Relations between Israel and the rest of the world have been tenuous of late. When Israel then go and board a ship under the flag of humanitarian aid, one would not expect relations with the world and Gaza to improve at all. I intend to try to study the situation from a purely factual perspective point of view and then draw several conclusions that you may or may not agree with.
Let's start with the beginning of the story. It might be said that there is no beginning to the story as the Palestinian - Israeli conflict is a vicious cycle. Still, we can at least use the Gaza war as a reference point.
Gaza is busy firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel and Israel responds. Dramatically to say the least. A series of air-strikes were carried out resulting in the deaths of 1417 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers. International response to this statistic and in fact the tactics of the Israeli army in general caused major international condemnation.
Let's not even get into the Goldstone report as it is remarkably flawed in ways that I don't feel like getting into right now, but should you want to read about them try this link.
I do want to remark on one thing, though. A great deal of the civilian casualties in this war were results of the human shield strategy, in which Palestinians rely on their own human civilians to deter Israeli fire. In fact, one might argue that Palestinians caused most of their own civilian casualties. There is no reason whatsoever that Israel should have jeopardized the lives of its own soldiers to reduce the casualties of its enemy's civilians. A country's primary concern must be its own citizens.
Anyway, to return to the point, Israel was condemned for disproportionate response and being to careless with the lives of civilians. Ultimately, though, Israel protected its own civilians as well as might be expected and the rocket fire stopped. Whether or not they sacrificed to many Palestinian lives along the way is up for debate, but one thing is certain, had Gaza valued the lives of its civilians, they would have ensured that their army was as far away from their civilians as possible.
Still, these air-strikes left Gaza in remarkable disarray. They needed supplies and resources to rebuild the piles of rubble left by Israel. Israel could of course not entirely stop these supplies, but would be careless to let the supplies land without inspecting them. For perhaps they contained more rockets, the last thing they'd want.
Liberal activists from around the world against the Israeli violence toward innocent civilians in Gaza are now bound to come to the fore in providing these supplies. Thus when a flotilla of six ships aimed to break through the Gaza blockade as a protest to Israel's censorship of supplies, it is unsurprising that Israel warned them against doing any such thing, instead telling them to send their supplies across land. Surely a human rights activist group is the ultimate hiding place for weapons to refill the store houses of the tarnished Hamas group.
What Israel didn't expect was to have any particularly violent encounters, but for whatever reason, when boarding the ships as a result of a failure to comply with the request to send the aid via land, a major brawl ensued upon the Turkish ship. Nine to nineteen activists were killed in the violence, and ten Israeli soldiers were injured.
Israel claims that the violence of its soldiers was self-defense, Turkey and most of the rest of the world seems to believe the violence of the activists was in self defense.
I'm inclined to believe Israel on this one for two main reasons:
1) The flotilla claims that no weapons were aboard when two of the Israeli soldiers had bullet wounds, and
2) There were no episodes of violence on the other ships, and one would expect a certain consistency, had the Israeli soldiers been ordered to incite the violence.
Still, regrettable as the deaths of these great people who fought for what they believed in are, to fault Israel for asking the resources to be put across the land and then after warnings going and intercepting the ship is difficult. Why precisely if they wanted to perform a terrorist attack as they are being accused of, they'd warn the victims, is a little strange as well.
Those are my thoughts for now. Feel free to leave your own below, but please keep the discussion clean, intellectual and non-insulting.
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