WarSclerotic

Alan Dershowitz: Israel\’s Actions Were Entirely Lawful Though Probably Unwise.

Although the wisdom of Israel’s actions in stopping the Gaza flotilla is open to question, the legality of its actions is not. What Israel did was entirely consistent with both international and domestic law. In order to understand why Israel acted within its rights, the complex events at sea must be deconstructed.

First, there is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which included a naval blockade. Recall that when Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, it did not impose a blockade. Indeed it left behind agricultural facilities in the hope that the newly liberated Gaza Strip would become a peaceful and productive area. Instead Hamas seized control over Gaza and engaged in acts of warfare against Israel. These acts of warfare featured anti-personnel rockets, nearly 10,000 of them, directed at Israeli civilians. This was not only an act of warfare, it was a war crime. Israel responded to the rockets by declaring a blockade, the purpose of which was to assure that no rockets, or other material that could be used for making war against Israeli civilians, was permitted into Gaza. Israel allowed humanitarian aid through its checkpoints. Egypt as well participated in the blockade. There was never a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, merely a shortage of certain goods that would end if the rocket attacks ended.

The legality of blockades as a response to acts of war is not subject to serious doubt. When the United States blockaded Cuba during the missile crisis, the State Department issued an opinion declaring the blockade to be lawful. This, despite the fact that Cuba had not engaged in any act of belligerency against the United States. Other nations have similarly enforced naval blockades to assure their own security.

The second issue is whether it is lawful to enforce a legal blockade in international waters. Again, law and practice are clear. If there is no doubt that the offending ships have made a firm determination to break the blockade, then the blockade may be enforced before the offending ships cross the line into domestic waters. Again the United States and other western countries have frequently boarded ships at high sea in order to assure their security.

Third, were those on board the flotilla innocent non-combatants or did they lose that status once they agreed to engage in the military act of breaking the blockade? Let there be no mistake about the purpose of this flotilla. It was decidedly not to provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, but rather the break the entirely lawful Israeli military blockade. The proof lies in the fact that both Israel and Egypt offered to have all the food, medicine and other humanitarian goods sent to Gaza, if the boats agreed to land in an Israeli or Egyptian port. That humanitarian offer was soundly rejected by the leaders of the flotilla who publicly announced:

“This mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege on 1.5 million Palestinians.” (AFP, May 27, 2010.) 

The act of breaking a military siege is itself a military act, and those knowingly participating in such military action put in doubt their status as non-combatants.

It is a close question whether “civilians” who agree too participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different than pure, innocent civilians, and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants. They fit uncomfortably onto the continuum of civilianality that has come to characterize asymmetrical warfare.

Finally, we come to the issue of the right of self-defense engaged in by Israeli soldiers who were attacked by activists on the boat. There can be little doubt that the moment any person on the boat picked up a weapon and began to attack Israeli soldiers boarding the vessel, they lost their status as innocent civilians. Even if that were not the case, under ordinary civilian rules of self defense, every Israeli soldier had the right to protect himself and his colleagues from attack by knife and pipe wielding assailants. Less there be any doubt that Israeli soldiers were under attack, simply view the videoand watch, as so-called peaceful “activists” repeatedly pummel Israeli soldiers with metal rods. Every individual has the right to repel such attacks by the use of lethal force, especially when the soldiers were so outnumbered on the deck of the ship. Recall that Israel’s rules of engagement required its soldiers to fire only paintballs unless their lives were in danger. Would any country in the world deny its soldiers the right of self-defense under comparable circumstances?

Notwithstanding the legality of Israel’s actions, the international community has once again ganged up on Israel. In doing so, Israel’s critics have failed to pinpoint precisely what Israel did that allegedly violates international law. Some have wrongly focused on the blockade itself. Others have erroneously pointed to the location of the boarding in international waters. Most have simply pointed to the deaths of so-called peace activists, though these deaths appear to be the result of lawful acts of self-defense. None of these factors alone warrant condemnation, but the end result surely deserves scrutiny by Israeli policy makers. There can be little doubt that the mission was a failure, as judged by its results. It is important, however, to distinguish between faulty policies on the one hand, and alleged violations of international law on the other hand. Only the latter would warrant international intervention, and the case has simply not been made that Israel violated international law.

JPost.com | BlogCentral | Inside the Middle East | Obama, Israel and American Jews.

Commentary asked “31 prominent American Jews” to respond to these questions: “Can Obama’s Jewish supporters act in a way that will change the unmistakable direction of current American policy emanating from the White House? Will American Jews accept Barack Obama’s view that the state of Israel bears some responsibility for the loss of American ‘blood and treasure’ in the Middle East? Will they continue to extend their support to the Obama administration and to Barack Obama’s political party?” My answer, from “Obama, Israel & American Jews: The Challenge – A Symposium,” in the June issue of Commentary:

While “I-told-you-so” vindication feels good (I was senior Middle East adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s campaign), it is no substitute for the urgent re-education of Barack Obama.

No American president has ever entered the Oval Office with so many bad ideas about the Middle East, half-baked in the ovens of the Middle East departments at Columbia and the University of Chicago. Two of these ideas are particularly pernicious and might be described as the Khalidi Doctrine, after Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American professor who gave Obama his Middle East primer at Chicago. First, the American resort to force in the Middle East is always counterproductive; second, the unresolved Palestine problem is the hinge on which the entire Middle East turns.

