And, similar to the boxing in of pro/anti Iraq arguments back in the day (or still today sometimes), trying to polarise classification of opinions into either black or white when most would exist in grey, is wrong and goes nowhere. Anti-Iraq was not pro-Saddam. Anti Israeli action is not anti-Israel, or pro-Hamas, or pro or anti anything else except pro-middle ground, pro-solution, or whatever.
It’s perfectly possible, and reasonable, to agree with Israel’s right to exist and right to defend itself – and to recognise how difficult and complex the challenges involved with that actually are - while also believing that they are going about it the wrong way.
So in regards to the blockade, yes, I think it is perfectly reasonable and totally understandable for Israel to want to control what is being transported into Gaza, by land or sea. But it is totally unreasonable for Israel to use this as an excuse to hold a boot on the throat of the Palestinian people in Gaza (a people that Netanyahu does not believe actually exist, in a land he believes is not actually theirs.)
Israel could easily – easily – have gone about this a different way. First of all, a pre-dawn commando raid so far beyond the actual blockade line, well into international waters, is a mistake of stupefying proportions. Either they truly do not give a fuck, or they’ve lost control of reasonable judgement. But from the beginning this was handled poorly. There was an aggressive (and so challenge setting) message from before the flotilla even set float. Image was everything, compromise necessary, and Egypt, Turkey and the US held the solution. I don’t understand how Israel could have fucked this up so brilliantly. The right way seems fairly simple to me?
Some suggest that Israel under the current leadership has lost all sense of perspective and proportion. That it’s totally ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (everyone else) and that everything must be a message of strength and force against ‘them’, and so, while obviously not wanting the result they got, the show of force was perhaps the only option on the table from the beginning. Forgetting the rights and wrongs of it for a moment, beyond that, just in terms of pure strategy, I can’t understand where they see any kind of future with that kind of thinking. They might as well just jump to what most of us would consider the worst-case-scenario end game right now and get it out of the way.