A crowd of over 1,000 people “invaded” the arrivals hall at Lisbon airport last night to welcome the four Portuguese citizens detained by Israeli military for sailing in a humanitarian flotilla towards Gaza.
It was a jubilant reception: supporters waved Palestinian flags, shouted anti-Israeli/ pro-Palestinian slogans, and the four – Left Bloc MP Mariana Mortágua, actress Sofia Aparício and activists Miguel Duarte and Diogo Chaves – took the opportunity to detail the treatment received in detention (which did not in any way fit the request for ‘dignity’ transmitted by Portuguese authorities last week).
Mariana Mortágua stressed: “(We realised the difference in that prison) between being Europeans and Palestinians, and as hard as it was for us, and it was hard, and as much as there were abuses, and there were abuses, many, it gave us an idea of the degree of impunity of Israeli forces against Palestinians.”
Miguel Duarte underscored Mortágua’s statements saying there are no prisoners’ rights in Israeli jails, and if the Portuguese detainees had any protection, it was because they were Europeans and because there were mobilisations around the world in support of the flotilla.
Duarte spoke of “beaten comrades”, of detainees held for 24 and 48 hours without food or drink – some with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, who were also deprived of medication – of prisoners put “in cages in the sun”.
The activists also said they were given documents and pressured to sign, later realising that the document said that the detainees accepted that Israel had legally captured them and taken them to Israel.
“We refused to sign and the Israeli soldiers used our passports and forged our signatures to show that we accepted that we had been intercepted legally. Let’s be clear, we were intercepted illegally and taken against our will to Israel,” said Duarte.
Diogo Chaves said it had been “very hard for him to leave the Israeli prison” “and “leave comrades behind”.
“But we also realised that we had to come home early so that we could fight for those who were left behind and for the Palestinian cause,” he told his audience.
For all those who were welcoming the four, however, there have been just as many, if not more, who have found this episode nothing short of a self-seeking sideshow. There has even been a petition circulating (and signed by tens of thousands) calling on Israel to keep Mariana Mortágua…
Today, in popular tabloid Correio da Manhã, university professor Luciano Amaral, sums up the ‘great furore’ of the days since the flotilla was disbanded by Israeli military: “Only bourgeois Western intellectuals in search of a “thrill” can fantasise the flotilla as an extraordinary moment of “bravery” and “courage”. We already knew the “script” of previous flotillas: the boats navigate peacefully through the Mediterranean, except when there is bad weather, they are boarded by Israeli military as they approach Gaza, the crews are detained, they are asked if they want to be deported to their comfortable western countries, or whether they wish to fight the detention in the courts. They end up being returned while the minuscule amount of humanitarian aid that they were transporting is delivered to Gaza by Israel. The “Palestinian cause” receives a few more days of attention, and then everything returns to the way it was before”.
Amaral’s frustration is that flotilla-related news detracted from so much that is in fact a great deal more important – like the plan for peace in Gaza, which does trace out a potential end to the abject misery of the Palestinian people, once and for all, if it can be successfully ‘taken over the line’.
Source material: Correio da Manhã/ Lusa
