Samson Blinded has posted a new item:
During his first term in the office, Netanyahu was tough. Very tough. He did not
conduct “final status” talks with the Arabs. Instead, he flatly refused to
make any major territorial concessions to them. Then a crazed Israeli soldier
opened fire on Arab civilians at a Hebron market. TV cameras were on the spot
(surprise, surprise). Amid an international outcry, Netanyahu’s government
agreed to abandon Hebron to the Arabs. An incident, yes. Like Mabhouh’s
suicide.
This term, Netanyahu was not tough. Though shock-shelled by Obama’s
rhetoric, he was slow to give up—but then came the Gaza flotilla
debacle.
Why were the boats intercepted 80 miles out at sea? The depth of a
blockade is only 20 miles. An interception on the open seas is a clear-cut act
of piracy. An honest mistake, made because no lawyer was present? You bet. The
Border Police refused to take part in the operation because they lacked
jurisdiction outside of Israeli territory. The Navy knew that it was committing
a breach of international law. Yet the order was given. A senseless order,
because the boats could as easily have been intercepted within the blockade
zone—legally.
Why intercept the boats at all? Their cargo had been inspected at Greek and
Turkish customs, and presumably by Israeli agents as well. Everyone knew they
had no meaningful weapons on board. Would the boats docked in Gaza have created
a dangerous precedent which could later have been used to facilitate arms
trafficking to Hamas? The Israeli government is not in the habit of dealing with
remote threats; if it were, Hezbollah would not have been able to amass 50,000
rockets, nor would Syria have aimed 1,000 ballistic missiles at our cities, nor
would Hamas have been able to smuggle in antitank and antiaircraft rockets. The
boats were not stopped because they threatened, even remotely, to set a
precedent.
If anything, the Israeli government was especially careful about
the flotilla because it had been financed by Turkey. No way would the government
carelessly and deliberately jeopardize our already strained relations with the
Ottomans. So there must have been an overwhelming reason for the
interception.
Without doubt, the Gaza flotilla was going for the Exodus scenario: a highly
publicized attempt to break the blockade of Palestine. They even spent extra
time wandering around the Mediterranean sea to garner all available attention.
There was next to no cargo on board: these were passenger ships, what cargo! And
even the arrogant Israeli intelligence could not have missed the preparations
being made for a violent encounter among the ship’s 650 passengers. They were
playing out the famous Jewish-British confrontation. Recognizing the similarity,
British diplomats were among the first to condemn Israel. According to the
scenario, there would have to be deaths.
A ship with so many passengers can hardly surrender. How are the passengers
supposed to disembark to be transferred out of Israel? With too many people on
board, surrender was not an option: they had not prepared for the trip for
months only to be detained by Israelis. Numbers have a power of their own: a
boat with dozens of passengers is easy to take over, but hundreds of people are
likely to fight.
With full knowledge of the likelihood of confrontation,
the Israeli government sent Navy commandos rather than Border Police to make the
interception. Anyone familiar with Navy training could have predicted the
ensuing fiasco. The Navy is simply not trained for this kind of operation.
Recall the indiscriminate shootings that took place during the early stages of
the first Lebanon war. The Border Police, on the other hand, are well prepared
and trained to control riots with non-lethal means. The Marines were lost: in a
clearly hostile situation, they were only allowed to use... paintballs! And no
peacenik piece of trash in the government is going to go to jail for sending
Jewish boys unarmed into a combat zone. The Marines’ initially meek reaction,
predictably, encouraged the mob and escalated the subsequent fighting. Whereas a
few live shots would have sufficed to quell the riot, the initially mild
reaction ensured significant casualties—most importantly, among the
Marines.
Besides choosing the wrong type of troops for the operation, the government sent
an insufficient number of them. Who in his right mind would send a few dozen
Marines against hundreds of violent protesters? We are not even talking about a
typical anti-riot operation in which a wall of police presses against the mob
and relatively few policemen are required to man the confrontation line. The
Marines were dropped from helicopters right into the middle of a hostile crowd.
When the first Marine who landed on the Marmara was attacked on the spot,
Admiral Marom should have changed tactics immediately. It is hard to doubt his
expertise in such simple matters, but they continued dropping the Marines with
paintball guns onto a ship which was exploding with rage. Apparently, the
Marines did not receive fire cover from several helicopters right above them,
despite being in mortal danger. They went with mere pistols against hundreds of
armed rioters: in close combat, the rioters’ knives and axes were easily equal
to Navy handguns. Someone sent the Marines to their deaths, and one is left to
ask oneself about the role of Admiral Marom, who narrowly escaped discharge a
year ago due to his tendency to frequent strip joints, and who may be indebted
to high-ranking leftists in the establishment who saved his job.
Unimpeded satellite translation of the confrontation from the boats speaks
volumes. Why wasn’t the Navy ordered to jam the activists’ communications?
Mistakes like this do not happen in well-planned, routine operations in which
scores of professionals cross-check the most minute details.
The
pro-Palestinian activists were on a suicide mission. What did they expect, to
fight off the Israeli Navy with knives and firebombs? Or did they expect to
escape being thrown into Israeli jails after attacking Israeli Marines? No,
theirs was a suicide mission.
The world was also surprisingly prepared. Germany, unwilling to see Jews return
to Bavaria, is normally our staunch ally. Yet, the German PM condemned Israel
immediately, though the Marines acted in self-defense. The French, Italians, and
nearly everyone else followed suit immediately, though the casualties, even if
inflicted on peace-loving civilians, were minuscule by anyone’s
standards—certainly by the standards of the NATO countries fighting in
Afghanistan. Completely ignored was the fact that the ‘peaceniks’ attacked
the Marines rather than vice-versa.
Obama is a special case. His honey-sweet invitation to Netanyahu was immediately
suspect. Okay, Obama needed to repair his relations with America’s Jewish
community, but what is the point of a hollow meeting? Obama can remove his feet
from the table while speaking with Netanyahu, but he will still be pressing the
Jewish state to abandon Jerusalem and live with a nuclear Iran—not a big deal,
indeed, since a life like that wouldn’t be long. Then, conveniently, came the
Gaza flotilla debacle, and the scheduled meeting was abandoned. Instead, the US
State Department joined the chorus of international condemnation of Israel. Tell
me that Obama did not know about the impending debacle.
Such string of operational errors in a simple intercept could have happened on
its own - in which case, the government is guilty of criminal stupidity. More
likely, Israeli leftist establishment framed Netanyahu.
The last time there was such a provocation against Netanyahu’s
government, it cost us Hebron. Let’s see what concessions they ask for this
time.
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