The Need for Something Better

The Need for Something Better

Michael Walzer: The Need for Something Better

The first and most obvious thing to say is that Israel should have let the six ships through to Gaza. It would have been smart to escort them into the harbor, with Israeli flags flying–not what the militants on board would have wanted. Israeli intelligence wasn’t very good in this case, but they did know that there were no weapons on board–at least, no weapons usable by Hamas. Many Israelis wanted to let the ships through, among them the Cabinet secretary, who was ignored.

The food supplies that the six ships were carrying amounted to roughly one quarter of what the Israelis deliver to Gaza every day. When everything was loaded onto trucks and brought to the Gaza border, Hamas refused to accept it–which suggests that the need is not as critical as we have been told or that Hamas doesn’t care much for the well-being of the people of Gaza. It is possible that both these propositions are true.

But if conditions in Gaza are not critical, they are very bad, and today virtually everyone on the Israeli left is calling for an end to the siege. But not an end to the arms embargo–no one here wants to see Hamas getting more advanced weapons. So, what the Israeli government should aim at is what Colin Powell, years ago, called “smart sanctions.” It isn’t necessary to ban any stuff that could conceivably be used in making weapons, but it is necessary, my friends say, to ban weapons. But it has to be stressed that any change in policy must be negotiated with Israel’s allies. The siege is a joint Israeli-Egyptian effort, and it has had the tacit support of the Palestine Authority in Ramallah (the very strong, though silent, support, people here say).

What happened at sea three days ago? Israel walked into a trap. For weeks the commandos were drilled on how to respond to non-violent resistance–spat at and insulted, taught how to handle people who went limp. And then they were dropped one by one into an angry and aggressive mob. The lack of imagination, the arrogance and stupidity of the leaders who decided on what to do is unbelievable. But these seem to be the features of Israeli policy in many areas these days.

There should certainly be a commission of inquiry–Israeli, not international. There should also be a Turkish commission, investigating how a group of militants with no commitment to non-violence got on board a ship that was supposedly full of peace activists. The Israeli commission must question the decision to board the ships so far from Gaza, at night, without knowing who was on board, using soldiers who had not been trained in non-lethal crowd control.

It is a bad time here, and there is at this moment no center or left alternative to the current government. But the flotilla fiasco may begin the long process of convincing Israelis that they need something better.