Am I the only one, but does the Mavi Marmara bring back memories of the famed Exodus ship, which launched from the Baltimore harbor in 1947? I’m not talking about good memories either. 

The former steamer SS President Warfield of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company was purchased by the pre-state Jewish military force the Hagannah and renamed the SS Exodus. It set out on a mission to pick up 4,500 Holocaust survivors, temporarily in France, and take them to then-British controlled Palestine.  It was commandeered in international waters by the Royal Navy and the passengers were sent – of all places—to an interment camp in Germany.

The huge international outcry was a lynchpin for the founding of the Jewish State a year later. Back then, the United States had been pressing Britain to allow more Jewish refugees into Palestine through their joint Anglo-American Commission. But when forced to find a better solution to managing the deteriorating situation between Arab and Jewish militias, the UK threw up its hands and said to the new United Nations, “It’s all yours.” The U.N., as the world knows, decided to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Palestinian state.

Two local esteemed local Ph.D.’s in Mideast studies, Robert O. Friedman and Arthur Abramson don’t see the Exodus comparison. They think the Mavi Marmara is different because the Palestinians already have a land they control and they are not refugees seeking a home in a world that does not want them. Yet from an international PR perspective, Israel does come across as the big, mean bully that the British were in the post-World War II years.

A difference for sure is that the impact of this event is being built up on social media (facebook, twitter, etc.) with dueling videos, and many in the world are siding with the Palestinians, whom they view as the underdog.

Some think it may all trigger a third intifada, or violent Palestinian uprising (just like the ones that began in 1987 and 2000).  I believe it may force the U.S. to press Israel even harder to rethink how it’s managing the Gaza and West Bank situations. And there lies a strong comparison indeed.