All eyes were on the Mavi Marmara sea drama this week, but the Turkish-backed convoy is not the first. It's just the largest attempt to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Indeed, another vessel, the Rachel Corrie, which is sponsored by a Malaysian foundation, had already set out for Gaza this week, with Malaysian and Irish activists (including Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan) aboard, and carrying cement, CAT scanners, dental supplies, wheelchairs, crayons and sports equipment for kids.
Convoy campaigns are, of course, the direct result of the land and sea blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt after the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gazan government. Israel maintains control of the airspace and territorial waters of the 360-square-kilometre strip.
Since then, people of all stripes ("retired schoolteachers, mayors of small towns") and other activists have wasted no time in trying to breach the border. Canadians, such as the three in the Turkish convoy, participate too.
The journey to Gaza is arduous. Depending on the port of departure, a sea voyage is a many-day proposition - and dangerous. The U.S.-based aid group Free Gaza Movement mounted the first sea effort, in August, 2008: a convoy of two small wooden boats, named the SS Free Gaza and SS Liberty, which included 44 activists from 14 countries, including Lauren Booth, sister-in-law to former British prime minister Tony Blair, and an 81-year-old Catholic nun from the U.S., Sister Anne Montgomery. They were successful in breaking through the blockade. But, in December, 2008, the Cypriot-flagged yacht SS Dignity operated by Free Gaza was rammed by Israeli Defence Force boats in international waters and had to be towed to Lebanon for repairs. In February, 2009, another humanitarian vessel, the Togo-registered Tali, was seized.
Sharyn Lock, a spokeswoman in London for the Palestine-led International Solidarity Movement, which was involved in the early sea ventures, said the first convoy was inspired by the difficulties activists faced at land borders. "We didn't know how we were going to continue to work until someone said, 'Let's try to get in by sea.' "
The land route is as much an exercise in patience as in public relations, as with Viva Palestina, the February, 2009, mission led by former British MP, maverick George Galloway. Its convoy of more than 120 vehicles, including a fire truck and 12 ambulances, travelled 8,000 kilometres overland from Britain through Spain to Morocco and across the north of Africa. Mr. Galloway made it in, via Egypt, and delivered $5-million worth of aid.
The publisher of rabble.ca, Kim Elliot, says the Egyptian authorities are unhappy with the international traffic into Gaza. So Egyptian border control uses a variety of tactics to dissuade activists - who typically fly into Cairo, and travel six hours to the border town of Rafah - including long wait times in distinctly unpleasant circumstances. "They stopped cleaning the bathrooms," she said.
Nevertheless, land convoys are still attempted. Aid group Code Pink, led by retired U.S. Army colonel Ann Wright, a former diplomat who resigned in protest against the Iraq invasion, has led a number of delegations into the territory since 2009. Its Gaza Freedom March, which convened at Rafah in March, 2009, involved 1,400 people from 42 nations. In August, 2009, two Canadian MPs, Richard Nadeau of the Bloc Québécois and Libby Davies of the NDP, accompanied Code Pink.
Ehab Lotayef, a computer systems manager at McGill University's department of electrical engineering, made it into the territory in March of 2009 after three weeks of trying. A Canadian born in Egypt, Mr. Lotayef said there were about 50 Canadians among the 1,400 internationals on the Gaza Freedom March.
"I have seen the drawings of kids and those drawings have helicopter gunships and bombs," he said. "That is their daily life."
Special to The Globe and Mail