(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

Why does Israel have to be put on the defensive internationally after its commandos use limited force in response to being attacked with potentially deadly weapons? Would anyone be complaining if the men and women of the US Navy were to use lethal force to defend themselves in the course of interdicting Somali pirates?

Comments

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

That might also mean that Israel would have been better-served letting this ship land in Gaza, even if they did want to keep the general blockade up.

But why should they assume that this ship is what it claims to be? There really are weapons being transported into Gaza. A ship could very well be carrying weapons to furnish Hamas with more means to shoot missiles at Sderot.

[uncleamos]

You're arguing the small point and ignoring the big one.

[ccommack]

Thank you.

[meanfreepath.livejournal.com]

Israel had given plenty of warning that the flotilla was in hostile waters and had ordered it to divert to Ashdod, which the Mavi Marmara had refused to do. Would any reasonable person expect it to sail right up to the 12-mile line and then turn around? The alternative would have been for the Israelis to wait for the ship to come within an arbitrary line and lose a potential tactical advantage.

More fundamentally, I would question whether the twelve-mile territorial waters limit is really relevant here, in the context of a blockade and a war/police action. In Vietnam, we certainly mined and blockaded harbors such as Haiphong.

Unrelated to the main topic, but I'm having a tough time controlling my emotions in this response

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big fan of the "We're at war so it's okay" thing.

But then I don't see war as morally neutral. Things can get rather complicated and messy on the ground, but I'm skeptical of the claim that on the grand scale wars never have good guys or bad guys, that it's impossible to determine who's the aggressor and who's the defender.

And I'm sorry, but Israel-as-defender is a narrative that has lost all meaning for me and that I now unequivocally reject. It makes no historical sense whatsoever and trying to make it make sense does violence to every single moral principle of Western liberal democracy we Americans like to pretend we hold dear.

Even if we pretend history started 20-30 years ago it still doesn't make sense. The dominant Israeli narrative of the "war" involves looking at thrown rocks and baseball bats and "missiles" that are glorified firecrackers and have casualty rates in the *single digits* every time every time a new barrage comes and imagining it to be the entire Nazi army with banners waving at the gates.

I just can't stomach it anymore. It almost literally makes me sick.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

America is more like the spoiled, privileged child who grew up to be a bully because it never really got used to having to play nice with others and treat them like equals, rather than having the truly embittered, hysterical tang of the cycle-of-abuse kind of bullying. It is possible to get America to get bored and give up; this is far less true of other aggressive nations.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

I would never take charge of Israel for the same reason I don't want to be in charge of America's withdrawal from Iraq. It is a huge, intractable mess that can never be resolved without hurting a whole lot of people. The only way to cleanly fix things would be to have a magic time machine that would allow you to reverse history so that it never happened in the first place -- but it's impossible now to actually return to that status quo ever, not without a ton of death and destruction.

(Seen from this perspective the common Palestinian opinion -- "We wish Israel didn't exist" -- isn't genocidal, it's a wish for a return to that status quo that unfortunately cannot now happen without something approaching ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I don't think that makes the wish unreasonable.

This is partly because I now look at the basic and foundational argument of Israel's existence -- wishing Israel didn't exist equals wishing that the Holocaust would recur, because Israel is the only possible insurance policy against another Holocaust -- and I think it's crap.

It's crap for numerous reasons, but one of the primary reasons I dislike it is that it's only a tenable position if applied evenhandedly and NO ONE actually proposes applying it evenhandedly. Not even for ACTUAL VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST -- who is out there campaigning for the creation of a Romany homeland?)

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

The thing is that when Israel proposes the conspiracy theory that the ship was actually loaded with actual weapons, they are imputing conspiracy to a *huge* spectrum of people -- all of the activist groups involved in the flotilla, some of the members of whom are quite high-profile and respected citizens of their own nations, as well as the *Turkish freaking government* and the officials responsible for inspecting the ship to ensure it was carrying nothing inherently hazardous/illicit before it embarked.

Now, if you actually take the position that Israel is a tiny island of Jewish identity swamped by an enormous sea of barely-restrained European and Muslim anti-Semitic rage, then this is a plausible and sensible corollary to take -- of course any "peace activist" ship inspected by a non-Israeli, non-USA, nominally Muslim government is going to be suspect.

If you do *not* share this view of the world, then this seems like out-of-control paranoia that only further cements Israel's reputation as dangerous and impossible to deal with.

These days it's getting harder and harder to take any middle ground between these two views.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

"We're at war". "We're at war". "We're at war". Same goddamn litany that can be used to justify anything.

Look, if Israel really wants to be at war with the whole damn world, Israel will eventually get its wish -- as long as they keep pushing -- and the results will probably not bode well for Israel.

