And as it was a Turkish ship in international waters — therefore Turkish territory — this was an act of war against Turkey.

If you look at the long 9m36s video of the attack (at mine), it looks as if people were injured and killed before the Israelis boarded the ship. Eyewitness accounts emerging of course contradict the IDF’s version.

Well any film that may have been taken showing the idf shooting first will have been taken because they captured the ship .

And yup it clearly is a illegal act, the turks are saying they will give future ships naval escorts so Israel may have a war with a founding member of nato, the most moderate Islamic country and what was one of their best friends over stopping wheelchairs etc going to people who need wheelchairs .

Really bad planning on the Israeli side how to lose friends and influence people.
I hope the turks stand up to them or they can reconsider what the hell their doing

good article rueben

So let’s get this straight. What Israel expected to happen was that they would shepherd the flotilla into an Israeli port, and negotiate a lifting of the blockade. The small group of jihadists who had concealed themselves in amongst the genuinely well-meaning to take arms to their ‘brothers’, as the Israelis suspected, then sparked off a conflict that leads to an international relations disaster for Israel – at the expense of actually delivering aid.

It’s sad to see how easily everyone’s influenced by a very few warmongers. Like pushing buttons, honestly. If you think any Israeli (bar a few nutty Kahanists and the like) wanted this, you’re totally mad. Stipulating that to be so – because the alternative, a planned massacre, isn’t consistent with the facts – then the vitally important question arises of how these events in fact came to happen.

It’s obviously the case that when you go around armed to the teeth, you will find it easy to over-react to a threat – quite possibly very reasonably because you perceive it to be greater than it really is – and it won’t be difficult to spark of something like this. Have you actually looked at the evidence as to whether someone did so deliberately or not before criticising Israel for their actions? If nothing else, it changes the target of your criticism in this instance from being trigger-happy to being inappropriately over-armed.

Oh, one more thing, for pedantry’s sake. It’s not a unilateral blockade – Egypt also enforced it on Gaza’s land borders until today.

Dave: The Israeli forces were “inappropriately over-armed”, fired first, and kept firing after a white flag was raised. See my post above. That’s a pretty fucking big error of judgement.

Owen:

What exactly was the error of judgement, though? If we accept that Israeli policy is not to slaughter international protesters deliberately – which does appear to be the case – then if you’re suggesting a deliberate massacre, you’re suggesting that it was a rogue action. That would be reprehensibly evil, but not something you’d call an error of judgement.

If, on the other hand, it was not a deliberate massacre, then there are genuinely interesting questions to be asked about how it is that Israel has ended up doing something that no sane Israeli wanted. At the very least there’s an opportunity to get the Israelis to change their processes for dealing with things like the initial problem – the flotilla running the blockade – if the triggers can be identified.

It’s great to sit here being morally righteous about who bears overall responsibility for people being dead, but it’s not so great to do it at the expense of working out why those people are dead and how similar deaths can be avoided in future. Whoever you pin the blame on, people are just as dead.

Maybe I’m just an eternal optimist, but it seems to me preferable to see SNAFU than murderous deliberate massacre.

Well, I don’t see this behaviour by the Israelis as out of character given that the means by which the state of Israel was formed were itself a precedent for their actions in this context. No ‘sane Israeli’ might have done this, but let’s not forget that the ‘sane Israelis’ of today can claim said ‘sanity’ because they’ve had, and thrive, on the dirty work done by their foreparents.

I don’t believe in a ’2-state solution’ – as the pro-zionist Guardian supports – but a unified state comprising both the Jews and Palestinians. But if Israel continues to act in this manner, then I suppose I will have little opposition to the dismantling of the Israeli state in favour of the Palestinians.

How exactly would “dismantling Israel in favour of the palestinians” differ from the unified state option

Apologies Reuben. I ought to have elucidated on that point.

‘Dismantling Israel in favour of the Palestinians’ refers to the eviction of the Israelis from Palestine. The ‘unified state option’ refers to their living together in one state run by a government comprising both parties (which is what i wish happened in the case of India with the British and Indians – i’m an ‘Indian’ from singapore btw).

I suppose the latter would also mean that the ‘Israeli’ state would be ‘dismantled’, except, in this case, it would favour both parties as opposed to just the Palestinians.

Ed, “evicting the israelis” would be a ridiculous and morally unacceptable solution. When you speak of evicting the israelies, would this apply to all israeli citizens – including Israeli Arabs, Armenians and Druze – or just some. Many Israeli citizens moved to to the country not as enthusiastic colonists but as refugees from places like Egypt. Many more were born there. And where would you evict them to? Another round of ethnic cleansing is not what the middle east needs.

I certainly would support the dismantling of Israel – insofar as it is by definition a Jewish ethnic state – in favour of a genuinely multi ethnic state.

I’ve never understood the two-state proposals. Why only two? Surely either one state, or about seventeen, for all the different groups? To my mind, if you’re going down that route, a federal structure is the way to go.

Thing is, though, this is all irrelevant in this context. Given that Israel does exist, and is not going to be dismantled overnight because of how it was formed, all that bringing it up allows you to do is to condemn people morally.

If we approach the problem from the other end, we can discuss what the least change is that we could make which would have the biggest effect. It’s going to be a lot harder to come to an agreement (including Israel) that the Israelis were wrong to stop the flotilla than it is to come to one that the operation could have been much better handled.

Don’t tie yourself up in knots over one state/two states/no states…but deal with the specific issues of oppression and discrimination and consider what issues need to be campaigned on and who will campaign on them.

Work on this basis and you will be working towards a good solution (which by the way would not be one that just brings another ethnic cleansing – the problem is not the presence of Israelis but the presence of injustice and discrimination and occupation and there have been and are today Palestinians and Israelis who are working to combat these problems).

Out of this tragedy this week there is at least a deeper consciousness among many in the world who wish to challenge the status quo in Israel/Palestine at different levels.

Less good news is that the anger that the Turkish Government feels hasn’t undermined its continued desire to buy military equipment from the Israelis, but perhaps the Turkish people will say something to their government about that.

Davidr>

I think that unless you’re suggesting Israelis as a population differ in some way from other groups, you really have to ask why it is that Israel – an otherwise liberal, Westernised, democratic country – behaves any differently to the way we behave. In fact, I think the answer’s pretty plain: fear makes people do things they would never otherwise do, and in that respect we are just like Israel – see our ‘anti-terror’ measures for examples.

How a cycle of fear and violence has come into being is, to my mind, not relevant. We need to break the cycle and put out the fire before discussing how it started.

It’s my opinion that breaking the cycle is actually pretty easy. You can remove the fuel for terrorist groups – deprivation on the Palestinian side – by Marshal Plan-ning the whole area until everyone’s too busy getting rich to fight. At that point, all that’s left, having removed the fear, is the original xenophobic brawl and an argument about money.

We’d do well to remember that Rodger Young will always be a hero.