Turkey has warned that its relationship with Israel has been severely damaged after at least nine people died when troops stormed ships trying to break the Gaza blockade.
The Turkish government has long been Israel’s main regional ally but called the raid an act of state terrorism and has accused Israel of violating international law.
Jonathan Head reports.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10199824, 31 May 2010
J Street is the political home of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 5/31/2010 1:19:58 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: Shocking News Off Gaza
|
Like many of you, I am still absorbing the terrible news from the waters off of Israel and Gaza this morning. Going into this weekend, we knew there were few good outcomes likely from the latest effort to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip in the face of Israel’s determination to prevent it. But none of us expected the tragedy we woke up to this morning, a day on which we honor the memory of U.S. soldiers who served and died in prior wars. As one of our supporters wrote to me this morning, “how many more people need to die, how many more children deprived of a father or mother, before this conflict is settled and people can live in peace and security, while devoting their energy to building better lives?” With details still emerging and propaganda spinning furiously on all sides – one simple truth stands clear to us: today’s events are the natural outgrowth of the larger, ongoing failure to resolve this conflict peacefully through a two-state solution. It is up to our leaders to turn this crisis into a real push to end the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians now – otherwise events will spin even further out of control. We will have more to say on how in the days ahead. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts with us by responding directly to this message and we’ll put together a webpage for feedback and reactions from the J Street community later on in the week. Our statement reacting to the day’s events follows: J Street is deeply shocked and saddened by reports that at least 10 civilians have been killed and dozens more wounded (including Israeli soldiers) this morning as Israel intercepted a naval convoy bringing humanitarian supplies and construction materials to the Gaza Strip. We express our condolences to the families of those killed and we wish the injured a full and speedy recovery. We hope that leaders on all sides will take immediate steps to ensure that this incident does not escalate into a broader round of violence – in Israel, in Gaza, or in the region. There will undoubtedly be calls in the coming days for a UN investigation into today’s events. A credible, independent commission appointed by the Israeli government should provide the world with a full and complete report into the causes and circumstances surrounding the day’s events and establish responsibility for the violence and bloodshed. This shocking outcome of an effort to bring humanitarian relief to the people of Gaza is in part a consequence of the ongoing, counterproductive Israeli blockade of Gaza. J Street has been and continues to be opposed to the blockade – believing that there are better ways to ensure Israel’s security and to prevent weapons smuggling than a complete closure of the Gaza Strip. We do not know yet what the impact of today’s incident will be on the just-restarted peace process, on Israel’s relations with the international community, or on the health of Arab-Jewish relations within Israel itself. We do know, however, that today is one more nail in the coffin for hopes of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict peacefully and diplomatically and for preserving Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. We urge President Obama and other international and regional leaders to take today’s terrible news as an opportunity to engage even more forcefully in immediate efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’ll be in touch, – Jeremy Jeremy Ben-Ami ———- J Street is the political home of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement. |
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Istanbul on Monday to condemn Israel’s naval raid. The operation was bound to deepen Israel’s isolation around the world.
WASHINGTON — Israel’s deadly commando raid on Monday on a flotilla trying to break a blockade of Gaza complicated President Obama’s efforts to move ahead on Middle East peace negotiations and introduced a new strain into an already tense relationship between the United States and Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel canceled plans to come to Washington on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Obama. The two men spoke by phone within hours of the raid, and the White House later released an account of the conversation, saying Mr. Obama had expressed “deep regret” at the loss of life and recognized “the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances” as soon as possible.
While the administration’s public response was restrained, American officials expressed dismay in private over not only the flotilla raid, with its attendant deepening of Israel’s isolation around the world, but also over the timing of the crisis, which comes just as long-delayed American-mediated indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians were getting under way.
Some foreign policy experts said the episode highlighted the difficulty of trying to negotiate peace with the Palestinian Authority without taking into account an element often relegated to the background: how to deal with Hamas-ruled Gaza. Hamas, the Islamist organization that refuses to recognize Israel’s existence, operates independently of the Palestinian Authority and has rejected any peace talks. Gaza has repeatedly complicated Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
“This regrettable incident underscores that the international blockade of Gaza is not sustainable,” Martin S. Indyk, the former United States ambassador to Israel, said Monday. “It helps to stop Hamas attacks on Israelis, but seriously damages Israel’s international reputation. Our responsibility to Israel is to help them find a way out of this situation.”
The Obama administration officially supports the Gaza blockade, as the Bush administration did before it. But Mr. Obama, some aides say, has expressed strong frustration privately with the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
At a time when the United States is increasingly linking its own national security interests in the region to the inability of Israelis and Palestinians to make peace, heightened tensions over Monday’s killings could deepen the divide between the Israeli government and the Obama administration just as Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu were trying to overcome recent differences.
