Monday, June 07, 2010

Israel's Attack and the Cycle of Blame

By Michael Winship
June 7, 2010

“Where is the balance between wisdom and force?”

Read on.

2 comments:

Marvin Najarro said...

It seems like the balance is lost. We have forgotten our sense of humanity. War is inherently evil, but we humans beings justify it as a something necessary.

AJ said...

Conflation conflation, conflation.

1. Making sure that the people of Gaza have a decent life.
2. Preventing those in Gaza from having more weapons in their fight against Israel.
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They're not the same. That's why the Oslo accords agreed to by the Palestine Authority in the 1990s gave Israel control over access to the sea. I've read the document.

Israel isn't relying on those documents.

But it does tell you that somehow or another Israel will control access to Gaza by sea sufficiently to stop weapons.

Not surprisingly, there's a very good case that International law supports the sea blockade.

Is there a humanitarian issue with Gaza? Yes. So what do you do? You fill ships with aid and people that you've carefully vetted. You know that somewhere (anywhere if the blockade is legal) Israel will take control of the boats. What you want is to go to Ashdod,even though you keep yelling otherwise.

And you keep doing it,over and over again.

And that will go along way towards what you should want reasonably.

But it is much more effective to fight back, knowing almost certainly people will die.

So Egypt will keep the border open to people and controlled goods and in a few months the tunnels will be no more.

I'm not saying the tactics of violence didn't work. I just think its hypocritical for those closely involved with the ships to pretend they didn't have the choice of violence. And let us not pretend that they didn't know how it would end.

For only a few dead, they got an awful lot of benefit.

As to where and how and with what force the Israelis acted, if the blockade was legal, they acted perfectly fine. ,