Robert Mackey: Echoes of Raid on ‘Exodus’ Ship in 1947
[Robert Mackey is a report for the New York Times and a frequent blogger on both national and international news. During the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia, he worked as a field producer for a United Nations sponsored program that broadcast news reports and documentaries in local languages throughout the former states of Yugoslavia.]
To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday’s killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel’s military in international waters, as commandos intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and a seminal event in the Jewish struggle for an independent homeland.
Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist who is rounding up reports and commentary on the attack on his blog, “Promised Land,” points to a post in Hebrew by Rafi Man of the Israel Democracy Institute which asks: “Will This Be the Palestinian Exodus?”
Mr. Man was referring to the story of the “Exodus 1947,” a ship filled with Jewish Holocaust survivors who wanted to immigrate to Palestine in July 1947. That month, the British Navy intercepted the ship to enforce a ban on Jewish immigration to the territory, which was then under British control.
As my colleague Margalit Fox wrote in December — in an obituary for Yitzhak Ahronovitch, the captain of the Exodus 1947 — the violent way the British Navy seized that ship and deported the refugees backfired, creating global sympathy for the plight of stateless Jews....
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To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday’s killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel’s military in international waters, as commandos intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and a seminal event in the Jewish struggle for an independent homeland.
Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist who is rounding up reports and commentary on the attack on his blog, “Promised Land,” points to a post in Hebrew by Rafi Man of the Israel Democracy Institute which asks: “Will This Be the Palestinian Exodus?”
Mr. Man was referring to the story of the “Exodus 1947,” a ship filled with Jewish Holocaust survivors who wanted to immigrate to Palestine in July 1947. That month, the British Navy intercepted the ship to enforce a ban on Jewish immigration to the territory, which was then under British control.
As my colleague Margalit Fox wrote in December — in an obituary for Yitzhak Ahronovitch, the captain of the Exodus 1947 — the violent way the British Navy seized that ship and deported the refugees backfired, creating global sympathy for the plight of stateless Jews....