Let's Talk About the Real Problem...

[eumelia]

The siege on Gaza.

Israeli/American-Jewish blogger Bradley Burston wrote right after the Free Gaza Flotilla Disaster that:

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.

Not a completely analogous comparison, but it's palpable for the reason that everyone agrees that Vietnam was a war done wrong and perpetrated for the wrong reasons.
It was also a war, the US ultimately lost.

Israel isn't at war with Gaza, nor the West Bank. Israel is a warden.

The flotilla's aim was not only to break the siege (all the ships had something like 10,000 tonnes of food, medical supplies, clothes, toys, etc.) but to put a spotlight on the injustice of the circumstances surrounding the siege.

At this point, no one is talking about that. What is being spoken about is the disaster that cost lives and wounded many.

I don't have all the facts. No one has.

I'll tell you what I do know, even if the activists reacted with violence, the reaction is still done in self-defence. When you are boarded via war-vessels, helicopters by Commando soldiers of one the most notorious platoons in Israel (Shayete 13) you will grab what is at hand and defend yourself.

The IDF stopped the flotilla, 65km off-shore (that's international waters) and took control of the situation, they lost control. That doesn't make it a "lynch" as many are calling it.

Yesterday there was talk of the fact that the ships were smuggling weapons.
These are the weapons found on board:

What do you see?
I see kitchen appliances, rope, rods, keffiyas, rope cutters, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, anything used as a murder weapon in a game of Cluedo, am I right?

That seems pretty ad hoc to me. Where exactly are these "smuggled weapons"? Perhaps sharing a bunker with Iraq's WMD's.

Regardless, the soldiers were obviously surprised and they were wounded and I'm sorry for that. I don't think soldiers should be put in positions in which they are forced to fight civilians.
They very much felt threatened:

'We fired because we were attacked', says Israeli captain in Gaza flotilla op.
[...]
"We knew there would be resistance, but not at such a strong level," said Captain R., who led one of the teams and was wounded in the mission. "Every [activist] that approached us wanted to kill us."
[..]
The commandos had been well-prepared for the mission, said the captain, and had taken into account that the activists might respond with violence. "We thought it would be passive resistance, maybe verbal, but not at such strength," he said.

Emphasis mine.

The activists on board have this to say:

Turkish activist Nilufer Cetin, who had hidden with her baby in her cabin's bathroom aboard the Mavi Marmara, told reporters she believed there were 11 dead.

”The ship turned into a lake of blood," Cetin told reporters in Istanbul, having returned after Israeli officials warned that jail would be too harsh for her child.

"We were aware of the possible danger in joining the trip," she said.
[...]
She said Israeli vessels harassed the flotilla for two hours starting around 10 p.m. Sunday, and returned at around 4 a.m. Monday, fired warning shots and told the ships to turn back.

When the Mavi Marmara continued on its course the harassment turned into an attack.

"They used smoke bombs followed by gas canisters. They started to descend onto the ship with helicopters," she said, calling the clashes that then erupted "extremely bad and brutal."
[...]
"Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat," said Greek activist Dimitris Gielalis, who had been aboard the Sfendoni. He was among six Greeks returned home Tuesday.

"They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used," he said.

He said the boat's captain was beaten for refusing to leave the wheel, and had sustained non-life-threatening injuries, while a cameraman filming the raid was hit with a rifle butt in the eye, he said.

"Of course we weren't prepared for a situation of war.," he added.

Emphasis mine.

Who are you going to believe?
What I see here, form the scant data we do have, is an already illegal military operation gone very badly with a huge amount of casualties coming from those who felt the need to defend themselves.
Ultimately, looking at the balance of powers, I think it's quite clear who is at fault here.

But that's just my opinion as a loony leftist self-hating Jew, right?

Comments

[ajnabieh]

My first reaction to that picture was just like yours--those knives aren't weapon-knives, they're shit-I-grabbed-in-the-kitchen. Also, I am now very tempted to make inappropriate Clue/Cluedo jokes. (The IDF! In international waters! With excessive use of force! I said they were inappropriate.)

I am also very freaked out by this use of "lynch" to describe what happened. It's a very American reaction I'm having, but--well--lynching is a very specific social practice, and it's one that's been invoked a lot in American politics recently, and it's just really scary to see it used here. Can I ask, is the image of lynching being used equally in Hebrew-language discussion about the attacks, or is it slightly different? I'm not familiar with how the politics of that image would work in Israeli society.

[eumelia]

Ever since the lynch in Ramallah it's been fairly common use for Arab-on-Jewish violence language. It's really not the same mental frame work like in the US.

[ajnabieh]

Ah, yes, that makes sense. I was rather hoping it was something that made sense in the Israeli political context, because the translation to American was making it sixty kinds of problematic, and I was hoping none of those were intentional.

[yvi]

:/

I have already read a few comments along the lines of "there was no need to give these things to the people in Gaza, they are being adequately provided for by Israel, this was only meant to provoke, and besides, they had weapons." They had kitchen knives. They were in international waters. I certainly don't know what the truth is and I know things aren't black & white, but I can't get these things out of my head. I think it's pretty obvious that the people living in Gaza need help and that certain things need to end. :(

[eumelia]

It's a shitty situation.

:/ is correct.

[silveradept]

Because anyone trying to give humanitarian aid needs to be raided in full commando-style and be used as a pretense for any sort of thing.

I wonder how many additional flotillas are going to be queued up so as to make the authorities repeat themselves with beatings as multiple attempts happen sequentially.

[eumelia]

There's one on the way at the moment if I'm correctly informed.

[silveradept]

I heard as much myself. I wonder if they'll meet the same response. And whether there's another one already in the works to send after the current one gets turned back.

[schemingreader]

I listened to BBC World Service this morning and heard an Israeli diplomat give a detailed analysis of everything that went wrong. I've seen the same thing, give or take, in English-language Haaretz. But from the US Jewish community? A lot of blather about how it was the fault of the people on the boats. (Dudes, you sent commandos to quell a civilian crowd in international waters, how the hell wasn't that going to result in casualties?)

Because there's no way that Peter Beinart could be right. (Oh, of course, he was only saying that the American Jewish establishment was at fault for supporting the Israeli right, not even criticizing Israel, but people are ready to burn him in effigy.) And Marjorie Ingall is a terrible person for saying that she doesn't know what to tell her children about Israel.

I don't know what to tell mine, either.

[ironed_orchid]

As another loony leftist, I can't see any flaws in your reasoning.

[green_knight]

Thank you for reporting. The excuses for boarding, with elite troups, vessels in international waters, are pretty thin, and the 'weapons on board' picture just emphasizes that.

I salute everybody who went on board the flotilla, and who is willing to board the next one.