I know you haven't been following this thread from the start, but two questions:
- Do you think Israel is justified in maintaining a blockade given that weapons used against Israeli citizens have been smuggled into Gaza by sea in the past?
- Can you explain why violence occured on only one of the many ships boarded by Israel during the blockade?
I have been following the thread from the start, I only skipped a few pages in the middle.
The thrust of my post was actually about the fact that this incident is a serious own goal for Israel, and they're coming over very very badly in the media presentation and the court of public opinion. I note nobody actually commented on the article I linked to, which was written by a native-born Israeli.
Yes, the Israeli spokesmen are coming over in exactly the same way as Mugabe's henchmen. The complete disconnect between what they are saying and what we can see is actually happening. The party line being repeated that we are the good guys and behaving perfectly reasonably.
At the same time, Israel's actions are seen as being completely disproportionate to the threat they are under. We see people in Israel with a pleasant, western lifestyle, symphony concerts and so on. At the same time we see a small group of people penned into a crowded ghetto, living in poverty and deprivation, being allowed aid shipments based on cold calorific requirements calculations and comments about them being "put on a diet". We see Israel building something that dwarfs the Berlin Wall, cutting through Palestinian land and annexing even more territory. We know about the nuclear weapons.
We're invited to believe that the small, poverty-stricken group represents a genuine threat of genocide against the large, prosperous, well-armed nation. It dosn't appear credible. Far from there being any danger of the Palestinians ejecting the Israelis from the entire territory, the danger seems to be of the Palestinians themselves being left with no remaining territory. Whether what they have at present could be a viable state is debatable.
The relative imbalance of might is so complete that Israel's protestations come over very badly indeed. It really does seem as if this "socialisation and indoctrination process" described by Pappe distorts the Israeli view of reality to a serious degree.
Situations where two disparate groups have genuine claims to the same bit of territory are never good. But no peace is ever likely to be reached if one side is intent on obliterating the other. The paradox is that while an Israeli might hear this statement as supporting their view that the Palestinians would like to eject the Israelis, the rest of the world sees it in terms of Israel's excessive heavy-handedness in trying to disadvantage the Palestinian territories into oblivion.
Rolfe.
