Blame the Flotilla Not Israel

As the world rushes to condemn Israel for her actions against the flotilla cooler heads need to prevail and place the blame where it belongs, with the flotilla.

This crisis has long roots, but the logical place to look is the beginning of the current infantada. The current infantada began when President Clinton's peace initiative failed. The initiative didn't fail because of lack of effort on his part, or willingness to compromise on Israel's part. The initiative failed because of Palestinian unwillingness to accept the deal, which was likely the best offer they will ever receive. The immediate next steps, and the world's reaction to the steps, set up the incident with the flotilla today.

When the peace initiative failed, Arafat responded by declaring an infantada. Shortly after the infantada began, the Palestinians went complaining to the UN that "the Israelis shot back." The world failed to condemn the Palestinians and gave sympathy to their claim. This collective failure on the part of the rest of the world set the stage for the showdown at sea today because it didn’t hold the Palestinians accountable for their own aggression and in effect gave tacit support for their aggression.

Jump to the cause for the blockade. Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.” Hamas launches rockets into Israel, targeting civilians, for the purpose of attempting to achieve its political goals, a Palestinian state, the very thing that was offered to the Palestinians by President Clinton and agreed to by Israel.

In response to the rocket attacks, Israel tried a series of military interventions. These interventions would secure a time of relative peace, but the rocket fire would resume. Simply put, the problem was not being solved with military action, another route to deal with the terrorism needed to be enacted. Enter the blockade.

Israel has the capability to completely blockade the Gaza strip, allowing in no water, food, medicine, fuel, etc. This would cause the Palestinians to capitulate out of sheer necessity in a relatively short period of time. Rather than take this route Israel allows in humanitarian aid, and allows in construction materials if they are tied to a specific project. The blockade is working, rocket attacks are down, thus supporting the argument that the rocket fire stopped and cease fires were agreed to by Hamas to give them time to rearm.

Now we turn to the incident with the flotilla. The flotilla was acting in a manner specifically to cause an incident. When they were going to be intercepted at night, they changed course so that the intercept would be at day and could be videotaped for better publicity. Five of the six ships in the flotilla were stopped with no violence. The ship with the activists was the ship where violence occurred. We have a repeat of the waaaah, Israel is shooting back mindset. Turkish TV, which is hostile to Israel in this action, showed video of the activists attacking the commandos as they boarded the ship. Israel claims that her commandos opened fire after being “attacked by knives, clubs, and live fire.” The evidence supports this claim, video shows the commandos under attack and commandos were shot and have injuries consistent with being attacked as described. In effect, this was an ambush by the flotilla.

Blame for the incident falls squarely on the flotilla. They acted in a provocative manner. They armed themselves with both weapons and video equipment to cause a fight to break out and then selectively release images to attempt to gin up sympathy for their actions. The world should be showing outrage, but the outrage should be aimed at the flotilla rather than Israel.

Sources: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/terrorism
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ml_israel_palestinians