WarSclerotic

It is possible for intelligent people to disagree over the way Israel stopped the flotilla that set out for Gaza from Turkey last month. Even after what we have learned about the “humanitarians” on board in the past two weeks — that many were in reality thugs lying in wait to ambush Israeli commandos — it is still possible to contend that Israeli military planners and commanders were unprepared for what their troops found when they tried to board the Turkish ships. Their unpreparedness, in turn, led to an overreaction by the commandos who, caught off guard, ended up killing nine thugs.

I, personally, don’t dispute the Israelis’ tactics, I’m merely saying that among smart people it’s possible to disagree over whether Israel used just enough force, or too much.

But what can no longer be disputed is the character of those onboard the flotilla.

Sure, there were many useful idiots on the decks — pro-Palestinian activists from Western nations who had been included merely because they made good PR decoys. And, yes, most of them probably swallowed whole the bumph flotilla organizers were selling–that the exercise was merely an attempt to run Israel’s blockade of Gaza ports and bring food, medicine, clothing, toys, etc. to the poor, starving residents.

But the real passengers were 40 operatives from the Turkish Islamist organization, the IHH, which has close ties to the ruling AKP party and directly to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, according to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. It has also been reported that the ship on which the deadly commando raid took place, the Mavi Maramara, was purchased by the IHH from a company owned by the AKP with money furnished by the Turkish government.

There was never any nobler purpose than to break the blockade so ships that would follow could bring in guns, explosives and rockets for use against Israel. That’s what Gaza is running short of — weapons. Every day Israel gives Gazans tons of food and supplies, or permits other countries’ aid organizations to ship tons more across Israeli territory.

I’m not saying Gazans are living large on Israeli rations and potable water, but Gaza’s Hamas rulers need the blockade lifted because there are running short of guns, ammunition and portable missiles, not wheelchairs, toys and hypodermics.

Nor is it hard to believe that organizers hoped the Israelis would attempt to board the IHH ship so fanatics could attack them with rods, knives and light weapons — either to kill the Israelis or to provoke the kind of retaliation that would bring international condemnation and scathing headlines.

We know all nine of those killed by Israeli commandos were affiliated with the IHH — including American Furkan Dogan — so to continue to insist they were merely idealists on a compassionate mission who were brutally murdered by Israel is at best self-delusion and at worst dishonest.

Yet in Tuesday’s Toronto Star, author and columnist Linda McQuaig insisted the nine were nothing more than “peace activists” and that their “killings” were a “shocking” contravention by Israel of a convention among “civilized countries” that “seizing ships on the high seas is a very bad thing.”

The insistence that the nine dead extremists were nothing but peaceniks and that Israel was in contravention of maritime law(it wasn’t) is bad enough — Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls this sort of thinking typical of “knee-jerk left-wingers and the usual legion of poseurs around the world” — but McQuaig insists on going further still.

McQuaig likens Israel’s raid to the Palestinian Liberation Front’s 1985 attack on the cruise ship the Achille Lauro, in which terrorists seized the ship and tossed a disabled American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard to drown.

This is a sneering attempt to draw moral equivalence between Israeli counterterrorism and blind acts of hatred against Jews for the crime of being Jews. This is an only slightly more sophisticated version of the old tactic of comparing Israel to the Nazis and Gaza to a concentration camp. But it is a mark of how desperate the anti-Israel left is to keep their flotilla myth alive.

lgunter@shaw.ca