A UNITED NATIONS MIRACLE
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2011
Here’s a story for the man-bites-dog folder: The United Nations has conducted another inquiry into an Israeli military operation–and produced a report that mainly vindicates the Jewish state. And here, alas, is a story for the dog-bites-man folder: The Turkish government has responded to the U.N. report by withdrawing its ambassador from Tel Aviv and expelling Israel’s from Ankara.
The Palmer report–named for the inquiry’s chairman, former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer–was commissioned by the U.N.’s Secretary General to investigate the May 2010 “flotilla incident,” when six ships sailing from Turkey to Gaza on an alleged humanitarian mission were boarded by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade of Gaza. Nine passengers were killed (and several Israeli soldiers badly beaten) in the ensuing melee, sparking a crisis in Jerusalem’s already frayed relations with Ankara.
Given the U.N.’s track record on Israel, one might have expected this latest report to be a reprise of Richard Goldstone’s notorious report alleging Israeli war crimes during its 2009 war with Gaza (charges later retracted by Mr. Goldstone). Instead, the Palmer report offers a point-by-point rebuttal to some of the most preposterous accusations leveled against Israel.
One such accusation from the Turks is that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is illegal because blockades can only be legally imposed on another state, and Israel has never recognized Palestine as a state. The Palmer report dismisses that legal legerdemain, noting that “Hamas is the de facto political and administrative authority in Gaza,” that “it is Hamas that is firing projectiles into Israel or permitting others to do so,” that “law does not operate in a political vacuum” and thus “Israel was entitled to take reasonable steps to prevent the influx of weapons into Gaza.”
Then there is the fiction that the flotilla had embarked on a “humanitarian mission.” If that were true, its organizers would not have spurned Israel’s offer to off-load their supplies in the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod. As the report acidly observes, the flotilla’s largest ship and the site of the fighting–the Mavi Marmara–barely contained any humanitarian goods beyond “foodstuffs and toys carried in passengers’ personal baggage.”
The report also gives weight to the view that a “hardcore group of about 40 activists” from an Islamist NGO known as the IHH “had effective control over the vessel during the journey and were not subjected to security screening” when they boarded the ship in Istanbul. “It is clear to the Panel that preparations were made by some of the passengers on the Mavi Marmara well in advance to violently resist any boarding attempt.”
Simply put, the flotilla’s organizers were spoiling for the fight they later would claim as evidence of Israeli criminality. That’s a fight Israel went out of its way to avoid, both through high-level diplomatic representations to Ankara and repeated warnings to the flotilla to turn away from the blockade.…
All of this might have provoked a bit of soul-searching within the Turkish government, just as its once-warm embrace of Syria’s Bashar Assad has. Instead, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has doubled down on his anti-Israel bets, insisting that Jerusalem apologize to Turkey, compensate the victims and lift its blockade of Gaza as the price for his forgiveness. The Palmer report is a fresh reminder–from the least likely of sources–of why Israel has no honorable choice but to spurn those demands. The Turks will learn in their own time that being Hamas’s patron is a loser’s game.
UN REPORT ON FLOTILLA INCIDENT EXONERATES ISRAEL
Elliott Abrams
Weekly Standard, September 3, 2011
The United Nations report on the Mavi Marmara incident, entitled “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry on the 31 May 2010 Flotilla Incident,” is now public and largely exculpates Israel. All the facts are as Israel contended and as the Commission notes “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza. The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure” and “Israeli Defense Forces personnel faced significant, organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers when they boarded the Mavi Marmara requiring them to use force for their own protection.…”
The Commission makes the judgment that the use of force by the Israelis was “excessive and unreasonable,” but the real verdict is evident in the way the Israeli and Turkish governments have reacted. Israel has accepted the report and its findings of fact while of course disagreeing with that judgment about its soldiers; Turkey has rejected the report entirely.
