There is an ominous shadow looming over Israel's recent international missteps. The global rush to judgment against Israel's interdiction of the Turkish ferry "Mavi Marmara" represents an important barometer of Israel's decaying public diplomacy.
In less than six months, under its truncated Likud government, Israel has managed to alienate its most important regional Muslim ally, Turkey; angered the United Arab Emirates with the botched assassination saga in Dubai; endured expulsion of diplomats from Australia and the United Kingdom -- two of Israel's greatest friends; accorded Hamas' supporters a public relations bonanza, and kicked settlement construction sand in the eyes of Vice President Biden.
For good measure, Israel's actions may undermine efforts to muster sufficient international support to have the United Nations impose the type of crippling economic sanctions against Iran that could mean the difference between a chastised Iran or an Iran with a nuclear bomb.
This is not a winning hand, chaver!
Israel's official reaction to the debacle on the high seas is part justified and part chutzpah. Part justified because the flotilla's organizers were offered a peaceful detour away from confrontation and rejected the offer preferring violence to score points at the expense of exposing innocents to unnecessary injury and death.The ringleaders on the ferry were akin to anarchists trying to provoke the police into a confrontation with a peaceful demonstration. Part chutzpah because Israel could have disabled the ferry's engines instead and towed the ship to shore instead of putting their soldiers and the protesters in harms way.
The facts are under investigation, and time will tell which side was "legally" within its rights under international law. But legality rarely trumps public perception, and perception, not legal treatise, influences public opinion.
Some of the defiant "in your face" statements to the crisis emerging from members of Israel's right wing coalition are troublesome. They are unhelpful to Israel's cause. Indeed, egged on by Israel's now indicted foreign minister, spokesmen for Israel's ultranationalist parties are all too primed to toss overboard with reckless abandon the value to Israel of its friends and allies to score debating points at home.
Like flotsam and jetsam, they devalue the importance to Israel of world opinion, its ties to Israel's most important regional allies, and the incalculable value of Israel's strategic partnership with the United States. They disparage President Obama, his Chief of Staff when visiting Israel, and gleefully humiliate those who dare to disagree. Enough is enough!
That leaves me with a sinking feeling about Israel's international condition.
The continued humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now front and center again in Arab media -- stoking more perilous anger and resentment. And the last thing that Israel needs now is more regional isolation and more Arab anger which diverts attention away from Iran's illegal nuclear ambitions. Does that not matter to Israel's ultranationalist settlement leadership?
The flotilla fiasco camouflages a more fundamental issue that defies easy resolution: the plight of Gaza's 1.5 million citizens caught in the vice between their unlucky choice of leadership and their inability to force their recalcitrant leaders to compromise with their Fatah compatriots to find a way out of their plight. Gaza's beleaguered civilians have a human right to have unfettered access to everyday goods, including all the things we take for granted: food, medicine, and the right to travel.
But make no mistake about it Hamas is callously using Gaza's hapless civilians as human shields to further its terror against Israel. They deserve release from this bondage not because it suits Hamas but because the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is simply unacceptable from any perspective. It would be a travesty if in the maelstrom of this mess Hamas is absolved of any responsibility for the plight of its wards.
The challenge to the Palestinians, to Israel, and to the rest of the world is how to chart an end to the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade, while preventing Hamas from rearming and re-launching its terrorist missiles against Israel. Gaza's population is paying too high a price for the stalemate to continue indefinitely.
David Shasha: Losing the Jewish Soul
The inability of Zionism to integrate the traditional culture of the Middle East into its national program has led to an endless series of conflicts with the Arabs.
Ahmed Rehab: Israel Gaza Attack: Do Actions of the 'Jewish State' Represent Jewish Values?
Israel's failure is not a failure of Jewish values. If anything, it's a failure to apply Jewish values.
Israel tension boosts Turkey's popularity with Arabs
Excerpts from Israel PM Netanyahu's televised remarks
Australian PM calls Israel's Netanyahu on Gaza aid flotilla
for some, a small kindness is not forgotten.
you showed kindness towards me, which caused me to be open to to see the the conflict from the perspective of the israelis.
once a vocal critic of israel, my views have been reshaped.
one can be both pro israel and pro palestinian.
it is not a mutually exclusive concept.
some can be persuaded.
some are content to cling to their bigotry and hatred.
alex
Moreover, take the time to look up the word Chutzpah (as I see many here have done in courtesy) before you base the entirety of your interpretation on one misunderstood word. Thank you, Amb. Ginsberg, for providing a coherent and comprehensive perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolding today, and for using terminology that seems to have stymied some of my more reactionary fellow readers.
THIS IS TOTAL NONSENSE.
What Israel offered was to dock in an Israeli port and then take the goods to Gaza, which of course is nonsense because Israel IS NOT ALLOWING ANY GOODS INTO GAZA ANYWAY!!!
If the people who want to bring the supplies to Gaza are doing it from the sea, is precisely BECAUSE ISRAEL HAS SHUT THE GAZA DOORS FOR YEARS now.
So for this Israeli ex-ambassador to try to SPIN the facts to mitigate the damage Israel is suffering in the court of International public opinion, is double dishonest!!
No. There's no doubt Israel acted illegally. Why? Because the blockade of Gaza is illegal due to U.N. Resolution 1860.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment_and_arts/10250452.stm
The problem here is that I never heard or saw much about it from them in the regular press, just defensive statements.
Why didn't Israel ask another country to check the ships, instead of getting drawn into a trap, instigated by a terroist group. Another question is why were the terroists waiting for them with clubs and knives, when all Israel wanted to do was check for weapons, and send the ship to Gaza.
The mistake by Israel is that they should have been prepared for the confrontation with non-lethal tactics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elU3etpW-YQ
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.
10 activists shot down (and more wounded) when they didn't have firearms themselves, and you term it "chutzpah"?
You're a sick, disturbed person Ginsberg.
It is a term to describe the king's fool's audacity to speak truth to power. The audacity to baldly lay bare the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the elite. The "fool" being such a figure as a modern comedian.
It is not the audacity to murder political activists.
For example, Stephen Colbert had some serious chutzpah when he spoke truth to the political and media elite when he headlined the Washington Correspondants Dinner during the Bush Administration. He called out the incompetence and dishonesty of the Bush Admin, as well as exposing the corruption and sycophancy of the mainstream media that aided and abetted said incompetence and dishonesty.
A democratic nation using armed commandos to storm a ship full of political activists in international waters, murdering 10 and wounding many others, is not the same thing.
http://humanrightstv.blogspot.com/2010/06/defenders-of-mavri-mamarra.html
Ex US-MArine Ken O’Keefe's account of the massacre on board the Mavi Mara. His disarming of an Israeli attacker and his subsequent abuse at the hands of cowardly Israeli captors.