Israel’s Naval Blockade of Gaza Is Legal, Necessary

Dore Gold
Bloomberg Business Week
10 June '10
Posted before Shabbat

The continuing demand that Israel should agree to an investigation -- with international involvement -- of its interception of a Turkish-led flotilla to Gaza last week presupposes that Israel did something fundamentally wrong.

At the United Nations, the Security Council issued a presidential statement which lent its political weight to calls for a full investigation into the Israeli military operation. The member states initiating these efforts in the UN system are simply trying to use the international bureaucracy in New York and Geneva to deny Israel its right of self-defense.

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council -- which gave birth to the infamous Goldstone Report that blamed Israel, and not Hamas, for the destruction caused by their 2008 war -- already decided that Israel violated international law by interdicting the Turkish flotilla and then called for another investigation to prove its point. There is always room to conduct an internal probe by the Israeli Defense Force. This happens in Israel even after a successful military operation let alone in the case when the results are controversial. In fact, the IDF has already begun an inquiry into this incident.

But Israel’s critics are raising other questions. Why is Israel blockading the Gaza Strip? What right does it have to board a ship in international waters? Why interfere with the humanitarian needs of Gaza’s Palestinian population? French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he was “profoundly shocked” by Israel’s move against “the peace flotilla for Gaza.”

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Probe: Erdogan knew Gaza flotilla would be violent

Files found on activists' laptops pointed to strong ties between the Islamist IHH movement and Turkey's prime minister.


Anshel Pfeffer
Haaretz
09 June '10
Posted before Shabbat

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan knew in advance that activists aboard a Gaza-bound aid flotilla planned to attack Israeli troops, Israeli intelligence officials have said.

In a report published this week, a group of independent investigators from Israel's intelligence community found that activists aboard the 'Mavi Marmara' were part of an organized group that was prepared for a violent conflict.

Last week Israeli commandos killed nine pro-Palestinian activists when they boarded the Turkish-owned boat, part of a six-ship convoy trying to break Israel's maritime blockade on the Gaza Strip

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Turkish Flags

J.E. Dyer
Contentions/Commentary
10 June '10

Turkey’s sharp turn against Israel under Islamist Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has been much noted in the last couple of weeks. But a just-released report from Israeli analysts clarifies how close the flotilla confrontation of May 31 came to being a Turkish incitement to armed conflict.

The report was issued by Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, or Malam, a private contractor that works with government intelligence agencies and is sometimes used to make disclosures to the public. Based on the material gathered in the flotilla incident by the IDF and other government agencies, Malam concluded that the Turkish government knew in advance of the Turkish Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH) activists’ intention to fight the Israeli navy.

The IHH group of 40 boarded M/V Mavi Marmara in Istanbul without being subjected to the security checks all other participants went through. The group was equipped with communications gear, gas masks, and security vests decorated with Turkish flags. IHH operatives used the ship’s upper deck as a headquarters, prohibiting other passengers from visiting it. Once onboard, the IHH group began pillaging the ship for the makeshift weapons with which its members attacked the Israeli commandos during the May 31 boarding. According to the Malam report:

Bülent Yıldırım, the leader of the IHH … was on the Mavi Marmara and briefed group members about two hours before the Israeli Navy intercepted the ship. Their main objective was to hold back soldiers by any means, and to push them back into the sea.

The Haaretz summary continues:

Files found on laptops owned by the IHH members pointed at strong ties between the movement and Turkey’s prime minister. Some of the activists even said that Erdogan was personally involved in the flotilla’s preparations.

The more we know, the less sudden or unexpected appears Erdogan’s latest threat to bring a Turkish naval escort to Gaza. In retrospect, the situation looks more like one engineered by Erdogan to justify a confrontation with Israel than mere opportunism.