First, the panel challenges the motives of the flotilla: “[T]he Panel seriously questions the true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers.… If the flotilla had been a purely humanitarian mission it is hard to see why so many passengers were embarked and with what purpose. Furthermore, the quality and value of many of the humanitarian goods on board the vessels is questionable.… Although people are entitled to express their political views, the flotilla acted recklessly in attempting to breach the naval blockade.… The actions of the flotilla needlessly carried the potential for escalation.…”
More seriously, the panel concludes that the “humanitarians” on the Mavi Marmara came armed for a fight: “It is clear to the Panel that preparations were made by some of the passengers on the Mavi Marmara well in advance to violently resist any boarding attempt.…The Panel accepts, therefore, that soldiers landing from the first helicopter faced significant, organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers when they descended onto the Mavi Marmara. Material before the Panel confirms that this group was armed with iron bars, staves, chains, and slingshots and there is some indication that they also used knives.… Two soldiers received gunshot wounds. There is some reason to believe that they may have been shot by passengers.…”
It is not startling that in the face of this Turkey rejected the report. Nor is it surprising that Israel rejected Turkey’s astonishing demands for an apology. Israelis from left to right rejected that demand, knowing that an abject apology in such a situation would weaken their country’s reputation for strength and resolve in the entire Middle East. And in Israel’s situation, such a weakening in front of enemies and potential enemies would be dangerous. Moreover, Israel survives with an unspoken but critical understanding between its army and its populace: we defend you, and you defend us. Throwing the young commandos to the wolves, opening them to prosecution, calling their heroic acts unlawful, would have broken that pact.
It is with all of this in mind that the actions of the Obama administration must be seen as miserable. For instead of defending Israel, the White House has for weeks been pressuring Israel for an abject apology to Turkey. Why? The obvious reasons were given: Gee, we need Erdogan on Syria and Egypt, we needed him on Libya, come on, patch things up, it’s just words.
According to Israel’s largest circulation daily, this was the situation in mid August: “Washington wants to bring to the table an Israeli agreement to apologize over the flotilla incident.” The American demand was also voiced by Clinton during talks she held with Defense Minister Ehud Barak during the latter’s visit to the US three weeks ago.… According to Israeli diplomats in Washington, US officials had even implied that it would be difficult for the US to persuade other nations to reject the Palestinians’ UN statehood bid in September if Jerusalem refuses to apologize to Turkey.
There are many other such stories, and it is clear that the U.S. government was pushing Israel to apologize. Of course, administration spokesmen will largely deny this and say they were seeking a middle ground. Probably so: that has been administration policy toward Israel for two and a half years now. The policy is not to offer strong support, but to seek a compromise between Israel and her enemies. In this case such a position was both morally wrong and dumb, if the idea was to get Erdogan off his anti-Israel kick and restore the good old days of warm Turkish-Israeli relations. One of the reasons Israel refused an apology was its clear and correct understanding that having a cold and hostile relationship with Israel is Erdogan’s goal. He will move toward that goal with whatever tools lie at hand, and an Israeli apology over the Mavi Marmara would have gained next to nothing–while weakening Israel’s self-respect and its position in the region.
So this is another example of the Obama Administration refusing the strong support Israel needs and looking instead to find compromises–tawdry, damaging, dangerous. After 31 months of this, no one should be surprised. But when a UN commission takes what is in many ways a stronger moral stance in defiance of the UN’s automatic anti-Israel majority than does our own government, we have a right to be disgusted.
ISRAEL MUST LEVERAGE
TURKISH REJECTION OF PALMER REPORT
Evelyn Gordon
Jerusalem Magazine, September 5, 2011
For Israelis, the findings of the UN inquiry into last year’s Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza contained little news; the Palmer Report largely echoed the conclusions of Israel’s own Turkel Committee probe: The naval blockade of Gaza was legal; Turkey should have done more to stop the flotilla; Israeli soldiers were brutally attacked by flotilla “activists” and had to use force in self-defense.… But the reactions from both Ankara and Washington have been highly instructive.