Their current strategy of treating some of the most starving and desperate people in the world as incredibly deadly hostile combatants has certainly borne rich fruit for them over the years. If they lump every outsider who takes umbrage at this assessment of the situation as also being hostile combatants the Levant is likely to get even more fun to live in soon.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

Would anyone be complaining if the men and women of the US Navy were to use lethal force to defend themselves in the course of interdicting Somali pirates?

If the Somali "pirates" were attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to illegally occupied territory through an illegal blockade? Yes. People would be complaining. Those people would probably be lambasted as anti-American, terrorist sympathizers, etc., but they'd complain.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

(The closest parallel I can think of would be, say, teleporting us back in time to the war with the Philippines and imagining peace activists trying to bring aid and comfort to the Filipinos while the good men of the Navy were trying to bring Aguinaldo's forces to heel.

This is a very bad parallel in many ways, but it's a close enough parallel in enough ways that I can confidently say that, yeah, I'd be complaining. I was going to bring Native Americans into it for a closer parallel, but it's too hard to make that fit with the whole naval blockade thing.)

[sildra.livejournal.com]

If Israel didn't exist, would the modern plight of the Jews be any better than the modern plight of the Romany, who, to this day, continue to suffer pogroms, and for the most part live in abject poverty?

Re: Unrelated to the main topic, but I'm having a tough time controlling my emotions in this respons

[meanfreepath.livejournal.com]

I don't go to bed worried that I might wake up for the last time to a barrage of rockets. Nor do I ever bother to contemplate the possibility that I might be blown to bits or maimed by a suicide bomber every time I board a bus or go shopping.

Hamas rockets may be relatively ineffective compared to most modern ordnance, but you do not deny that they do kill people and destroy property. Hamas has unequivocably expressed the intent to destroy Israel, and were it not for Israeli military actions they might well succeed in attacks significantly more destructive than harassing fire.

[ccommack]

Well, first off, if I were in charge of Israel, I would not be blockading Gaza. It's a ridiculous, stupid, self-defeating, and dishonorable policy. But if I were in a position where I had no choice and really, really, needed to enforce the blockade? Well... There are plenty of options to get an unarmed merchant vessel to stop. I might actually have authorized boarding by helicopter, but in daylight and after due warning had been issued, including through naval gunnery across the bow. Mostly, I would have refrained from storming the ship until it was at or imminently about to cross the 12-mile limit, or any alternative announced and posted blockade line.

Re: Unrelated to the main topic, but I'm having a tough time controlling my emotions in this respons

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Nor do I ever bother to contemplate the possibility that I might be blown to bits or maimed by a suicide bomber every time I board a bus or go shopping.

Neither do Israelis. That's a ridiculous exaggeration. In fact, I've never met an Israeli who was at all concerned about this possibility except when they were discussing politics, and the ones with integrity mostly dismiss it even in that context. It's just not the kind of thing one worries about in real life.

As my father always told me when I was concerned about this as a child, I was more likely to die in a freeway accident in LA than I was to be in a bus bombing when I visited Israel.

[indecisionwins.livejournal.com]

But do you really think that would be happening to Jews if Israel didn't exist? I mean, I guess the question is where all of those Jews would have gone after the war if not to Israel. I don't know the history well enough to know, but could they all have come to America if they had wanted to? Or would they have had to go back to Eastern Europe and/or stayed in the various Middle Eastern countries where Sephardic Jews lived? I mean, I disagree with Arthur in that I do still think it's nice that Israel exists, and I don't think going back and un-creating it would be an ideal outcome (although I also don't have any ideas for what WOULD be a realistic, ideal outcome)...but I also don't think Israel's existence really has that much of an impact on the lives of American Jews, even if it is nice to have it as a refuge in case Sarah Palin ever becomes president or something...

Re: Unrelated to the main topic, but I'm having a tough time controlling my emotions in this respons

[ccommack]

Hear hear. The rocket attacks from Gaza are scary, but they've killed <30 Israelis in the last decade. I think you're statistically more likely to die from medical malpractice.

[ccommack]

Various corners of the internet also point out that it ought to be easy for a modern navy with precision gunnery and/or frogmen to simply disable a merchant ship and then tow it into port at leisure. They say this assuming that the IDF had this option and deliberately chose not to take it; given how many stories I hear about the IDF involve rank incompetence at the institutional level, I wouldn't even assume that much.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

They could not have all gone to America. Only the ones with close relatives who could sponsor them could have gone to America (and a lot of them did), but it took a long time to get the paperwork through, and the Iron Curtain was rapidly falling.

My grandfather, from Budapest, was faced with the choice of settling in Palestine, or being disappeared by the Soviets (this is what happened to all of his high school friends--one of them had a British uncle, so the whole social group got implicated as spies). So he couldn't stay in Eastern Europe at all. He had no family in America, and so couldn't go there. And his home in suburban Budapest had been demolished anyway, so his whole family was homeless, even the ones not being hunted by the Soviets.

