Israel’s fault in the attack on the Mavi Marmara is beyond dispute. The IDF should not have sent its troops to board this ship in the middle of the night. Nor did the government exercise proper oversight or planning in the matter. Having made another colossal blunder in the international arena, Prime Minister Netanyahu clearly deserves all the condemnation that he is getting. Yet in the rush to admonish Israel for its aggression, many people have lost sight of the protesters’ fault in the matter.

According to reports, people on the boat attacked the soldiers using switchblades, slingshots, deck chairs, marbles, and metal bars. Two activists then allegedly grabbed handguns from two commandos and began firing. Some Israelis had to jump into the water to escape the melee. In the end, two soldiers suffered gunshot wounds and another was stabbed.

To understand the recklessness of these actions, try to think of it in an American context: If the police show up at your door—even without a warrant—you do not have the right to pull a switchblade or grab a deck chair. If you resist arrest, you will be charged with a crime. When this type of struggle poses a real danger to police officers’ safety, they can and do shoot people.

These principles also apply in international waters. Unless the soldiers began mowing people down as soon as they touched the deck, the protesters should have complied with their demands. A metal pole is never the proper means to solve a dispute with law enforcement—which is what the IDF was in this case. Considering that this ship was full of human rights activists and lawyers, they really ought to have known better.

- Joe

This is from the Israeli Army. It starts at 10 sec. Israel should never have put these commandos into such an impossible situation.

The thing that strikes me most about Mavi Marmara debacle is the apparent lack of foresight on the part of the IDF. What exactly did they expect to happen?

If you drop 15 heavily armed commandos on to a ship of 600 activists in the middle of the night, it’s likely they will view it as an attack and fight back. The isolated commandos will likely fire on the activists when attacked and viola, a failure that makes the Tehran hostage rescue look downright competent. This isn’t rocket science; it’s barely crowd control 101. (The videos above and below give a good picture of how chaotic the whole operation was.)

To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying Israel = evil and activists = martyrs or vice versa. We don’t know enough to make those determinations, and anyone who tells you that they do has an agenda.

What is clear is that if the IDF had waited until dawn and boarded the ship with more, less conspicuously armed soldiers, it’s likely things wouldn’t have gone as badly.

- Evan

A lot of questions remain after Israel attacked an aid flotilla headed for Gaza early this morning: Why launch an operation against protesters in darkness at 4:00 am, a time that would maximize chaos? Why not wait until the ships entered territorial waters? Why launch an attack at all, when there were less risky ways to divert the ships? [update: Israel attacked at night to avoid media coverage. That worked out well]

The only thing that is clear is that Israel walked, with hubris, right into a giant trap. And Binyamin Netanyahu is leading one of the most diplomatically incompetent governments in history.

As the world waits to see how Turkey responds, another country to watch is Egypt. Many people (especially outside of the Arab world and Iran) often forget this fact—but the Gaza blockade is a two country affair. Egypt also has a border with Gaza, and by opening the Refah crossing, it could end the blockade any minute that it wants to. Egyptian President Mubarak's support for the blockade is extremely unpopular at home, and it makes him a frequent target of invectives from al-Jazeera, Hezbullah TV (al-Manar), and Iranian government mouthpieces. 

But Mubarak also loathes Hamas, which is an offshoot of Mubarak’s main domestic opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see if he can withstand pressure this time. And if Turkey wants to use its opportunity in the spotlight to make the blockade untenable, it should not only condemn Israel but also put heavy pressure on Egypt, which is more likely to crack.

P.S. For those who aren’t familiar with the history of the region, Gaza was actually part of Egypt until Israel conquered the territory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Many Israelis undoubtedly wish that it was still part of Egypt.

- Jon

Ross Douthat suggests that perhaps the declining attachment of secular American Jews, as described in Peter Beinart's essay, is a product of natural assimilation—as has happened to Irish and Italian Americans’ decrease in attachment for their respective homelands. The Economist’s Democracy in America blog (the Economist is so money!) basically takes Douthat to school:

Here's the thing: Italy and Ireland are not projects. There is no way for Italy or Ireland to fail to become Italy or Ireland, to traduce their founders' visions and disappoint some group of their citizens so bitterly that they would rather emigrate than participate in or legitimate them. But Israel, like America or the Soviet Union, is an eschatological and ideological project. And for most American Jews (though not for all Jews), the Zionist project has always envisioned a liberal, democratic state upholding the norms of citizenship and human rights that Theodore Herzl felt had been violated by European anti-Semitism. Just as American socialists could turn away from the USSR in the aftermath of the show trials, and just as some Americans periodically feel that political developments in the US constitute a betrayal of the ideals that make the nation what it is, liberal Jews brought up on a liberal, democratic (and often socialist) vision of Zionism are coming to feel that the actually-existing Israeli state is a betrayal of those Zionist ideals, and that it does not deserve their allegiance.

This is what is torturing the moral compass of liberal Zionists—the idea that Jews, so poorly treated as minorities in Europe, have failed to give equal rights to minorities in the Jewish state. Despite all the slogans—“Israeli Arabs are freer than Arabs in any other country”—Arabs are not functionally equal to Jews in Israel—definitely not in East Jerusalem, and lets not mention the West Bank. Some may argue that it is impossible to be liberal in the Middle Eastern environment. Nevertheless, what does this mean for the Zionist project? How can an illiberal Israel be a light upon nations?

Roger Cohen reports on the West Bank's only brewery, Taybeh. It's a video piece- definitely worth your 3 minutes, and you won't even have to drudge through Cohen's stilted prose. Whoever can get this stuff distributed at SOAS would make a fortune.

An unsparing piece by Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books exposes some of the problems in American Jewish debate on Israel. Money quote: 

In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning. It remains the lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic; they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular. They don’t want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left, but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right.

These American Zionists are largely the product of a particular era. Many were shaped by the terrifying days leading up to the Six-Day War, when it appeared that Israel might be overrun, and by the bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when much of the world seemed to turn against the Jewish state. In that crucible, Israel became their Jewish identity, often in conjunction with the Holocaust, which the 1967 and 1973 wars helped make central to American Jewish life. These Jews embraced Zionism before the settler movement became a major force in Israeli politics, before the 1982 Lebanon war, before the first intifada. They fell in love with an Israel that was more secular, less divided, and less shaped by the culture, politics, and theology of occupation. And by downplaying the significance of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only exists in their memories.