A day or so back the Jerusalem Post ran a propaganda piece called "Duped," saying that the Turkish passengers of the Mavi Marmara included a bunch of jihadists who were bent on a violent confrontation with Israel, and lo, they won. Norman Finkelstein sent along the article with one statement in it boldfaced:
Former senior navy officers were also quietly telling reporters that the navy had other options. One claimed that it was possible to sabotage the ship’s propeller or that the commandos could have boarded by sea.
I asked Finkelstein why he thought this was important: Did he think that the Israelis chose the violent path?
Finkelstein and I then had an exchange, with a lot of speculation on his part, which I will summarize in my own words (Finkelstein has scholarly, not bloggerly, standards for publication): Of course we don’t know what happened. But the Israeli allegations are on their face not credible. The final deciders on the attack, according to the Israeli press, were Netanyahu and Barak. Well, Netanyahu’s brother Jonathan was on the Entebbe raid in 1976 and was the only Israeli killed. The Entebbe raid was of course great p.r. for Israel’s military prowess for several decades thereafter. In his prime, Barak was also a commando. He led the commando raid that assassinated senior PLO officials in Lebanon in 1973, another great p.r. stunt. Finkelstein speculates that Netanyahu and Barak wanted to stage a dead- of-night armed commando raid in order to prove after so many bungled operations that the Israeli army was still up to snuff. And against the Turkish vessel– because it’s the Muslim world that they want to impress. (Not to mention burnishing their personal reputations and enhancing political futures.) The simple fact is that they had nonviolent options and by their own reasoning — "we did not expect violent resistance" — they could have just boarded the boat in broad daylight. The only sensible conclusion is that they wanted some "daring" commando raid to use for p.r. They wanted to pull a rabbit from the hat — and instead drew corpses drenched in blood.
P.S. From the Times online today, "Operation Calamity":
The relationship between Bibi and Ehud goes back more than 40 years. Barak was a commander of Israel’s equivalent of the SAS and Bibi was one of his young officers. In 1972 they were among the commandos who stormed a hijacked Sabena jet at Tel Aviv airport. Bibi was injured by a bullet in his hand. Barak went untouched. Ever since, Netanyahu has regarded him as his mentor.
