Author: Andrew Sullivan

Just imagine if a flotilla of anti-Tehran activists were attacked in international waters by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and that the Guards killed 16 or more of the civilians. What do you think Commentary would be saying then?

Another gripping one is here, showing the activists attacking the commandos boarding their ship.

A simple point. The violence by the activists is pretty abhorrent. These are not followers of Gandhi or MLK Jr. But the violence is not fatal to anyone and it is in response to a dawn commando raid by armed soldiers. They are engaging in self-defense. More to the point: they are civilians confronting one of the best militaries in the world. They killed no soldiers; their weapons were improvised; the death toll in the fight is now deemed to be up to 19 – all civilians.

It staggers me to read defenses of what the Israelis have done. They attacked a civilian flotilla in international waters breaking no law. When they met fierce if asymmetric resistance, they opened fire. And we are now being asked to regard the Israelis as the victims.

Seriously.

This is like a mini-Gaza all over again. The Israelis don’t seem to grasp that Western militaries don’t get to murder large numbers of civilians because they don’t like them, or because they could, on a far tinier scale, hurt Israelis. And you sure don’t have a right to kill them because they resist having their ship commandeered, in international waters. The Israelis seem to be making decisions as if they can get away with anything. It’s time the US reminded them in ways they cannot mistake that they cannot.

That's George Will's critique of the oil spill in the Gulf: whatever the facts about the matter, the federal government's impotence in stopping it is politically relevant because it reinforces an anti-government "narrative." This charge is, Will concedes, unfair, but he levels it anyway.

Notice how post-modern the right is. You have to abandon your own principles of limited government, then pretend that the advocates of maximal government believes the state should be able to fix deep sea drilling blowouts, and then argue that all that matters in politics is not reality, but narrative.

Here's what YNet is reporting:

The forces hurled stun grenades, yet the rioters on the top deck, whose number swelled up to 30 by that time, kept on beating up about 30 commandos who kept gliding their way one by one from the helicopter. At one point, the attackers nabbed one commando, wrested away his handgun, and threw him down from the top deck to the lower deck, 30 feet below. The soldier sustained a serious head wound and lost his consciousness. Only after this injury did Flotilla 13 troops ask for permission to use live fire.

The commander approved it: You can go ahead and fire. The soldiers pulled out their handguns and started shooting at the rioters’ legs, a move that ultimately neutralized them. Meanwhile, the rioters started to fire back at the commandos. …

It appears that the error in planning the operation was the estimate that passengers were indeed political activists and members of humanitarian groups who seek a political provocation, but would not resort to brutal violence. The soldiers thought they will encounter Bilin-style violence; instead, they got Bangkok. The forces that disembarked from the helicopters were few; just dozens of troops – not enough to contend with the large group awaiting them.

So 30 activists managed to beat up 30 armed commandos! Here's also a lovely linguistic touch: "rioters." Rioters? These were people on their own boat in international waters, resisting a military attack. That makes them rioters? In that word alone, you get a glimpse into the Israeli mindset.

And remember that it is not Gaza that is besieged; it's Israel. Try repeating that to yourself as long as it takes for you to become a columnist for the Washington Post.

Maintaining the siege and blockade of Gaza (because its citizens elected a government Israeli abhors), and strafing it with military might over a year ago, is not exactly what one expects of a civilized Western state. To then go on the offensive against a flotilla of aid ships, trying to bypass the blockade, and killing at least ten people aboard is bordering on insanity. This meretricious act of violence – like the brutal assault on Gaza itself – has further isolated Israel from what friends and allies it still has. The Turkish government has called this “inhumane state terror“:

Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut short a visit to Latin America to return home. … Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, called for a full inquiry into the incident and the immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. … President Nicolas Sarkozy of France called Israel’s use of force ‘disproportionate,’ while William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said he deplored the loss of life. … News reports said the authorities in Egypt and Jordan, two Arab neighbors which have peace treaties with Israel, had summoned Israeli envoys to protest the action.

You can see some early footage here. The white flag had allegedly been raised after two people had been killed. So, according to the eye-witness al Jazeera reporter on board, Israel’s military killed perhaps a dozen civilians on an unarmed ship after a white flag had been raised. If this were not Netanyahu’s government, I’d be more skeptical. But we know what his government is, what it believes, and what it is prepared to do. Mercifully, Netanyahu will not be meeting with president Obama this week. The attack took place far away from Gaza and was defended by the Israelis as self-defense:

Israel’s military said that protesters managed to grab two guns from Israeli soldiers and use them against the commandos, prompting soldiers to return fire.

An Israeli commando, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he and other Israeli soldiers who rappelled onto the boat from a helicopter were immediately attacked by about 30 people on board.