First, if anyone still harbored the illusion that the Israeli-Turkish relationship was salvageable, Ankara’s response to the report ought to disabuse them of this notion. What Turkey’s response makes clear is that Ankara never had the slightest interest in repairing its relationship with Jerusalem; what it wanted was to further blacken Israel’s international image, undermine Israel’s vital security interests and humiliate Israel by forcing it to come crawling. And given the UN’s anti-Israel record, Ankara understandably counted on the Palmer Report to do all three.…
But when the report failed to do any of the above, Turkey flatly refused to accept its conclusions. Instead, it announced that it will pursue all the above goals by other means: It will try to secure indictments against Israeli officers and politicians in any court willing to take the case; it will appeal the Gaza blockade to a different UN forum, the International Court of Justice, which–given the precedent of the ICJ’s ruling on the security fence–would likely accept Turkey’s contention regarding its illegality; it will offer future flotillas to Gaza a Turkish naval escort, on the theory that Israel would have to let these flotillas through rather than risk war with Turkey, thereby effectively ending the blockade; and it will rescind these and other hostile measures only if Israel renders them unnecessary by surrendering unconditionally–i.e., by admitting culpability for the deaths, apologizing and ending the blockade.
In so doing, Turkey has made its position too clear for even the rosiest of rose-tinted glasses to disguise: It has irrevocably joined the anti-Israel camp, and seeks only to undermine Israel in any way possible.
But the Obama Administration’s reaction has been no less instructive. Start with the fact that US President Barack Obama worked a miracle I would have sworn was impossible: creating a UN-sponsored inquiry on Israel that produced reasonably fair and balanced conclusions. Add in the fact that Obama has been struggling to convince American Jews of his pro-Israel bona fides, and this would seem to be a golden opportunity to trumpet a pro-Israel achievement. All he would have to do is back the committee he himself established and demand that Turkey accept its conclusions (as Israel has) instead of escalating the conflict via its threatened legal and military moves.
Instead, the administration is still demanding that Israel apologize to Turkey, even though the Palmer Report pointedly avoided demanding any such thing: It said merely that Israel should express regret and offer compensation to the bereaved families–both steps Israel has repeatedly offered to take, but that Turkey rejected as insufficient, insisting nothing less than an apology (i.e., an admission of culpability) would do.
Moreover, Washington has yet to utter a word of criticism of Ankara over its refusal to accept the report’s conclusions and its crude anti-Israel threats. Even Germany’s normally anti-Israel foreign minister–who himself deemed the Gaza blockade “unacceptable” less than a year ago–managed to say that Turkey should take the report’s conclusions “seriously” and avoid “aggravating the situation.” Yet the Obama administration has been silent.…
The inescapable conclusion is that Obama’s goal in establishing the Palmer Commission was in fact identical to Turkey’s: He wanted a report that would incriminate Israel and thereby pressure it to capitulate to Turkey’s demands.… The thunderous silence Washington has maintained…speaks louder than words: This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, and now we don’t quite know what to do to achieve the desired Israeli capitulation beyond continuing our behind-the-scenes pressure for an Israeli apology.…
Israel should be leveraging the Palmer Report–and Turkey’s rejection of it–to prove to the world that Turkey under the AKP is no longer a force for regional stability; it has become a fomenter of conflict, and must be treated as such.… [Unfortunately], in this spat (as in most others), Obama is backing Israel’s enemy.…
ANKARA’S CHOSEN SCAPEGOAT
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2011
Monday morning, Turkey took its anti-Israel campaign to a new level. Beyond downgrading diplomatic relations with Israel; beyond suspending military agreements; beyond threatening naval war; beyond threatening to foment an irredentist insurrection of Israeli Arabs; the Turks decided to terrorize Israeli tourists landing in Istanbul airport.
Forty Israeli passengers, mainly businessmen who had landed in Istanbul on a Turkish Airlines flight from Tel Aviv, were separated from the rest of the flight passengers. Their passports were confiscated. They were placed in interrogation rooms and stripped down to their underwear. Their carry-on bags were checked. And then they were lined up against a wall, forbidden to sit down or use the washroom.… The ordeal went on for 90 minutes, until Turkish authorities returned their Israeli passports and permitted them to pick up their suitcases and exit the airport.
What were the Turks trying to accomplish by terrifying the Israeli tourists? They didn’t need to threaten trade ties. Their Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu already took care of that over the weekend. The victimized Israelis said the Turkish airport authorities wouldn’t even answer their questions. Any time we asked them a question, the tourists said, the Turks ignored us. It was as if they weren’t even there.
