Just war theory

On the topic of blockade-busting, AP are reporting that Egypt are opening the land crossings into Gaza.

http://www.salon.com/news/israel_flotilla_attack/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/06/07/gaza_blockade_3

If only we could assume that Dershowitz was trying to be funny.

There’s no just war; there’s just war. Forever, in this case, it seems.

I don’t like it. But I think the orthodox answer is that civilians are protected from direct attack unless they directly participate in hostilities; and this includes when you aim to support one party by directly harming the military operations or capacity of the other. So, yes, if peaceful protesters are trying to interfere with the war effort of one side, and are doing so in support of the other side, it would seem that under the laws of war it’s legitimate for combatants to directly target them. Just war theory’s a lot less just than many people think.

btw:

I like that “perhaps”, as if it might turn out, after further legal cogitation military action by the professor IDF, that torpedoing or bombing the convoy would be a legitimate act

I think my adjusted version may describe the decision process more accurately, because we’re not actually seeing a forward process of reasoning from ethical principles to permissible actions here – it’s a backward process starting from the answers in the back of the book. If someone had, two weeks ago, suggested that Israel might be about to massacre unarmed protestors on those ships, Dershowitz would quite likely have said that this was ridiculous and would never happen. Now that it’s happened, of course it was inevitable. (I’ve actually seen this reverse-ferret happen in real time on a couple of occasions)

my understanding of Rachel Corrie is that she voluntarily stood in front of a bulldozer from which she could have fled, and was killed as a result.

I’m reminded of that bloke standing in front of that Chinese tank column, for some reason. Of course, it wouldn’t have been acceptable for the tanks to run him over, because China is a dictatorship, or something.

but then I don’t think many people claim that the Israelis meant to shoot the protestors

execution-style bullet wounds to the back of the head notwithstanding.

“execution-style bullet wounds to the back of the head notwithstanding. ”

I don’t think anything like this has been convincingly shown, has it? I mean I don’t think any serious person is suggesting that these were execution?

“Well no the “levels” in that extraordinarily silly counterfactual ”

I thought it was quite plausible. Why is it so silly? I think that even in the most technical sense some of the reaction to the flotilla tragedy has been somewhat shrill. We have heard words like ‘execution’, ‘massacre’, ‘kidnap’, and ‘piracy’ bandies pretty freely. Surely we can agree that there is some shrillness there?

I really don’t have your chops, or your industriousness, John, in respect of loaded manipulative rhetoric and the largescale weaving of misdirectional what-ifs. So I myself will leave you to what you “think”. Others with the time and the mind can take you up, if they think there’s much purpose to it.

I think that if a contingent of unarmed Israeli or US civilians attempted to breach a Hamas military cordon in Gaza and refused to turn away when told, they would be legitimate targets, wouldn’t they?

A better analogy would breaching a Hamas-declared cordon of Israel. Supplying Israel with arms, for example, against Hamas’ instructions. Would that make US citizens legitimate targets?

“A better analogy would breaching a Hamas-declared cordon of Israel. Supplying Israel with arms, for example, against Hamas’ instructions. Would that make US citizens legitimate targets?”

I preferred mine because I thought it really was plausible, I mean I think it could happen just like that. But if Hamas did have a military blockade of Israel in accordance with the rules of war and a group of US peace activits tried to breach it ignoring warnings etc etc, they would be legitimate targets, wouldn’t they? I mean, it would still be wrong to shoot them, but still. I can’t see any way round that.

what about Tom Hurndall, Ashendorf? Why is his case different?

Raven, I don’t support the blockade and I think the attampt to run it by unarmed activists was a good aand legitimate way to challenge it (and it may be successful too). I certainly think it is tragic that anyone was killed (although I will take some persuading that anyone was ‘executed’: why on earth would that be ordered?). But I do think that Israel was acting within its rights in boarding the ships.

Torpedoing or bombing the convoy would be a legitimate act, if the blockade were legitimate.

Alex, isn’t that the problem, though, and the motivation for non-violent protest? Violence only sinks people deeper into the moral swamp. Can non-violent action on the part of outside parties change the violence of any of the involved parties, even a bit?

“the British, who were running a blockade of Palestine that was at least as legal as the current Israeli one, probably more so”

The British were not blockading Palestine, they were occupying it. I don’t see any parallels at all between an attempt to run a blockade in order to bring it to international attention and an act designed to persudae a state to accept refugees.