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Propaganda war latest: Tehran 3 Israel 0

Iran’s tactic of portraying its enemy as facing inevitable destruction is proving successful


Amir Taheri
Times U.K. Online
07 June '10

As Iran’s leadership prepares to dispatch a Red Crescent flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, its propaganda organs are spreading one message throughout the Muslim world: the Jewish state, branded by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “the Zionist stain of shame”, is heading for its inevitable destruction.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said of these aid ships that “if this symbolic campaign continues, it will result in the surrender of the Zionist regime, which will certainly be one of its biggest defeats”.

Over the past three years, Iran’s Khomeinist regime has succeeded in changing the traditional perception of Israel. Instead of Israel being the almost invincible enemy that crushed the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War, it is now portrayed as a waning power, a small and vulnerable enclave that, having lost the support of its powerful protector, the United States, is facing the might of a resurgent Muslim world under Tehran’s leadership.

This message is pumped out through Iranian satellite television stations, such as the Arab language al-Alam News Network. Tehran also publishes scores of magazines and books that are freely distributed throughout the Muslim world. Muslim opinion-formers are regularly invited to Iran for seminars on the pan- Islamic campaign to accelerate “the inevitable end of Israel”, a phrase repeatedly used by Iran’s official media. Mr Ahmadinejad has visited more than two dozen Muslim countries to propagate this new anti-Israel strategy.

To underline this new image of Israel, the Tehran propaganda machine has replaced footage of poor Palestinians crushed by “Zionists” with that of the growing arsenal of rockets that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have built up for what President Ahmadinejad calls “the final assault on the Zionist state”. The Jew, previously depicted as aggressive and domineering, is presented as cowardly. The mullahs in Friday sermons in Iran now claim such things as “the Jew runs away at the first sight of blood”.

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Erdogan and the Israel Card

Mr. Erdogan has become a hero in the Muslim world, where he is seen as the "new Nasser," in the words of one Saudi writer.


Steve Rosen
Middle East Forum
Wall St. Journal
10 June '10

The deaths of nine Turkish citizens in the Gaza flotilla incident would have brought a severe reaction under any circumstances. What is nonetheless striking in this incident is the unbridled anger and fiercely hostile reaction of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish public. Mr. Erdogan said Israel was guilty of "state terrorism" and a "bloody massacre." His foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said "This attack is like 9/11 for Turkey," comparing it to a premeditated act of aggression that took 2,900 lives.

Mr. Erdogan does not always display such reactions to allegations of human rights violations. Last year, he defended Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court for killing half a million Sudanese Christians and non-Arab Muslims. In March 2010, he denied that Turks ever killed Armenian civilians. He labeled a U.S. congressional resolution on the Armenian deaths "a comedy, a parody." He said that the Turkish military garrison stationed in Cyprus since 1974 is "not an occupier" but "[ensures] the peace." On tens of thousands of Kurds killed by Turkish security forces from 1984 to 1999, he says nothing.

Could it be that there is something more to Mr. Erdogan's rage against Israel than just a spontaneous reaction to the loss of life here?

Turkish elections, 13 months away, hold the answer. Backing for Mr. Erdogan's party has fallen to 29%, the lowest level since it won power in 2002 and far below the 47% it scored in July 2007. So Mr. Erdogan decided to play the Israel Card.

He tested this tactic in January 2009, in a confrontation with Israeli President Shimon Peres at Davos. Mr. Peres asked him in front of the cameras: "What would you do if you were to have in Istanbul every night a hundred rockets?" Mr. Erdogan shot back, "When it comes to killing you know very well how to kill." Thousands of Turks applauded Mr. Erdogan's performance, greeting him with a hero's welcome and a sea of Turkish and Palestinian flags upon his return home to Ataturk Airport.

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Barack Obama, Voting Present in the Middle East

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
09 June '10

The question of the hour is whether the Obama administration is actually going to sit on its hands and do nothing as the Middle East edges closer and closer toward a major conflict.

