[Peace-discuss] Even business press recognizes Israeli criminality

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

In re this piece, Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer writes, correctly it 
seems to me, "This is sophisticated bourgeois opinion, but it does suggest that 
there's really no global ruling class consensus in favor of Israel."

That's correct. Israel is the USG's dogsbody - to its own corruption - and has 
been for forty years.  Nobody else's.


On 6/1/10 6:17 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> [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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