Guided by these two ideas, Obama’s ship ran aground almost as soon as it left port. The diplomatic drive to tame Iran was bound to stall without the backup of a credible military threat – the willingness to use force, despite its downsides. The implosion of Plan A, “engagement,” has left a strategic vacuum, which only now the administration is beginning to fill with stiffer rhetoric. And putting the Palestine problem front and center has only incited the intransigence of the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. By declaring a peace deal a “vital American interest” and tussling with the Netanyahu government, Obama merely jacked up the Palestinian asking price for renewing negotiations and everything else.

As the two pillars of the Khalidi Doctrine crumble under the weight of reality, champions of an alternative approach are finally getting some traction. They insist that US diplomacy toward Iran is doomed, absent the threat to use force if talks fail. And they argue that tinkering with the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” is a dangerous distraction from the main event: Iran.

How do we know whether these ideas are making inroads? First, there was the “dual loyalty” smearing of Dennis Ross by an anonymous administration official, which looked like a desperate lunge to head off just this kind of rethinking. Second, the president of the weather vane called the Council on Foreign Relations suddenly reversed direction: chasing an Israeli-Palestinian deal, he announced, is “a distraction that would benefit neither the US nor Israel, given an Iranian threat that is close at hand and a promise of peace that is distant.” To judge from these gyrations, the re-education of Barack Obama has begun.

What can American Jews do to accelerate it? They must keep their and Obama’s eyes squarely on the ball. When Obama visited the town of Sderot during his campaign, he declared that “a nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation not just in the Middle East but around the world. Whatever remains of our nuclear non-proliferation framework, I think, would begin to disintegrate.” That is the Obama for whom most Jewish Democrats cast their votes: a president who would secure the greater peace. Call it the Sderot Pledge: American Jews must unite around it and hold Obama to it.

Martin Kramer is senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and Wexler-Fromer fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Tags: Israel Obama Pro-Hamas flotilla Turkey

Turkish terrorists beat up Israel troops

DEBKAfile reports: Early Wednesday, June 2, US president Barack Obama stepped into the fast-deteriorating flotilla crisis to stop it from spinning out of control. In secret phone calls, he asked Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to release all the remaining passengers without delay as well as the six ships. He then tried to reason with the incandescent Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan, who had just branded the Israeli raid a “bloody massacre.”

Offering deep condolences for the loss of life aboard the flotilla, the US president said better ways must be found to bring humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza without undermining Israel’s security. He supported the UN Security Council’s call for “a credible, impartial and transparent investigation” of the event, but refused to condemn Israel or take the inquiry out of its hands.

DEBKAfile reports from Ankara that Erdogan declined to be talked round, declaring that ifAmerica did not punish Israel for insolently “trampling on human honor”, Turkey would.

Overnight, Israel began evacuating diplomats’ families from Turkey. Diplomatic and consular staff were left in place in Ankara and Istanbul and told along with security firms to stand by for departure.

Netanyahu called the second security cabinet meeting in two days after the first on Tuesday approved the continued blockade of Gaza against all attempts to break it.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again threatened Israel with destruction for any action it may take  anywhere and its Western supporters with international trial as war criminals.

Israel is preparing for Ankara’s next steps that would defy President Obama’s bid to find a way out of the crisis between the two former allies. In Jerusalem, Erdogan’s accusations were deemed an unfounded and unjustified assault considering the evidence that he had consorted with terrorists, including an al Qaeda offshoot, to bring Israel under pressure in support of the Palestinian extremist Hamas.

This evidence released by the IDF Monday night, June 1, described how the Turkish Marmara, the flotilla’s lead vessel, had been commandeered by terrorists indirectly supported by the Ankara government’s subsidy to the Turkish Insani Yardim Vakfi – IHH, which is listed by the American CIA as an al Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorist organization with bases in Turkey, Bosnia and Bulgaria.

Those passengers attested to more than a hundred members of terrorist organizations aboard acting like a quasi-military group with a command hierarchy, whose leader forced the other four or five hundred passengers to fall into line behind them. The group was split into sub-sections, each in charge of a section of the ship before and after it set sail from Istanbul. Its members were all armed with an assortment of chains, iron bars and knives as well as night goggles and gas masks.

Although they appeared to hail from different terrorist organizations from various countries, they were all ordered to say they belonged to the IHH.
The group kept the ship to a strict military regiment, including round-the-clock guards in the different sections of the Marmara.

When the ship was brought to Ashdod port and the passengers removed early Tuesday, the IHH members were found without identification papers of any kind. Either the Turkish authorities atIstanbul were instructed to let them embark aboard the Marmara without documents or they threw them overboard before the ship docked at Ashdod. Each had an envelope stuffed with thousands of dollars.

DEBKAfile‘s intelligence sources disclose that, when first brought in, the Turkish terror activists refused to answer questions. By Tuesday nightfall, a few began talking and admitted to being members of IHH and its ties with al Qaeda’s Balkan outfit. Throughout the interrogations, Israelintelligence was in contact with colleagues in Western services for help to identify them by means of fingerprints and other physical features.
Our counter-terror sources report that Israel must now decide whether to prosecute some of the activists, including Israeli Arabs, on board the Marmara, on charges of collaborating with an international terrorist organization.

During Tuesday, Israel began deporting the 679 passengers – including 128 for Arab countries through Jordan. The rest will be flown out within 48 hours. Three Turkish jets were due to collect them Wednesday. Eight Israel trucks brought assistance products from the ships to GazaTuesday; another 10 will make deliveries Wednesday.

Israel intelligence agencies too have questions to answer – principally, how they missed spotting the terrorist presence aboard the putative aid-for-Gaza convoy and let a naval force undertake the mission to divert the ships to Ashdod, without preparing them for a violent confrontation with a determined, well-organized group of violent men.