My Israeli Friend Sets Record Staight

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I met Guy Leibovitz in Israel last June. Guy was one of the tour guides that traveled with us throughout Israel for the two weeks explaining the history of the sights and events of Israel’s long past. Today I received an email from him concerning the recent controversy brewing in the Middle East and I thought I’d pass it on for all of you to read. Here’s what he had to say:

Something bad is happening in the world. The “good guys” are looked at as the “bad guys” and the “bad guys” are looked at as the “good guys. “ Unfortunately, today in the world there is a lot of confusion and misinformation. Many people are misinformed. We all watched the reports on the news about the Israeli commando forces that took over six boats of aid to the Gaza Strip. Those six boats and many others are trying to bring aid to the Gaza Strip. At this point, we need to ask ourselves if this is the real intention of the organizers of the naval aid. And, if in the Gaza Strip, we really have humanitarian catastrophes, then the answer to those questions are: we have no humanitarian problem in the Gaza Strip. The Israelis in the past year allowed more than one million tons of supplies to enter the Gaza Strip. After completing a standard security check with the trucks, on the Israeli and Egyptian side of the Gaza Strip border. In the past, we had many attempts to smuggle in machineries to build weapon systems and ammunition including long range missiles. In the past ten years, almost one million Israeli civilians have been sleeping in shelters. As a country, we have the right to check everyone and everything that enters into the Gaza Strip as the Palestinians have proven in the past that they have no problems smuggling and using missiles against Israelis. If the condition of their own people is so important to their leaders, I would expect those leaders to invest their money in food, education, medication, etc. instead of relying on the humanitarian aid provided by your taxes. The state of Israel declared many times before to allow bringing aid into the Gaza Strip under the supervision of anyone after checking the cargo onboard. The same thing happened with those six boats that refused to cooperate with the state of Israel who refused to take with them humanitarian aid to Gilad Shalit, a prisoner of war, the soldier who has been held in captivity for the past four years. Hamas is also preventing Gilad Shalit to meet with the Red Cross, against every civil rights declaration. It’s taking us back to the question… who are the people on those boats? Five out of six boats were human right activists that did their job to bring aid to the Gaza Strip. Many Israeli civilians condemned any use of force against them. That’s why on those five boats, no one was injured. On the sixth boat, “the Marmara,” owned by the Turkish government and run by an organization called the IHH. IHH stands for Islamic extremists that are fighting for Islamic human rights. It means if you’re not Muslim, you don’t deserve to have any human rights. In the study written by the Danish Institute for International Studies, it was proven that IHH had a very tight relationship with Al-Quada and the International Jihad movements. In 1997, the Turkish government ran an investigation and inspected the IHH offices and discovered weapons, explosive devices and instructions on how to build explosive devices. IHH constantly supports families of terrorists that completed suicide attacks, and by that, they continuously encourage people to do participate in terrorist attacks. During the trial of Hachmad Rasam in 2000 in the United States, he was accused of plan to blowing up six hundred kilograms of explosives in the Los Angeles airport. A French witness named “Jans Louie Brugar” claimed that IHH had a very important role helping Al Queda to execute the attack. Of couse, IHH are constantly accusing the United States for killing innocent Muslims all over the world.

The soldiers that went down into the boat’s deck with paint-ball guns and nine millimeter handguns, as we could see on the videos posted online, never expected to front such violence. Many of the “human rights activists” attacked them with different weapons including knives and firearms. Watching those videos and listening to the walkie-talkie recordings, I learned that the soldiers did their best to restrain the use of their firearms under the distress of brutal lynching. For example, the IHH tried to crash the Israeli helicopter into the sea by tying the repelling rope used by the Israeli soldiers to the boat, not allowing the helicopter to take off.

Only when the soldiers were under danger of death, did they use their firearms. That was only after the IHH “human rights fighters” stabbed and shoot Israeli soldiers, proceeded to throw two of them from the deck and tried to kill them. We cannot allow flipping the entire story over only to blame the State of Israel. The other five boats, like many other boats before, unhappily cooperated with the Israeli army without the use of physical harm towards anyone. The boats were taken into the port after unloading the cargo and examined by the boom experts; the cargo was released to its final destination – the Gaza Strip. The IHH boat had only one purpose, and that was not to bring aid to the Gaza Strip. But to cause provocation to paint someone in colors of human right activists while watching a video of the same people attacking different soldiers on the boat is not exactly a “human rights mission.” Unfortunately, the IHH mission boat successfully accomplished their mission. The entire world is against the State of Israel right now. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East who is fighting everyday for human rights. Israel is not perfect, but we are providing aid to every disaster site in this world on a daily basis. Groups in Israel who are constantly supplying aid to the Palestinian people are just waiting to see if the same kind of humanitarian efforts are being provided by the IHH and other organizations to places like Darfur, Haiti, Chile, and all places in this world that require humanitarian aid rather than that are doing their very best to harm western societies.

We all need to place ourselves in the situation where the state of Israel is reaching out their hands for peace since 1937, even before the state and the local Arab population rejected any proposal. The state of Israel is trying to protect the citizens since the beginning of time and they’ll continue to until the end of time. If we will need to repeat the safety measures so that we can live in safety, we’ll do it again and again. We need to ask ourselves: if human rights activists had taken bats, firearms, and knives towards any one of us, we would feel a great need to protect ourselves. Israel feels lonely in this battle against the brutal attack and it’s very important for us to hear your support wherever it is. While watching the footage and videos, please understand that the goal, in this particular case, was to harm Israeli soldiers and not to bring aid to the Palestinian people. If you want to think about the goal of bringing supplies and aid to Gaza, you would see two totally different stories. No doubt that we need to send aid to the Gaza Strip like any other disaster area in the world, but the way to bring the supplies cannot be at the expense of dead Israeli citizens.

Guy Leibovitz