A selection of postings on the Flotilla that we missed earlier

A Blunder No PR Can Fix

Reza Aslan, 1 June 2010

Reza Aslan is author of the international bestseller No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic War (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized World).

“The armada of hate and violence in support of Hamas, a terror organization, was a premeditated and outrageous provocation. The organizers are well known for their ties to global jihad, al Qaeda, and Hamas. They have a history of arms smuggling and deadly terror.”

By stubbornly and repeatedly contradicting every international aid and human-rights organization in the world on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the Israeli government’s PR machine has overreached.

Just so we are all on the same page, this is how Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, described the flotilla of ships stormed by Israeli commandos in a pre-dawn raid Monday morning. Note that he is describing ships carrying humanitarian aid, human-rights workers, about a dozen doctors, some 30 journalists, two retired U.S. diplomats (Amb. Edward Peck and Ret. Col. Ann Wright), a Nobel Peace Prize winner (Mairead Maguire), a former U.N. assistant secretary-general (Denis Halliday), and several members of parliament from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, and Malaysia.

This was how Mark Regev, the Israeli government’s spokesman, described the response of passengers aboard the Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara when they were raided at 4 a.m. by an elite corps of heavily armed Israeli commandos who jumped from military helicopters and naval warships and shot live rounds, used tear gas and stun grenades, and killed at least nine people: “Why did they have a problem with an inspection process?”

This is how Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, who has repeatedly stated that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, described the entire Free Gaza movement, whose aid ships have been trying to break through Israel’s blockade of Gaza for the past three years: “The entire flotilla is a political and media provocation by anti-Israeli activists. They have absolutely nothing to do with humanitarian aid.”

By now we are all familiar with the power and potency of the Israeli government’s propaganda machine—the hasbara, or “public relations operation,” which has been on overdrive over the last 24 hours. Israel’s No. 1 priority right now, as voiced by Likud member and former Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman Miri Regev, is to deal with the negative media reports quickly, “so they would go away.”

No other country can boast the speed and efficiency of the Israeli government in responding to the slightest criticism of its policies or actions, as the Jewish Chronicle outlined in an article about Israel’s new and improved PR strategy, put in place after the debacle of the Lebanon war in 2006. The Chronicle summed up the strategy as “Fewer military officers; more women; tightly controlled messages; and ministers kept on a short leash.”

This is the infamous state propaganda machine that managed to paint the internationally renowned and widely respected South African judge Richard Goldstone, a trustee of Israel’s Hebrew University and former president of the Jewish charity organization World ORT, as “a self-hating Jew” and an “anti-Semite” for suggesting that Israel investigate “all violations of international human-rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after”—the exact wording of the Goldstone report.

But it now seems that even governments can occasionally “jump the shark.” By suggesting that a group of aid workers, human-rights activists, EU parliamentarians, and U.S. diplomats are supporters of al Qaeda, by describing a pre-dawn military attack on a convoy ship as “an inspection,” and by stubbornly and repeatedly contradicting every single international aid and human-rights organization in the world regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the Israeli government’s PR machine has overreached.

A Brief History of the Gaza Folly

The flotilla attack is just the latest in a series of bad decisions Israel has made about Gaza over the past five years.

Gershom Gorenberg, 1st June 2010

Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem.

At first, reports of the number of dead fluctuated by the hour. After Israeli naval commandos landed on a Turkish ferry heading for Gaza, rumors said that Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the radical Islamic movement among Israeli Arabs, had been killed on board. The rumors turned into news items in the Arab media; the sheikh was then reported alive and well. Descriptions of what actually happened on the crowded deck of the Mavi Marmara have, predictably, been wildly at odds. Activists who were on board say the Israeli commandos fired before being attacked; the Israeli military says the soldiers were defending themselves from a mob. Both sides present film clips of the nighttime struggle to back up their case.

Out of this blurred picture, one thing seems agonizingly clear: The raid was a link in a chain of premeditated folly.

Let’s follow that chain, from the news reports backward. To deflect criticism, Israeli army sources have told the press that the commandos faced a “lynch” when they descended by ropes from helicopters onto the Mavi Marmara — the largest boat in the flotilla intended to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza. Inside Israel, the word “lynch” stirs a very loaded memory: the mob murder of two Israeli soldiers who strayed into the West Bank city of Ramallah at the start of the Second Intifada in 2000.

Yet the word emphasizes the stark difference between the two events. The commandos didn’t stray onto the ferry’s deck. They boarded it in a planned operation. If, as Israel Defense Forces footage seems to show, people on the boat’s deck greeted them with knives and clubs, it means that at least some of the activists decided in advance that nonviolence wasn’t their strategy. Nonetheless, they weren’t lynching anyone; they were attempting to stop a boarding party in international waters. The Israeli Foreign Ministry argues that interdicting a ship on the high seas to enforce a declared blockade is legal under international law. It should have been no surprise, however, that the boarding would meet resistance from the 679 people aboard the ship — a mix of pro-Palestinian activists from the international Free Gaza Movement; members of the Turkish Islamic relief group Insani Yardim Vakfi; and a handful of prominent Israeli Arabs.

