Israel faces outcry after deadly battle on relief ship

What happened

Israel this week faced international condemnation after its soldiers rappelled from helicopters onto a ship filled with aid for Gaza, killing at least 10 pro-Palestinian activists. The craft was part of a protest flotilla of six Turkish-flagged ships seeking to break the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip and deliver food, medicine, and other relief. Israeli commandos boarded the largest boat and clashed with protesters in a nighttime melee of flailing clubs, tear gas, and gunfire. Starkly conflicting accounts of the incident emerged. Israel said its soldiers resorted to handguns only after passengers attacked them with knives and clubs and stole some soldiers’ guns; it released videos on YouTube showing passengers beating soldiers with rods and fists. But activists say Israelis fired without warning, and Turkish videos, also posted to YouTube, showed passengers panicking as they heard gunfire and saw the soldiers rappelling from helicopters.

The incident in the Mediterranean Sea sparked street protests around the world. Turkey, whose citizens accounted for more than half of the flotilla’s passengers, recalled its ambassador to Israel and called the incident “murderous banditry.” The U.N. Security Council held an emergency session as many nations, including France and Great Britain, called for an end to the blockade of Gaza. President Obama expressed condolences to Turkey and called for a “credible, impartial, and transparent investigation of the facts surrounding this tragedy.”

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What the editorials said

“This is a grievous, self-inflicted wound,” said The New York Times. Israel has every right to enforce its blockade of Hamas-run Gaza, but “was boarding, especially in the dark, the only means of stopping the ships?” And why weren’t the Israelis “better prepared to defend themselves without using lethal force?” Israel’s primary goal, said The Washington Post, should have been “to prevent the militants from creating the incident they were hoping for.” Instead, Israel played right into their hands, giving Israel’s many enemies the sort of propaganda victory they could only have dreamed of.

Israel did what it had to do, said The Wall Street Journal. The flotilla was organized by the IHH, “a radical Turkish group with close ties to Hamas, the terrorist group that illegally seized power in Gaza in 2007.” The IHH and their fellow travelers, the Free Gaza Movement, sought specifically to provoke, in their words, “a violent response from Israel” to “breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement.” Take a look at the videos of so-called peace activists beating the commandos viciously with clubs and knives. The Israelis were “acting to defend themselves.”

What the columnists said

Excuse me? said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. “When trained commandos open fire on activists,” we’re supposed to believe it was the soldiers who were in danger? “You have to invert every single principle of law and morality to give Israel the benefit of the doubt in this inversion of normal morality.” And how could the Israeli navy have failed to anticipate resistance? asked Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. Set upon by angry, frightened passengers, the commandos apparently “had no plan of what to do.” Firing on the ships was “an act of jaw-gaping stupidity, strategically and tactically—even leaving aside morally.”

Israel may now well find Turkey “a more dangerous foe than Hamas,” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Turkey has long been thought of as Israel’s “key Muslim ally,” but relations have been souring of late, and Turkey has been “buddying up to Iran.” Now Turkey’s government has a ready excuse to move further away from Israel. If Israel doesn’t figure out a way to mitigate the damage, it will find itself even “more isolated.”

There’s one bold step Israel could take immediately: End the Gaza blockade, said Aluf Benn in Israel’s Ha’aretz. Five years of enforcing Gaza’s isolation has not weakened Hamas’ control one bit. And attempting to police what Gaza residents can and can’t eat and buy “casts a heavy moral stain on Israel and increases its international isolation.” Let the “flotilla affair” be the last time Gaza makes Israel look bad. “It’s time to sever the last ties of the occupation and leave ‘Hamastan’ to its own devices.”