My grandmother was liberated from Auschwitz. (Well, not literally, since most people were marched out of Auschwitz a couple months before the camp was liberated; she was liberated from whichever camp it was she was marched to.) Other people had taken her family's house in the meantime. She and her surviving siblings tried to go to Vienna but there were no jobs there, especially not for foreign, homeless, Jewish teenagers, so they went to Prague, where a Jewish Soviet officer warned them that the borders were about to close and they had better not be in Eastern Europe when that happened. Their one American aunt had come back to support the family when the war started, and so was herself stuck in a liberation camp, not in America where she could fill out paperwork so the extended family could immigrate. So... they had two choices: 1) being homeless in France or Italy for a few years until their aunt was set free, sailed back to America, filled out the paperwork, and the US government processed it (one aunt did choose this route; it ended up taking about five years, during which time she and her family lived in a tent in a refugee camp in France, because they weren't allowed to actually settle in Western Europe), or 2) smuggling themselves into Palestine where there was a network in place to help people like them find housing and jobs. That was the Sephardic community that was taking people in.

Anyway, if these things are happening to the Romany, is there any reason to think the Jews would have fared better if they'd stayed in Europe?

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Also, keep in mind that it wasn't just the Nazis who shipped the Jews off to concentration camps. There were some countries who tried very hard to protect their Jews. Some countries stood passively by, or made only token protests, when the Nazis demanded that the Jews be shipped to concentration camps or killed. But there were some countries who volunteered to ship their Jews to concentration camps before the Nazis even asked, or even orchestrated their own local Holocausts based on the Nazi model. Unlike Germany, who've had their noses rubbed in it, these countries have never really been forced to face what they did, or the underlying hatred that caused them to do it.

In those countries, I find it hard to imagine that Jews in modern times would be treated any better than the Romany currently are, if they had remained there.

[indecisionwins.livejournal.com]

Well, sure...I mean, I don't know if you read about this when I posted on my LJ about this in the fall, but from my trip to Lithuania last summer, I learned about some strange anti-Semitism going on in Lithuania today. And actually, I've now written a 5 page essay about it that I'm trying to get published somewhere (hopefully the LA Jewish Journal...although I'd be interested to hear if you have other suggestions. (I put it online at http://mcohen1.bol.ucla.edu/Holocaust_Obfuscation_essay.pdf .)

But even though the Eastern European countries haven't come to grips with their complicity in the Holocaust, and are doing some disturbing things with that history...they in fact aren't physically threatening the Jews who are there. Maybe it would be different if there were more Jews there, or if Israel didn't exist, I don't know...but there is in fact international pressure today for them to not do things that are too blatant. (On the other hand, maybe some of that pressure comes from Israel... Or at least, at one place where we went, the Ninth Fort in Kovno, the story we were told was that the only reason why the Holocaust-related history of the site was represented in the museum is that a high ranking official from the Knesset visited as some point in the mid-1990's, was appalled that that was left out, and threatened to publicize it internationally unless they made changes.)

Re: Unrelated to the main topic, but I'm having a tough time controlling my emotions in this respons

[meanfreepath.livejournal.com]

That may be true. But you do not deny that the threat does exist, and I think that it is only because of Israel's tough security and military stance that the threat is not more serious.

There are certainly some aspects of the current coalition government in Israel, in particular Avigdor Lieberman's party, that I find distasteful. Trying to seize more land through unfettered settlement expansion in the West Bank is more likely than not counterproductive, and arguably immoral. But there is no denying that Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and that negotiations are unlikely to succeed. I therefore feel that perhaps Obama needs to tighten the screws on Netanyahu with respect to West Bank settlement expansion, and that engagement between Israel and the moderate elements of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank should be facilitated, but that there is little alternative to pounding/starving Hamas into submission.

[meanfreepath.livejournal.com]

Even if only humanitarian supplies are being carried, Israel has every right, and even the responsibility, to maintain the blockade and isolate Hamas. I think an apt metaphor here is Sherman's march to the sea, which broke the back of the Confederacy, or the American submarine blockade of Japan which so drastically reduced the amount of shipping going into Japan that the Japanese war machine might well have been starved into submission in a few more months, even without the atomic bombings.

Until Hamas is ready to renounce violence and recognize Israel, such that the people of Israel can live without the threat of violence hanging over them, maintain the blockade. And don't forget that Israel does allow some humanitarian aid in by land. Frankly, few militaries in the history of warfare have ever been as humane as the IDF.

[meanfreepath.livejournal.com]

There was plenty of warning, I think, and no doubt that the Marmara was being provocative. There was no need for the people on board to try to seize the commandos as soon as they slid down there ropes, as is clearly evident from the videos.

[meanfreepath.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily. Operations with frogmen, to say blow off a propeller, are fraught with risk for the attacking side. Modern naval gunnery is precise, but there's an even greater risk of a shell/missile missing its intended target and causing more loss of life than a boarding party, or rendering the entire ship unseaworthy.