Month: May 2010

‘Israel lost at sea’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen.

We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.

In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.

Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on that Israel’s own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the Jewish state.

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel’s Vietnam.

Of course, we knew this could happen. On Sunday, when the army spokesman began speaking of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in terms of an attack on Israel, MK Nahman Shai, the IDF chief spokesman during the 1991 Gulf war, spoke publicly of his worst nightmare, an operation in which Israeli troops, raiding the flotilla, might open fire on peace activists, aid workers and Nobel laureates.

Likud MK Miri Regev, who also once headed the IDF Spokesman’s Office, said early Monday that the most important thing now was to deal with the negative media reports quickly, so they would go away.

But they are not going to go away. One of the ships is named for Rachel Corrie, killed while trying to bar the way of an IDF bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago. Her name, and her story, have since become a lightning rod for pro-Palestinian activism.

Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state of war with Turkey.

“This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with the Turks,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most sensitive sense of Israel’s ties with the Muslim world.

We explain, time and again, that we are not at war with the people of Gaza. We say it time and again because we ourselves need to believe it, and because, deep down, we do not.

There was a time, when it could be said that we knew ourselves only in wartime. No longer. Now we know nothing. Yet another problem with refraining from talks with Hamas and Iran: They know us so much better than we know ourselves.

They know, as the song about the Lebanon War suggested (“Lo Yachol La’atzor Et Zeh”) that we, unable to see ourselves in any clarity, are no longer capable of stopping ourselves.

Hamas, as well as Iran, have come to know and benefit from the toxicity of Israeli domestic politics, which is all too ready to mortgage the future for the sake of a momentary apparent calm.

They know that in our desperation to protect our own image of ourselves, we will avoid modifying policies which have literally brought aid and comfort to our enemies, in particular Hamas, which the siege on Gaza has enriched through tunnel taxes and entrenched through anger toward Israel.

For many on the right, it must be said, there will be a quiet joy in all of what is about to hit the fan. “We told you so,” the crowing will begin. “The world hates us, no matter what we do. So we may as well go on building [Read: ‘Settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem’] and defending our borders [Read: ‘Bolster Hamas and ultimately harm ourselves by refusing to lift the Gaza embargo’].”

Hamas, Iran and the Israeli and Diaspora hard right know, as one, that this is a test of enormous importance for Benjamin Netanyahu. Keen to have the world focus on Iran and the threat it poses to the people of Israel, Netanyahu must recognize that the world is now focused on Israel and the threat it poses to the people of Gaza.

At Least 10 Protesters Dead

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Yes, of course. Humanitarian activists ambushed the Israelis, thereby totally negating the positive publicity garnered by their mission. Uh huh. It all makes sense now. And the Israels have never lied to us about such things, so it must be true!

Murdering liars.

(Meanwhile, the praiseworthy J Street project releases a statement.)

Reporting from Jerusalem —
Israeli naval ships seized control of a protest flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip on Monday, killing at least 10 people and sparking widespread international condemnation.

Israeli television, citing foreign media reports, said the death toll could be as high as 16.

“The images are certainly not pleasant. I can only voice regret at all the fatalities,” Trade and Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Israel’s Army Radio.

The raid set off a storm of international protest and drew condemnations from leaders of Spain, Sweden, France, Germany, the U.N., the European Union and Arab League.

But after some initial expressions of regret, Israeli officials Monday came out strongly in defense of the raid, characterizing the protesters as hard-core extremists who had prepared an ambush for soldiers.

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called the flotilla an “armada of hate and violence” that launched a “premeditated and outrageous provocation.” He said Israeli soldiers found evidence that “weapons” had been prepared in advance, but he did not specify whether those weapons included guns.

Israel’s military said protesters managed to grab two guns from Israeli soldiers and use them against the commandos, prompting soldiers to return fire.

Greta Berlin, leader of Free Gaza, one of the flotilla’s organizers, called those claims “absurd.”

“This was murder,” Berlin said in a telephone interview from Cyprus.

The six-vessel flotilla, packed with hundreds of international activists, food and other humanitarian supplies, had left Cyprus on Sunday night in an attempt to break Israel’s longstanding blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The Blockade

~ susie

The New York Times neglects to mention these are human rights activists in international waters, and that the Cypriot government refused to allow some smaller boats carrying two dozen high-profile activists, including legislators and a Holocaust survivor, to ferry them to the ship. But they are covering it, which is progress, I guess:

JERUSALEM — The Israeli navy made its first contact with a flotilla carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists and thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza shortly before midnight on Sunday, surprising the boats in international waters, according to activists on one vessel.

Israel has vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, where the Islamic militant group Hamas holds sway, putting the activists and the Israelis on a high-profile public relations collision course. Named the Freedom Flotilla and led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy of six cargo and passenger boats represents the most ambitious attempt yet to break Israel’s three-year blockade of the Palestinian coastal enclave.

Three Israeli navy missile boats left the Haifa naval base in northern Israel a few minutes after 9 p.m. local time, planning to intercept the flotilla.

After asking the captains of the boats to identify themselves, the navy told them they were approaching a blockaded area and asked them either to proceed to the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, or to turn around and go back to their countries of origin.

The activists responded that they would continue toward their destination, Gaza.

Speaking by satellite phone from the Challenger 1 boat, which has foreign legislators and other high-profile figures on board, a Free Gaza Movement leader, Huwaida Arraf, said, “We communicated to them clearly that we are unarmed civilians. “We asked them not to use violence.”

Earlier Sunday, Ms. Arraf said the boats would keep trying to move forward “until they either disable our boats or jump on board.”

Flotilla organizers flotilla had said they expected to confront the Israelis on Monday morning, in an effort to avoid an encounter in the dark.

Israel insists that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, contrary to grim reports of the international organizations operating in the area. It says that the blockade is necessary because Hamas tries to smuggle weapons into the territory, sometimes by sea. But it has offered to transfer the 10,000 tons of aid on the ships from Ashdod to Gaza through official Israeli-controlled land crossings.

Yes, because the government enforcing the blockade in the first place, which has already been turning away international aid so they can starve out Hamas, would bother to deliver the supplies. Uh huh.