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| Furkan Dogan: The American citizen was just a teen when he was wounded and then executed in cold blood by Israeli commandos while on the Gaza Flotilla in 2010. |
When it comes to this summer's Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the slaughter of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including 500 children, it's easy to wonder if American apologists for Israeli atrocities are living in an alternate reality. But those supporting the apartheid occupation and oppression of Palestinians and those of us opposing it do agree on one point: Israel's occupation could not continue without the US government's support, funding and weapons.
Yet the depth of US complicity in Israeli human rights abuses can be shocking to even the fiercest critics of US aid to Israel. A rare glimpse into how the United States has protected Israel from accountability for its crimes is seen in a set of government documents obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights in response to a FOIA lawsuit concerning Israel's raid of the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla; the Center recently released comprehensive guides to the documents, along with several hundred pages of newly released documents.
The 2010 flotilla was a humanitarian effort to bring desperately needed supplies like medicines, wheelchairs, generators and rebuilding supplies to Gazans who live cut off from the world by an illegal Israeli blockade. Israeli forces killed nine people aboard the flotilla, including United States teenager Furkan Doğan.
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This may be just the tip of the iceberg: The full nature of US support remains secret due to the lack of transparency regarding where US training and funding to Israel is ending up. The State Department itself has admitted that when it comes to Israel, there is no mechanism to track which units receive US funding. It's critical to be able to track and share this information, in part because such aid may be in direct violation of the Leahy Laws, which bar US assistance to foreign forces where there is credible information that a unit or individual has engaged in gross human rights violations.
Instead of providing this training, the US should have been seeking accountability for the attack in which a US teenager was shot in the face at point blank range after he already lay wounded. But when it came to the only independent international inquiry into the attack, the UN Human Rights Council's Fact-Finding Mission, not only did the United States vote against the resolution to investigate, but the country tried to derail it. One cable noted that the US Mission in Geneva, where the council is located, had "explored ways to 'turn off ' the flotilla fact finding mission" and that "we very strongly favor having this fact finding mission (FFM) fall away."
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