[Marxism] December and January extra US arms shipments to Israel

["Andrew Pollack" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Below excerpts from a Reuters article reprinted by Haaretz.
It raises at least a few questions:
* Did the December shipment mean the US had been tipped off to the
coming attack on Gaza?
* Are the arms scheduled to go from Greece to Israel later this month
already in Greece or still in the US?
* Can comrades in the US or Greece organize to try to stop these shipments?

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054236.html

U.S. seeks to ship hundreds of tons of arms to Israel

By Reuters

The United States is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver
hundreds of tons of arms to Israel from Greece later this month,
tender documents seen by Reuters show.

The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command said the ship was to carry
325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as "ammunition" on
two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli
port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.

The MSC transports armor and military supplies for the U.S. armed
forces aboard its own fleet, but regularly hires merchant ships if
logistics so require.

The request for the ship was made on Dec. 31, with the first leg of
the charter to arrive no later than January 25 and the second at the
end of the month.

The tender for the vessel follows the hiring of a commercial ship to
carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the
United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

A senior military analyst in London who declined to be named said
that, because of the timing, the shipments could be "irregular" and
linked to the Gaza offensive.

The ship hired by the MSC in December was for a much larger cargo of
arms, tender documents showed.

That stipulated a ship to be chartered for 42 days capable of carrying
989 standard 20-foot containers from Sunny Point, North Carolina to
Ashdod.

The tender document said the vessel had to be capable of "carrying 5.8
million pounds (2.6 million kg) of net explosive weight", which
specialist brokers said was a very large quantity.

The ship was requested early last month to load on December 15.

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