gaza flotilla

July 1, 2010

Having supposedly turned its back definitively on Israel, the EU, and the West in general, it turns out Turkey engaged in talks with . . . Israel and the EU...it's useless to deny the fundamental shifts emerging in Ankara's strategic calculus, both regionally and further abroad.

As the news of the Flotilla started its advance through the world, very little information was coming from Israel. It was in the late evening hours of Sunday, May 30th, and Monday was Memorial Day Holiday in the United States. The Flotilla left on its break-the-blockade-or-die mission a week earlier, on or about the 24th of May. It was a surreal feeling - would there be any response as America was in a long holiday weekend?

Israel announced Thursday that it will loosen its blockade of the Gaza Strip and allow more goods to enter the territory. The decision came in response to international pressure on Israel to end its siege of the strip following an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid ship that left nine activists dead.

When it comes to the mechanics of the Israeli PR campaign, it seems that they will win a positive outcome. With this strategy the Israeli government could win some support from leaders as well. Yet when it comes to the language of the PR campaign, Israel isn`t on the side of the winners. There are a few problems in the Israeli PR language.

It's easy to exagerrate the extent of Israel's diplomatic isolation, and you can count on that to happen every time an incident like the Gaza flotilla occurs. But what is indisputable is that since at least the Lebanon War of 2006, the Israeli strategic braintrust has prioritized maintaining absolute liberty of action over massaging international opinion.

It took between 12 and 14 hours for release of the tapes showing Israeli soldiers being beaten in a coordinated and planned attack aboard the Mavi Marmara. That footage, if released earlier, might well have drastically changed the international perception of what happened aboard the ship.

Israel's 2009 war on Gaza has been exhaustively documented: some 1,400 Palestinian deaths (compared to 13 for Israel), a vast, rubble-strewn landscape, international condemnation culminating in the hard-hitting and controversial "Goldstone Report" from the UN, and a blockade, tacitly approved by the U.S. and EU, that led to a humanitarian crisis, and ultimately to the high-seas catastrophe this week on the Free Gaza flotilla.

Pages