WarSclerotic

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: June 4 2010 21:46 | Last updated: June 4 2010 21:46

“Botched” and “stupid” are adjectives that have been applied all week to the events of Monday, when Israeli soldiers killed nine passengers and wounded dozens more on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish flagship of a six-boat convoy. The boats, sponsored by a Turkish charity with ties to Islamist radicalism, had a humanitarian objective: to deliver aid to Gazan ports. But as the flotilla leaders themselves acknowledged, they also had a military one: to break the blockade of Gaza that Israel imposed in 2007.

When participants in a conflict blur the line between civilians and combatants, good options disappear. Under the circumstances, the raid was neither stupid nor botched. It successfully repelled an attack on Israel’s borders, albeit at considerably higher cost than Israel would have wished.

There is a blockade of Gaza because Hamas, the Islamist party that runs Gaza, wants Israel destroyed. In recent years, it has launched thousands of rockets at cities in the Israeli south. One can argue over whether quarantining Hamas is wise, reasonable, proportionate or effective. But this is a separate question from whether Israel has the right to enforce a blockade in a war zone. Those complaining loudest about the Israeli raid tend to mix the two up and to say that because

a) Israeli’s blockade of Gaza is unjust, and

b) the passengers of the Mavi Marmara oppose the blockade of Gaza, therefore

c) in any encounter between Israel and the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, Israel is in the wrong and the passengers are in the right.

This is an unreasonable viewpoint. It is also a blueprint for escalating violence. Imagine the dangers, if, during the cold war, non-governmental organisations from the Soviet bloc had sailed flotillas into US waters to protest about racial conflict, or into British waters to protest against IRA internment.

Israel has provided evidence that its soldiers were in mortal danger when they abseiled on to the decks of the Mavi Marmara – high-quality video footage, which was released within hours. The government has shown that the passengers brought gas masks and had pre-fabricated propaganda videos. The Guardian reports that three of the dead Turkish citizens were seeking “martyrdom” through the operation.

But the intentions of those on the boat – whether humanitarian, as the organisers said (publicly), or terroristic, as the Israelis say – have nothing to do with the justice or injustice of the raid. Protecting borders is about sovereignty, not sentiment. The fact that, say, a door-to-door evangelist wants to save your soul rather than rob you does not give him the right to enter your house. Where intentions do matter is in assessing the relevance of whether the boat was in Israeli or international waters. The explicitly stated intention of the activists to violate the Israeli blockade almost certainly renders the precise location of the boat less important.

The insistence, even among Israel’s friends, that Israel behaved stupidly rests on the idea that it had other options. The American journalist Thomas Friedman and the Israeli novelist David Grossman both faulted Israel’s leaders for not acting more “creatively”. But creativity has its limits. A post on foreign affairs website Stratfor.com on May 26, almost a week before the encounter, laid out the alternatives ominously and accurately. Let the boat through, and you have issued an invitation to Iran and others to re-arm Hamas. Stop the boat and you have an “incident”.

In retrospect, Israel sent its soldiers on to the Mavi Marmara too lightly armed (some with paintball guns) for the mob that met them. Yet this was the right decision at the time, made to avoid even accidental violence.

If there is one attitude that some of Israel’s sincerest friends share with the extremists who have added comments to many of the Mavi Marmara videos on YouTube, it is that perfection and omniscience are both to be expected from the Jewish state. (They should have deployed their Secret Boat-Stopping Machine!) The extremists, though, take perfection to be a precondition of the state’s legitimacy.

Israel has been held responsible for the actions of others – notably, this week, for the deterioration in its relationship with Turkey. This view is promoted cynically by Suat Kiniklioglu, a spokesman for Turkey’s ruling AK party, who says the incident has “irrevocably damaged Turkish-Israeli relations at the bilateral level”, and naively by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who warns, “Israel’s storming of a Turkish-flagged vessel in international waters was a huge setback to efforts to win new sanctions on Iran”.

The deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations has proceeded steadily since Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought the AK party to power. Mr Erdogan wants a more Islamic Turkey, and in this he speaks for his country’s democratic majority. One cannot re-enter the good graces of the Muslim world with a trusting, or neutral, attitude towards Israel. Turkey’s growing hostility to Israel is a cause, not a consequence, of the Mavi Marmara incident. The promised United Nations investigation will provide a chance to examine the claims of foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu that the NGOs organising the flotilla were beyond Ankara’s control.

The most alarming thing this week was not the raid. It was the way internet opinion fell in behind activist opinion, and then the opinions of political and journalistic elites fell into line with the web. That Israel has lost the battle for public opinion is unfortunate. More troubling is that that battle was lost before the facts of the case had even emerged.