As soon as I heard about the shoot-out on one of the flotilla boats headed to Gaza when Israeli commandos boarded, I started saying to my friends: Israel was sandbagged.
“Sandbagged” means that the Israelis were set up; they were entrapped; their enemies knew what the Israeli response would be and did a jujitsu on them, so that Israel had a public relations disaster.
I based my assumption from two angles: (1) that Israel and its troops are practiced and cautious when it comes to an action with high potential for negative publicity and (2) Martyrdom has been a tactic by the Palestinians for a couple of decades. Therefore, I think the commandos hit a trap of violence. Pro-Gazans, some of whom I also call friends, would say that commandos are a violence in themselves. I say provocation in the name of victimhood and righteousness is as ancient as…well, it’s as modern as the Jewish ship, Exodus after WWII.]
After reading and watching news — ditto opinions/pundits — and talking to my friends, I thought I was the only person who held the assumption that Israel was sandbagged.
That was until I opened the editorial page of this morning’s Washington Post and read Turkey’s Responsibility. This was not a column. The editorial board gave a key fact that I hadn’t seen before, but which supports my assumption: The violence occurred on only one of the six boats in the flotilla, and on the boat, “all of those who were killed were members of volunteers for the Islamic “charity” that owned the ship, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH)….The Foundation is a member of the ‘Union of Good,’ a coalition that was formed to provide material support to Hamas and that was named as a terrorist entity by the United States in 2008….”
So where does the US go from here? It’s been courting Turkey for years. It’s an ally of Israel. It is try to resolve the Israel-Palestine-Gaza quagmire.
I have no answers. At times like this, I grow deeply pessimistic and remember that archaeologists have found traces of a war/wars between Neanderthals and Humans in that region 100,000 years ago. Is this a geographically doomed area?