“We’re not sure yet where things go from here,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic delicacy of the issue. The White House statement said that Mr. Obama “understood the prime minister’s decision to return immediately to Israel to deal with today’s events” and that they would reschedule their meeting “at the first opportunity.”
No matter what happens, foreign policy experts who advise the administration agreed that if Mr. Obama wanted to move ahead with the peace talks, preceded by the so-called proximity or indirect talks, the flotilla raid demonstrated that he may have to tackle the thornier issue of the Gaza blockade, which has largely been in effect since the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2007.
Since then, Israel, the United States and Europe have plowed ahead with a strategy of dealing with the Palestinian Authority, which has control over the West Bank, while largely ignoring Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians.
Gaza was left with a deteriorating crisis as Hamas refused to yield to Western demands that it renounce violence and recognize Israel.
“You can talk all you want about proximity talks, expend as much energy as Obama has, but if you ignore the huge thorn of Gaza, it will come back to bite you,” said Robert Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group.
For the Obama administration, the first order of business may be figuring out a way to hammer out a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas that will end the blockade of Gaza. Several attempts in the past two years to reach such an agreement have come close, but ultimately failed, the last time when the two sides were unable to reach a consensus on the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas, Gilad Shalit.
Mr. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, says that after things cool down, the administration needs to work on a package deal in which Hamas commits to preventing attacks from, and all smuggling into, Gaza. In return, Israel would drop the blockade and allow trade in and out. “That deal would have to include a prisoner swap in which Gilad Shalit is finally freed,” he said.
It was unclear whether the indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority would suffer an immediate delay. George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration envoy to the Middle East, was still planning to attend the Palestine Investment Conference in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Wednesday and Thursday.
The indirect talks involved American negotiators shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians, and are widely viewed as a step back from nearly two decades of direct talks.
But their structure may actually serve the purpose of keeping them going. Mr. Mitchell and his staff have been shuttling between the two sides for more than a year, meaning that the preparation for indirect talks and the talks themselves do not look different from the outside. As a result, the American brokers could continue their shuttles despite the flotilla attack.
While the blockade of Gaza has been widely criticized around the world, Israeli officials say it has imposed political pressure on Hamas. The group has stopped firing rockets at southern Israel and is fighting discontent among the people in Gaza.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 31, 2010
An earlier version of this article misstated the stance of the European Union on the Gaza blockade.
JERUSALEM — Israel faced intense international condemnation and growing domestic questions on Monday after a raid by naval commandos that killed nine people, many of them Turks, on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza.
Photographs 
More Photos »
On Sunday, before an Israeli raid, activists held a news conference aboard the Mavi Marmara, part of a flotilla taking aid to Gaza. More Photos »
After the Israeli raid, a speedboat escorted the ship, now with Israeli forces on board, to the port of Ashdod. More Photos »
By Jim Sleeper
If it weren’t so despicable, it would be laughable: To the outside world, the government of Benyamin Netanyahu is doing a perfect imitation of North Korea in its murderous assault last night on flotilla of peace activists bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The activists aren’t all pure, but Israel’s government has just purified them. If the government was bone-headed in barring Noam Chomsky from the West Bank at the Allenby Bridge last week, now it might as well be taking tips from Pyongyang.
Inside the country, meanwhile, debate is rising toward a boiling point that could start the civil war that almost began with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing orthodox Jew in 1995. But although Netanyahu squeaked in after the Gaza War with little more mandate than George W. Bush had in 2000, some undercurrents have been on his side.
At the Tel Aviv University, scholars and students who embody the best of everything most of us once admired about Israel are wringing their hands about the high birth-rate of anti-Enlightenment orthodox Jews and the virtual takeover of their once-social-democratic country by hundreds of thousands of smart, cynical Russian Jews. (Israel still has one of the worlds’ best and most universal health-care systems.)
The manipulative contempt with which these two powerful groups are gaming the just, ecumenical society that stronger, more noble people I know risked their lives to advance is heart-breaking.
Netanyahu & Co. are rushing ahead of even the birthrates, but at least that could dispel progressive wishful thinking before it’s too late. The government has let the flotilla “drive Israel into a sea of stupidity,” writes Gideon Levy, a senior columnist for Haaretz the country’s most prominent liberal daily.
“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,” writes Bradley Burston, a senior editor at Haaretz. “We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel’s Vietnam.”
Burston would know: A Los Angeles native and Berkeley graduate, he moved to Israel in the 1970s with some young Americans I knew who settled in Kibbutz Gezer, a progressive outpost between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. If you can recall that in those Vietnam War/Nixon years Israel seemed a lot more noble to many of us than the U.S. did, you’ll understand why Burston served in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic and studied medicine in Be’er Sheva for two years.