As several have said, a lot depends on whether the blockade is legitimate. If it’s not, as I suspect Chris thinks it’s not, then even boarding the ships is illegitimate.

But if the blockade is legitimate, the civilians participating in it do lose some rights but aren’t equivalent to combatants. In particular, they don’t have the right to kill combatants on the other side and therefore are still protected to some degree by the principles of necessity and proportionality. If the Israelis had a way of stopping the ship without killing the people on it, they’d have a duty to do that and torpedoing the ship would be a crime, as it wouldn’t be if the ship contained only soldiers.

At the same time, civilians who knowingly place themselves near a military target do lose some rights, so, in particular, harms to them count less in the assessments of proportionality and necessity. (If you could attack either of two military targets, one surrounded by voluntary shields and the other by people unwittingly in the vicinity, wouldn’t you have a duty to attack the first target?) I think this is why it”s legitimate to kill munitions factory workers while they’re working in the factory but not in their homes. When they’re at work they’ve voluntarily placed themselves near a legitimate military target and therefore taken some of the responsibility for their deaths on themselves. When they’re at home, that’s not true. And civilians voluntarily on a ship engaged in military action would be like munitions factory workers in the factory.

To repeat, though, none of this is relevant if the blockade itself isn’t legitimate.

How long before the Dershowitz ambiguity is extended to the Palestinian boycott of settlement products?

FFS John, the Turkish inquests found several of them shot in the back of the head, and one through the top of the head. Do you have some argument as to how several people can be shot through the back of the head and it not be an execution?

It’s very possible that the victims got caught in a crossfire or that they were attacking one soldier and were shot in the back by another or…

Let’s not forget the magic bullet theory here, either.

Laleh 06.08.10 at 11:48 am

John Meredith: “The British were not blockading Palestine, they were occupying it.”

Laleh: “As opposed to Israel, which is doing what to Gaza?”

Not occupying it. Surrounding it, shelling it, strafing it, raiding it and quite deliberately choking it for the immiseration of the people. But if you accuse the Israelis of ‘occupying’ Gaza, you will have hurt their feelings, and hurting their feelings is morally equivalent to [REDACTED – GODWIN VIOLATION].

John Meredith 06.08.10 at 1:06 pm

“I haven’t read the inquests but as far as I know none of the eye witnesses claim that there were any executions.”

Just to help you out here, the point is that a bunch of people being shot in the back of the head by pistols is sorta suspicious – to honest people, at least.

Strategic bombing

Until and unless the world retrenches from the excesses practiced by “the good guys”, the Allies, in WWII, there is no non-hypocritical standard for exempting anyone from combatant status. If it was kosher to drop incendiaries on residential areas of German and Japanese cities, if a starvation blockade of Germany and Japan was as legal as church on Sunday — then the 9/11 attacks, the blockade of Gaza, and the flotilla killings are all examples of moderation and relative humanity in the conduct of war.

Such retrenchment has happened before, and it’s not visionary and hopelessly idealistic to expect it to happen again. Europe recoiled in utterly justified horror from the excesses of the 30-Years War, and states imposed limitations on themselves with respect to the “strategic warfare” that had gotten out of hand in that war.

You sometimes hear the excuse made for our unwillingness to observe the civilian/military distinction in our own day, compared to general practice from the late 17th Century until WWII, that we now have the means, lacking before air power, to hit enemy populations and enemy economies directly, bypassing their armed forces. This is nonsense, of course, since before WWI there were no continuous fronts in war. The tactic of sending small bodies of horsemen around any enemy armed forces, to get deep into their territory and destroy homes and farms, and kill civilians indiscriminately, was always available until WWI and the continuous front. These small cavalry forces were too agile for any lumbering army to catch, so they could murder and pillage freely and indefinitely, living off the land as they devastated it. The rationale to do this, that the enemy land and civilian population supported the war effort of the enemy by paying the taxes that allowed war to be waged, was as true then as it is now. This is exactly what happened systematically in the 30-Year’s War that made Europe recoil and retrench.

