How Obama’s Policy Ensures More Flotillas

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
07 June '10

The Obama administration plans to use Israel’s botched raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla to force Jerusalem to end or at least drastically ease its blockade on Gaza, because “we need to remove the impulse for the flotillas,” a senior administration official told the New York Times. That single statement encapsulates everything that is wrong with Obama’s Mideast policy — and indeed, that of the entire West: willful blindness to facts that inevitably produces counterproductive policies.

First, the statement assumes the flotilla was indeed motivated solely by the blockade. Yet the organizers themselves — the Free Gaza movement and the Turkish group IHH — have both made it clear that their agenda is far broader.

After interviewing Free Gaza co-founder and spokeswoman Greta Berlin last week, the New York Times reported that Berlin “likes to joke” about her two ex-husbands — one Palestinian, one Jewish. “But when she is not joking she says that her detractors in Israel are right, that she does not accept Israel as a Jewish state.”

In short, Berlin isn’t motivated by Gaza’s “humanitarian distress” but rather by a desire to see Israel disappear. Thus her motivation to stage anti-Israel provocations won’t vanish just because the blockade does.

IHH founder Bulent Yildirim, addressing a Hamas rally in Gaza last year, certainly talked a lot about the blockade. But according to MEMRI’s translation, he also declared that “everything is progressing toward Islam”; offered Hamas “the blessings of Saladin,” destroyer of the Crusader Kingdom, to which Islamists often compare Israel; said that if only Hamas hadn’t declared a cease-fire, “all of Turkey would be in Gaza” to help it fight Israel; and warned “the Jews” that “we are here, in Turkey, in Egypt, Syria, and everywhere, and our daughters and our boys can also defeat you.” In short, his agenda, too, is not merely ending the blockade, but ending Israel — unless you assume, as Westerners repeatedly and mistakenly do, that people like Berlin and Yildirim don’t actually mean what they say.

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