, but rather a boat named in her honor, bringing humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip. We reached the Rachel Corrie as it was some eighty-five miles off the coast of Gaza in international waters earlier today. Soon after we made contact with the ship, reports began to surface that the Rachel Corrie was being pursued by three Israeli Naval vessels, and that the ship’s radar was jammed. The Rachel Corrie is the first of the Gaza Freedom Movement to set sail for Gaza since Israeli commandos attacked the six fleet Freedom Flotilla last Monday. Again, the activists on board are attempting to break the Israeli embargo. Read the rest of this entry →

With a bloody raid on the “Freedom Flotilla,” Israel has demonstrated, once again, its willingness to kill innocents in order to sustain its punishing blockade on the Gaza strip, even when doing so raises more and more questions about nuclear-armed Israel’s national sanity.

Scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of a new book on Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza entitled “This Time We’ve Gone Too Far,” deemed the attack on the six ships in international waters that left nine people dead Monday the actions of a  “demented… lunatic state.” Read the rest of this entry →