Where is the administration on Turkey’s dangerous provocations and outrageous rhetoric? Where does the administration stand on the Israeli blockade of Gaza — for it or against it? What does the administration think about the impending arrival of three Iranian “aid” vessels in the Mediterranean that intend to break that blockade? What does Obama think about the rising tide of eliminationist rhetoric coming from Bashar Assad, one of the primary beneficiaries of Obama’s “outreach”? Now would be a good time for the president to clear up where America stands. Instead, we have sunk to such a sordid and embarrassing place that the Obama administration’s representative to the UN Human Rights Council said nothing after the Syrian representative promoted a blood libel about Jews during the council proceedings.

What Barack Obama clearly is not learning is that his campaign to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel is creating serious strategic risks: it is an invitation to the region’s dictators and terrorists to test just how far they can needle and provoke Israel, knowing that when they push too far — such as we saw last week with the flotilla — there will be no consequences from an American president who has proved himself virtually incapable of speaking with moral clarity about the enemies of Israel.

Over the past few months, the Turkish prime minister has staged an Islamist coming-out party, with a display of thuggish bravado matched in the region only by Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad — and Obama says nothing. Syria is supplying ever more dangerous weapons to Hezbollah, and Obama not only says nothing but is also trying to reward Syria by returning the U.S. ambassador to Damascus.

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The new Turkish Jihad against Israel and the West

Robin Shepherd Online
Think Tank Blog
09 June '10

So, the Muslim country whose rulers perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century (against the Christian Armenians) is now reverting to old form in its ideological leanings and its hegemonic ambitions. As with all forms of political Islam, the variety espoused by Turkey’s current leadership has inevitably matured into a self-consciously anti-Western and anti-Israeli (anti-Semitic — see quotes below) movement.

In a brilliant deconstruction of where Turkey is now headed, Joshua Teitelbaum — a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and, inter alia, principal research associate in the Lauder School at the IDC — paints a depressing picture in today’s Guardian.

Noting that support for Turkey is at an all time high in the Arab world after it championed the terror flotilla to Gaza last week, Teitelbaum says:

“Israel’s relations with Ankara – military, economic, and tourist (Israelis once flocked to Turkey) – have been sacrificed on the altar of Turkey’s retrograde aspiration to lead the Islamic world and establish itself along with Iran as an alternative to American power. Turkey is once again turning eastwards.”

He also outlines the hysterical tones in which Israel is now being talked about by the Turkish leadership in the wake of the flotilla incident:

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Islamist Turkey Overreaches

Ankara’s irresponsible behavior reveals the weaknesses of Islamism 2.0.


Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
08 June '10

As typical Islamist-leftist theater to delegitimize Israel, late May’s Turkish-sponsored “Free Gaza” flotilla was tediously repetitious. As an illustration that Israelis don’t understand the kind of war they now must fight, the outcome was drearily predictable. But as a statement of Turkey’s policies and an augury of the Islamist movement’s future, it bristled with novelty and significance.

Some background: After some 150 years of faltering efforts at modernization, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in 1923 and was replaced by the dynamic, Western-oriented Republic of Turkey, founded and dominated by former Ottoman general Kemal Ataturk. Over the next 15 years, until his death in 1938, Ataturk imposed a Westernization program so stringent that at one point he had rugs in mosques replaced by church-like pews. Although Turkey is nearly 100 percent Muslim, he insisted on a purely secular state.

Ataturk never won the entire Turkish population to his vision and, with time, his laic republic increasingly had to accommodate pious Muslim sentiments. Yet Ataturk’s order persisted into the 1990s, guarded over by the military officer corps, which made it a priority to keep his memory alive and secularism entrenched.

Islamists first acquired parliamentary representation in the early 1970s; their leader, Necmettin Erbakan, served three times as his country’s deputy prime minister. As mainstream Turkish political parties frittered away their legitimacy through a disgraceful mix of egoism and corruption, Erbakan went on to become prime minister for a year, 1996–97, until the military asserted itself and threw him out.