That takes us back a link: The decision to send a handful of commandos to seize the ship — a decision approved by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his inner circle of ministers — shows hubris, poor intelligence work, and determined inability to learn from experience. Both the politicians and the generals expected that the arrival of Israeli soldiers would convince the crew and passengers to submit. And yet, a day before the boarding, Israel Radio cited an Al-Jazeera report that people aboard the ship said they were ready to die. The Israel Radio reporter described that attitude as “paranoia.” He didn’t consider the possibility that those aboard were ready for a fight. It seems that military intelligence also failed to examine clues in plain sight.

The naval commandos are an elite unit, trained for daring operations. Controlling an angry crowd of civilians armed with knives and slingshots isn’t in their job description. The riot equipment they got for this mission was insufficient. Outnumbered, they resorted to live fire. But riot control has long been an Israeli weak point. In 1990, outnumbered police fired on Palestinian demonstrators on the Temple Mount, killing a score of people and causing an international crisis. In 2000, police used live fire after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the same holy site, killing several Palestinian protesters and igniting the Second Intifada. Yet before the 2005 evacuation of Jewish settlers in Gaza, troops and police got weeks of training in crowd control and self-restraint. Deployed en masse, they were able to subdue violent protesters without fatalities. Somehow, the comparative lessons weren’t learned before this week’s deadly fiasco.

Perhaps there’s no way to use sophisticated crowd-control methods while boarding a ship. But that problem only leads us further back, to the decision to stop the flotilla. True, if Israel had allowed six ships, their passengers, and their cargo of humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, the siege of the Hamas-controlled territory would have been breached beyond repair.

But the Israeli siege itself is another link in the chain of folly. It was imposed in stages after Hamas’ election victory in January 2006, the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit later that year, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007. Limited supplies are allowed through at land crossings — and a shifting list of civilian goods are blocked. Instead, they reach Gaza through smuggling tunnels from Egypt, along with arms. The siege hasn’t convinced Hamas to return Shalit. It hasn’t sparked a popular revolt against Hamas rule. It has encouraged smuggling, caused suffering, and amplified foreign criticism of Israel. The flotilla was a missed chance for a long-needed review of Israel’s policies toward Hamas since the pullout from Gaza in 2005.

So we move back one more link, to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decision’s to leave Gaza unilaterally, rather than as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon knew that reaching an agreement would mean yielding nearly all of the West Bank as well. He saw the Gaza withdrawal as a way to avoid making such a deal. But the unilateral pullout weakened Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, an advocate of a negotiated peace, and legitimized Hamas and its “armed struggle.”

Before and after the raid, Israeli officials referred to the flotilla as a “provocation” intended to harm Israel. That’s probably true — and only raises the question of why Israel allowed itself to be provoked. Part of the answer lies in a cognitive failure in understanding events long before 2005.

To explain, I need to turn for a moment to what I can only call an omen that occurred the day before the raid: At age 89, veteran Israeli dissident Lova Eliav died. In 1968, as a rising politician in the Labor Party, Eliav shocked his comrades by declaring that the Palestinians must be recognized as a people, that Israel must negotiate with them and give up the occupied territories. His heresy came after he spent months in the towns and refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank, listening to Palestinians. It was a product of empathy, reason and the ability to believe in both peace and patriotism. He was driven from the party to the left margins of politics. Decades later, his ideas moved into the mainstream.

One more detail of his resumé: In 1947, as a young man, Eliav was the commander of a ship called the Haim Arlosoroff, which tried to bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine in defiance of British immigration limits. The voyage ended off the coast of Haifa when British marines took control of the ship. The would-be immigrants were interred in Cyprus. Eliav’s mission was not a failure, though. It was one step in a campaign that stirred the world against British policy and led to the establishment of Israel.

Were Israel’s current leaders able to read the past as Eliav did, to see oneself in one’s adversary, they would have seen the implications of the voyage of the Mavi Marmara and the folly of interdicting it. They might even understand that their consistent effort to avoid a two-state solution is a mistake. Eliav embodied a heroic, humanistic Zionism. The omen of his passing was ignored. It remains for Israelis who believe in his path to demand that the government finally break the chain of folly.

This is what happens to those whose entire world is Entebbe

Hebrew original by Ofer Shelah is a leading Ma’ariv commentator and author of several books on the Israel/Palestine conflict, translated by Eran Kahane

The attack on the boat caught me abroad, and evidently it takes a foreign perspective to understand the level of disconnect; the way Israelis view the situation compared to the way the rest of the world does is almost to the point that white is black and black is white.

In Israel we talk a…bout the “lynching of soldiers” and analyse the amount of crowd-dispersal logistics available to the commandos, as if the problem is a tactical one: if only we had brought the right tools everything would be alright. In the rest of the world, ever TV channel I watch and every news site I read paints the picture of a strongarmed state whose only solution to every problem is a military reaction, and whose sense of self-victimisation is driving it crazy.