“They beat us up with metal sticks and knives,” he said. “There was live fire at some point against us. … They were shooting at us from below deck.”

He said activists tossed some of the soldiers from the top deck to the lower deck and the soldiers jumped in the water to save themselves. Activists grabbed some soldiers and tried to hold them hostage, stripping them of their helmets and equipment, he said.

Protestors managed to grab two guns from Israeli soldiers? Really? And the result is possibly up to 16 dead, according to the LA Times? The Coalition government in Britain issued the following statement:

“Regardless of any reasoning, such actions against civilians engaged in only peaceful activities are unacceptable. Israel will be required to face the consequences of this act that involves violation of the international law.”

Amen. And the attack took place in international waters. We should find out more details soon. But it looks to me as if the Israeli government has again replied to a gnat with a bazooka. The disproportionate use of force, the loss of life, the horrifying impact of the blockade of Gaza in the first place: it makes Israel look like a callous, deranged bully, incapable of accepting any narrative that it cannot control and responding instinctively with disproportionate violence.

The suicide continues … and US aid to Israel, especially military aid, should be suspended until the Israeli government starts acting like something other than a rogue state.

New York, New York, 7.50 pm

Bruce Bartlett sees little difference between tax credits and direct spending:

To see just how similar a refundable tax credit is to direct spending, imagine that instead of having the Defense Department pay $1 billion to Lockheed Martin…for some spare parts for the Air Force, it instead gave it a $1 billion refundable tax credit that was tradable. If Lockheed Martin didn't have at least a $1 billion federal tax liability, it could simply sell the unused portion to another company that did. Either way the company gets paid $1 billion and $1 billion worth of resources are extracted from the private sector for government's use.

A reader writes:

I've been thinking of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas's rocket attacks in light of the South Korea's response to North Korea's sinking a South Korean military vessel. At the time, the meme that won me over re Gaza was "no country would put up with such attacks without responding."

For example, Goldblog stated

"No country in the world could afford to ignore such attacks. And no country would. An elected government, such as Israel's, has a basic, overriding responsibility — to protect its citizens from the organized violence of their enemies. Of course, it can do this in part by negotiating with its enemies (assuming its enemies recognize Israel's right to life) but its immediate mission must be to stop the violence, which is what Israel is now trying to do. Whether it succeeds or not is an open question (It is Hamas' indifference to Palestinian life, not Jewish life, that makes it a formidable foe, in the manner of Hezbollah) , but Israel must try to use all of the tools of national power to stop attacks on its citizens. Otherwise it is simply not a serious nation, one that does not deserve sovereignty."

Why are we not hearing the same arguments regarding South Korea? Is it an unserious country, not deserving sovereignty?

Of course not, it's making a rational decision that you don't invade a country with nuclear weapons just across your border without really really good cause. And even the deaths of dozens of sailors isn't a good enough cause. It’s the same decision that Mexico would make if we started lobbing rockets at Juarez.

Anyway, I'm sure I'm running straight into a TNC fake equivalency buzz saw, but this incident has made me rethink my support of that invasion. I think the reason that Israel's reasoning rang so true is because we've spent the last 20 years as the sole superpower, when we're upset, we can invade and most countries can't stop up. So of course we would respond to this type of analysis.

Israel is in the same position, Hamas cannot defeat it militarily and thus this response makes sense. They are bombing us, we should respond.

Whether the steps I took to get there are flawed or not, I've flipped positions. The only way this situation ends well is if Israel is willing to accept behavior from radical Palestinians that most countries with an overwhelming military advantage would not. It’s the only way to marginalize those elements and to rally support for (what I hope is) the majority that want peace.

I'm more mindful of the British example, since I lived during it. For years, IRA terrorists bombed Britain's pubs and shops and eventually nearly killed the entire cabinet in the Brighton hotel bombing. Those terrorists lived among the population in both the republic and Ulster? Did Britain bomb Ireland in response? Were republican areas in the north sealed off and pulverized as happened in Gaza? Were British casualties one hundredth of Irish casualties in response?

None of this happened. Margaret Thatcher no less accepted what became known as an "acceptable level of violence" because the alternative would a) have caused domestic outrage and b) made the situation far, far worse and recruited a new army of terror. Again, one has to ask: why is Israel different?

A disturbing report from the Guardian on the emergence of a fast-growing, racist, anti-Muslim group in Britain called the English Defense League, allegedly the most potent neo-fascist movement in Britain since the 1970s:

David Quigg has a good rule:

When I was a newspaper reporter, I inevitably imagined my profile subject’s grown children coming across my article someday. I aimed to write something that would be accurate, skeptical, analytical, and empathetic — something three-dimensional enough to give those hypothetical offspring some useful piece of the truth of who their mom or dad was. Maybe that makes me “too stupid or too full of (myself).” I don’t think so.