And that’s the thing of it. The Turks didn’t harass the Israeli tourists in order to send a message to Israel. They have nothing more to say to us. We are non-entities to them. We’re only good for attacking.
No, Israel wasn’t the target audience the Turks were playing to on Monday. Their target audience was the Islamic world generally and the Arab world specifically. Turkey’s influence in these arenas skyrocketed in January 2009 after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused President Shimon Peres and Israel of mass murder as the leaders shared a stage at the Davos Conference.
Similarly Erdogan’s domestic and pan-Islamic support levels increased steeply in the aftermath of the Turkish-supported pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza in 2010. After nine Turkish government-supported IHH terrorists were killed aboard the Mavi Marmara when they tried to murder IDF naval commandos who had lawfully boarded the ship, the Arabs hailed Erdogan as a hero for bravely attacking Israel.
Given how well scapegoating Israel has served him, Erdogan clearly believes it is a no-risk strategy for raising his star from Cairo to Algiers.
Leftist Israeli commentators refuse to accept what is happening. Writing in Haaretz on Sunday, Shlomo Avineri recommended that Israel compensate the nine IHH members whom IDF commandos killed in self-defense on the Mavi Marmara. Avineri argued that by refusing to do so, Israel was playing into the hands of hardliners. True, “it won’t be easy, but we need to grit our teeth and do the right thing,” he wrote.
Others have argued that Israel may be able to rebuild its strategic relations with Turkey by selling Ankara more drones with which to kill Iraqi and Turkish Kurds. The Turkish military claimed it killed 100 Kurdish fighters in its attacks last month in Iraq and along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Israeli UAVs reportedly played a key role in the bombing. But Turkey needs more. If we sell them more, the argument goes, maybe they will see how useful we are and stop attacking us.
Aside from being morally reprehensible, these arguments fail to recognize the basic reality that Turkey has no interest whatsoever in rebuilding its ties with Israel. The once-important strategic alliance is over and gone, and Israel cannot do anything about it. All Turkey sees us as today is a scapegoat.
It has been argued by commentators on the Right that Turkey’s abandonment of Israel is part and parcel of its abandonment of the US. But this is a mischaracterization of Turkey’s policy toward the US.
Since 2003, Turkey has undertaken a series of actions that have harmed US strategic interests. The first, of course, was Erdogan’s decision on the eve of the Iraq War to deny the US military the right to invade northern Iraq from Turkey. The latest action was arguably Turkey’s joint air exercises with the Chinese Air Force last September. Chinese jets en route to Turkey refueled in Iran. The exercise was a clear signal that NATO member Turkey intends to exploit its alliance with the US to build ties with the US’s chief geostrategic competitor.
Yet at the same time that Turkey has harmed the US, it has also taken steps to assist it. Most recently, last week, Erdogan belatedly agreed to station the high-powered US X-Band radar on its territory as part of a missile defense system to protect NATO allies against the threat of Iranian long-range missiles.
Turkey’s mixed policies toward the US reveal that unlike its position on Israel, Turkey believes that it has an interest in maintaining its alliance with the US. Its hostile behavior is more a function of perceived US weakness than anything else. That is, Turkey is willing to risk angering the US by undercutting it because it does not fear US retribution.…
To its credit, the Netanyahu government…has refused to apologize to Turkey.… Moreover, the government has wisely used Turkey’s behavior as a means of building strong bilateral ties with other victims of Turkish aggression. Over the past two years, Israel has strongly upgraded is strategic ties with Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania. Israel should add to these accomplishments by strengthening its ties to Armenia and to the Kurds of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.…
We need to recognize that what we are experiencing now is the beginning, not the end, of Turkey’s slide into the enemy camp. Erdogan is openly taking steps to transform Turkey into an Islamic state along the lines of Iran. And the further he goes down his chosen path, the more harshly and aggressively he will lash out at Israel.
Given that scapegoating Israel is not a momentary lapse of reason on Turkey’s part but a central aspect of a long-term regional strategy, it is clear that Israel needs to meet Turkish aggression with more than momentary courage in the face of intimidation and threats. Israel needs to build on its already successful policy of forming a ring of alliances around Turkey and develop a long-term military and diplomatic strategy for containing and weakening it.