Financial Times Says Massacre Damages Israel’s Legitimacy; White House: U.N. Position Is Correct

Update: Israel deports human rights activists, Batch of Freedom Flotilla passengers reach Jordan as Israel drops plan to prosecute activists.
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A political meme—a set of ideas and perspectives—often reveals the strength of a position on a given issue.

The meme being pushed by Israel on the Massacre in the Mediterranean is that the human rights activists forced Israel’s hand, compelling the state to murder them in international waters. That’s it. That’s the argument.

They were to deliver food and medical supplies, so they needed to be murdered.

So weak is this position that the White House actually has now taken the position of the U.N. Security Council statement condemning the acts which resulted in the loss of life.

The U.N. statement is weak, but Israel’s position is absurd.

A Financial Times editorial trashes the rogue state.

Israel is lost at sea

05.31.2010 | Financial Times

Attack on blockade-busters damages its legitimacy

With yesterday’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.