[Peace-discuss] Even business press recognizes Israeli criminality

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The Financial Times is very roughly the British analogue to the Wall Street 
Journal.  --CGE]

	Israel is lost at sea
	Published: May 31 2010 19:12 | Last updated: May 31 2010 19:12

With Monday’s brazen act of piracy, Israel dealt a blow to the legitimacy of its 
own struggle. The killing of activists aboard the captured ships sent Israel’s 
way of defending its security, which it was already imperative to return within 
the bounds of international law, hurtling into lawlessness.

Israel claims the activists had links with extremist groups and that some 
attacked Israeli soldiers with knives and sticks (and in some accounts the odd 
light firearm). Even if true, this would not justify the illegal capture of 
civilian ships carrying humanitarian aid in international waters, let alone the 
use of deadly force.

Outrageous as this behaviour was, the true outrage is the illegal blockade of 
Gaza that it enforced. Since the January 2009 Gaza war, which exposed Israel’s 
determination to destroy Hamas’s capabilities regardless of the cost to innocent 
Palestinians, Israel and Egypt have colluded to prevent the enclave’s 
reconstruction. According to the United Nations, three-quarters of the damage 
has not been repaired and 60 per cent of homes do not have enough food.

The ostensible goal is to weaken Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that 
rules Gaza (and whose Egyptian incarnation is Hosni Mubarak’s only real 
opposition). But the blockade aimed at crushing it, besides the illegal 
collective punishment it implies, only shores up Hamas’s support. If Israel and 
Egypt wanted to turn Gaza into a mafia-run statelet, they could hardly do better 
than sever any alternatives to Hamas’s smuggling network, leaving the population 
even more at its mercy.

Hamas engages in terrorism and fires occasional rockets into Israel, but it is 
an example of that rarest of Middle Eastern species: a popularly elected 
government. It has also signed up to the 2002 comprehensive peace offer by the 
Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. If this is a bluff, 
it is one Israel has yet to call. That is what this is ultimately about. 
Israel’s government has been pretending it is ready to negotiate for peace, but 
that there is no one to negotiate with on the other side. The attack on the 
blockade-busters lays bare the country’s slide into contempt for international 
law, intolerance of dissent and wilful sabotage of viable representation for 
Palestinians.

Israel has always known the importance of its conduct being judged legal by the 
world’s leading powers. Those powers – in the body of the Quartet and the UN 
Security Council – must now make clear it has gone too far.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cab86fe0-6cde-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html

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