But Burston must also know that his scathing Vietnam analogy has limits: The U.S. could have walked away from Vietnam with no dangerous consequences. In Gaza, by contrast, the influence of Iran and other powers makes the Israeli situation a little more… existential. Israelis also don’t have Americans’ history of conquering a whole continent and not having to care about it. Their history, too, is more… existential.
But precisely for those reasons, Haaretz reports, Israeli security forces are now on high alert, bracing for protests closer to home, maybe even for a third intifada if it turns out that one of the Palestinian activists on board the flotilla was killed. That only underscores the government’s stupidity.
What kinds of resistance to all this should progressive Israelis contemplate? TPM’s Bernie Avishai has participated in and described here some non-violent tactics being honed by both Arabs and Jews in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.
But what will unfold among contending factions of Israeli Jews I’ve mentioned? Here, again, it is useful to remember Israel’s differences from the United States. Precisely because there’s universal conscription in Israel, the military isn’t as militarizing as you might think. It’s an army where no one salutes anyone and civilian norms commingle with military ones.
That prompted Bernhard Henri-Levi, speaking in support of J-Street and progressive Israeli counterparts at the French Embassy here in Tel Aviv yesterday, to observe, “I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy.”
What he’s noticing is that universal service gives Israelis a sense of entitlement to sound off, including in dissent, in ways that the American left lost when conservatives, in a master-stroke, converted to a volunteer army, thereby taking the edge off anti-war Americans’ solidarity and feelings of unimpeachable right as well as inclination to express outrage at government abuses.
What will come of that sense of entitlement in Israel now, though?
On the one hand, the country does have increasingly powerful — and, yes, despicable — enemies, some of whom care not a whit for Palestinians, whom they have oppressed and are using as pawns in a dance of moral posturing. That’s a caution for Americans haunted by Vietnam.
On the other hand, there are Israelis like the many who contribute to Haaretz who are stirring deep feelings of misgiving and outraged dignity among others who sense, as many of us Americans did during the Vietnam and Bush years, that something in their republic was being stolen. This can’t go on without a fight. The question is, what kind?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe, May 31, 2010
by Flying Rodent
Jesus facepalming Christ. Let’s say you were a cartoonish, Ahmadinejadesque lunatic fixated on destroying Israel.
How would you go about achieving your goal?
Well, priority number one would be to isolate the Israelis from their allies, so they have no diplomatic or military cover.
A good start would be to take actions that infuriate military partners like the Turks by killing a load of Turkish civvies, then telling them to fuck off by pretending that the civvies you killed deserved it.
You’d definitely want to sabotage relations with allies like Greece, so that they’d withdraw from joint military operations and bar your military leaders from the country.
You’d want to blacken the Israelis’ image by finding as much video footage as possible of exploded children and Merkava tanks doing donuts in the rubble of civilian housing, preferably from insane, murderous, indefensible and counterproductive wars.
You’d want to rile up Israel’s enemies by marching the Israeli military into conflicts in Lebanon that they can’t win so that they look much weaker than they are, and you’d want to destroy the reputation of Israel’s special forces. At least since the raid on Entebbe, Israeli special forces have looked courageous and invincible – getting some good footage of them blowing away a load of civvies in a clusterfuck operation would be propaganda gold.
Plus, you’d want to isolate the country from the United States by blowing up a load of pointless political pissfights that gain Israel nothing and damage its supporters as badly as possible.
The Israelis don’t need the US to give them every item of military hardware excepting nukes and aircraft carriers, but trying to fund that stuff out of general taxation rather getting them for free would be much more difficult.
In short, you’d want to make Israel look like a paranoid, bloodthirsty and extremely belligerent nation of racist freaks, determined to murder fuck out of civilians with total impunity year-in, year-out, so that the entire planet disowns them by, for example, withdrawing their ambassadors and issuing a barrage of denuncations.
This, I contend, is the actual policy of the Israeli political class, and I’m now certain that the Israeli government is packed to the hoop with Iranian sleeper agents.
Short of handing Syrian intelligence the launch codes to their nuclear arsenal, I really can’t think of any way in which the Israeli political class could do their country more harm.
It’s been clear for years that the Israeli right is utterly dependent on the looniest fringe of Palestinian society for their power and legitimacy, and that both sets of nutters use violence against the other as a means to cementing their rule.
The basic situation over there is that both Hamas and the Israeli government are committed to policies that harm their populations but ensure their own continued rule. It’s a godawful, mutual death spiral that’s heading in precisely the wrong direction.
Shorter – there really is an urgent and perilous threat to Israel. It’s called “the Israeli government”.
, May 31, 2010
