At 4:30 am on Monday, May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos, boarding from sea and air, attacked the six boats of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it sailed through international waters attempting to bring humanitarian relief to the beleaguered Palestinians of Gaza. Within minutes, nine peace activists were dead, shot by the Israelis. Scores of others were injured. Within hours, outrage at Israel's action echoed around the world. Spontaneous demonstrations occurred in Europe, the United States, Turkey, and Gaza itself to denounce the attack. Turkey's prime minister described it as a "bloody massacre" and "state terrorism." In these pages, a range of activists, journalists, and analysts piece together the events that occurred that May night. Mixing together first-hand testimony and documentary record with hard-headed analysis and historical overview, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara reveals why the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla may just turn out to be Israel's Selma, Alabama moment: the beginning of the end for an apartheid Palestine. Contributors include: Ali Abunimah, Omar Barghouti, George Bisharat, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Martha B. Cohen, Juan Cole, Murat Dagli, Jamal Elshayyal, Sümeyye Ertekin, Norman Finkelstein, Gisha.org, Neve Gordon, Glenn Greenwald, Arun Gupta, Amira Hass, Adam Horowitz, Rashid Khalidi, Stephen Kinzer, Paul Larudee, Iara Lee, Gideon Levy, Daniel Luban, Alia Malek, Henning Mankell, Mike Marqusee, Lubna Masarwa, Yousef Munayyer, Ken O’Keefe, Kevin Ovenden, Ilan Pappé, Doron Rosenblum, Sara Roy, Ben Saul, Eyad Al Sarraj, Adam Shapiro, Raja Shehadeh, Henry Siegman, Ahdaf Soueif, Raji Sourani, Richard Tillinghast, Alice Walker, Stephen M. Walt, and Haneen Zoabi. Cultures of Resistance : Midnight on the Mavi Marmara // Haymarket Books from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.
About the Editor
Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader and the author of the American Book Award-winning How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America.
What People Are Saying
"This collection of some four dozen essays from eyewitnesses and 'activists, novelists, academics, analysts, journalists, and poets,' serves many purposes…. But perhaps most urgently, and certainly most befitting a work so quickly assembled after the incident, the book's eyewitness accounts from activists aboard the flotilla and essays from their sympathizers represent an attempt to recapture a narrative of the event…. The first book on the flotilla massacre serves accordingly as the general public's introduction to civil society and the Gaza crisis—a collection of eyewitness accounts as well as a useful background reader, and a clarion call to action infused with the energy and efficacy of the activists themselves." —Peter Certo, Foreign Policy in Focus