States seeking to be part of the community of nations – and Israel must be so for its own survival, if not for any other reason – simply do not do such things. They don’t deploy armed soldiers against civilian ships, even ones trying to break the “holy siege” on Gaza. They don’t operate a police action on foreign nationals in international waters, and they definitely don’t end such missions with a 2-digit number of casualties.

Countries who do this kind of thing are ones who have long ago replaced their foreign policy with the sense that anything, even bringing pasta into Gaza, is an existential threat; states with no leadership, but a gang of populists who understand that their public is addicted to the feeling that “the world is against us” and to military might.

I know that logic has long ago stopped being a decisive factor in these matters. Too many people, in political power and in media, make their living from the campaign of the evil world against Israel. To me, this state of affairs – and particularly the whiny attitude is creates that shakes itself from responsibility that through itself brings on – is much more a threat than terrorism or Hamas.

So here you are, the reasonable results of the recent maneouvers: complete lack of legitimacy for every Israeli action, from the continuation of the siege on Gaza to every violent reaction, even those that the world would justify under different conditions.

The continuing process of our “South Africanization,” at the end of which it will no longer be legitimate to trade with Israel, to exchange information and invite us to sporting events. It will mean the loss of ability from those supporters of Israel – in Washington and everywhere else – to defend any move made by us, even from unreasonable criticism.

All this, the people supposed to be leading us should have understood at first glance. You don’t need UN experience or a degree from Stanford to understand it. They simply needed to understand in advance that military power should not be used here, even at the price of the “Marmara” docking in Gaza. But all they saw were headlines abouts the “brave assault,” the photographs of soldiers sliding down ropes, of the people of Israel once again thanking God that they have the best and most moral army in the world.

So this is what came out of it: From today the hands of the best unit in this army – whose warriors enlist to truly defend Israel – are soaked in the blood of civilians. This is what happens to those whose world is Entebbe.

Condemnation of the raid was immediate and overwhelming, with the shameful exception of the US government, whose UN representative merely expressed “regrets” at the loss of life. Demonstrations broke out in cities worldwide, including New York. Many countries condemned the attack—notably Turkey, until recently a key Israeli ally and regional power broker with whom relations may now be irreparably damaged because so many of its nationals were in the flotilla. The UN Security Council demanded an end to the Gaza blockade, although Washington successfully watered down the official statement and forestalled calls for an independent investigation. Without such an inquiry, it’s unlikely that those responsible for this assault will be held accountable.

The attack on the Freedom Flotilla is the culmination of more than four years of failed policy, in which a siege has been imposed on the entire population of Gaza in an attempt to weaken and isolate Hamas after its victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Israel does not bear sole responsibility for an unjust blockade that also undermines its own long-term security; indeed, the policy was jointly crafted and executed with the United States and has enjoyed the collusion of the European Union, Egypt and even the Fatah wing of the Palestinian Authority.

The effects of this policy on the people of Gaza have been devastating. According to various UN agencies, the formal economy has collapsed. More than 60 percent of the people are food insecure, and nearly 80 percent depend on the UN for sustenance, with rising levels of malnutrition. The destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure has been comprehensive, with the reduction in electricity supply damaging food production and storage and dangerously limiting access to safe drinking water. The blockade has prevented all but minimal repair of the damage from Israel’s 2008–09 military assault; thousands are still displaced from their homes.

The United States has had ample opportunity to change its one-sided policy, which has resulted in continued warfare, occupation, misery and death for Palestinians and Israelis. Israel’s occupation would not have been possible without tens of billions in US military aid, without dozens of UN vetoes cast by Washington, without the State Department’s back-room strong-arming of other nations. It would not have been possible without the dishonesty of a US media establishment that habitually twists or simply refuses to report basic facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict—and is often less critical than the media in Israel. It would not have been possible without the active collusion or cowardly silence of the vast majority of the Democratic Party and liberal policy establishment, which for too long has bowed under the intimidation of AIPAC and other right-wing Zionist organizations, including Christian Evangelicals, all of which claim to defend Israel but which in fact support the most retrograde forces in Israeli society—elements that are leading Israel on a path of self-destruction.

The rightward trend in Israeli politics, and widespread outrage stemming from the 2008–09 attack on Gaza, have led to tough questioning of the US-Israel alliance, not only among the younger generation of activists and bloggers in America—many of them Jewish—but also by the new liberal lobby J Street. This phenomenon was exemplified and noted recently by former New Republic editor Peter Beinart in a scathing New York Review of Books article critical of the older Zionist establishment. The trend is also analyzed at length by Norman Finkelstein in his new book, “This Time We Went Too Far”: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Disenchantment may finally be growing in official circles too. As noted recently by Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus, Washington’s uncritical defense of Israel has increasingly become a threat to US interests in the region, where Islamist extremists use the oppression of Palestinians as a recruiting tool and where leaders have become increasingly wary of association with the United States.

One positive outcome of the attack on the humanitarian flotilla is that it has focused the world’s attention, as never before, on the indefensible blockade of Gaza. The siege must end immediately, and along with it the counterproductive US-Israeli policy of isolating Hamas. Only then will it be possible to work constructively toward a resolution of the conflict.