Europe quit waging war this way (well, against other Europeans, anyway) after 1648 for the same reason it quit using judicial torture. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything but make wars bitter and interminable. Limited wars are disaster enough, without the completely unnecessary layer of civilian destruction, which actually makes the enemy military harder to defeat by radicalizing the enemy civilian population in support of the war effort.

We aren’t any less civilized, any less capable of throwing off intellectual inertia and the blind hatred of the Other of the moment in order to pursue enlightened self-interest, if not morality, than the people of 1648. We need to try to be at least as rational as the set of petty tyrants and religious fanatics who ran Europe in that day.

It is really totally consensus, particularly among European liberals, that strategic bombing was a war crime. Slaughterhouse-5 is not really an obscure book.

This idea of a “starvation blockade” on Germany during the second world war is very strange, by the way. Germany had food rationing, but it was significantly more generous than that in Britain. There was starvation in Germany after the war, but this wasn’t because of a blockade. In any case, how do you “blockade” Germany? Particularly during a period in which it was occupying Poland, France and Ukraine?

And for those who are, well, possessed of a Derschowitzian view of history, it should be noticed that the blockades were called off when the wars were over. In the case of Israel and Gaza, it’s a deliberate act of Israel that this war will never be over.

FlyingRodent 06.08.10 at 1:34 pm

Well, yes. The joke about the magic bullet was this – if a person has given the issue so much thought that they’re willing to consider the possibility that “the victims got caught in a crossfire or that they were attacking one soldier and were shot in the back by another or that they got caught with an errant bullet or that they were shot in the front, were spun around by the impact and got shot in the back as the soldier continued firing”…

Flying Rodent: “…Well, why wouldn’t it occur to such a person that they might have been, say, running away, for instance? It seems at least as likely as any other theories, and has the added Ooomph of making sense, i.e. lots of people would run away from soldiers firing guns.”

Yes, but the goal here is to exonerate Israel, to come up with some justification for these people who all had what used to be called ‘Russian heart attacks’.

Under this ‘theory’ what is the status of propagandists and apologists for the combatant regime?

Are they legitimate military targets? If it is an allowable act of war for Israel to torpedo unarmed ships in international waters, are they permitted to bomb their offices and assassinate their staff.

Starts to sound remarkably like the definition of terrorism. I am pretty sure that if the offices of AIPAC were destroyed along with all the staff that Dershowitz would be describing it as a terrorist act rather than a legitimate act of war.

Dershowitz is of course correct that the attack on the ship could be legal, but only if the blockade is a blockade of a belligerent state as opposed to a non-state actor. That particular point of international law was used by the British as the basis for their recognition of the Confederacy. Their argument being that by blockading the confederacy the US had in fact de facto recognized it as a state. Likewise the blockade of Gaza by Israel is a defacto recognition of Gaza as a state.

There is a reason for the distinction between acts that are allowable against state and non-state actors. If unrestricted warfare was legal against non-state actors there would be no incentive for recognition and affording rights such as recognition as prisoners of law.

John Meredith: “I don’t think there is much sign that either side is trying to bring this war to an end. But while it is a war, a naval blockade of the enemy is legal, even if we prefer if it didn’t happen.”

Got proof that it’s legal?

“Got proof that it’s legal?”

I think the law is quite well established that a defensive naval blockade of a combatant’s coastline is legal (so long as it is enforced). We might agree that Israel’s intention is ot only defensive, but I think everyione would concede that it is also defensive and so legal.

Yeah. Even though I’m at least ambivalent about the legality of the blockade in a way that I suspect Chris isn’t, I take it that the point of the post wasn’t “look at the mistaken argument that Alan Dershowitz has made,” but rather, “look at the repellent and obvious exercise in bullshitting Dershowitz is engaged in, and indeed seems to revel in.” And, *regardless* of whether the blockade is legal, Dershowitz is engaged in repellent and obvious (and gleeful) bullshitting– he’s just happy that people he understands as bad guys got kilt.

whoops– 10 new posts went up between Chris’ post that I was “yeah”-ing and my own reply.

I think the law is quite well established that a defensive naval blockade of a combatant’s coastline is legal

It is a point quite important to Israel that it isn’t Gaza’s coastline.

Well it is obvious that the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas is not an armed conflict exactly like others that have gone before, and there is lots of room to argue the toss about the legality of the blockade from that point of view, but if you accept Israel’s argument that they are in an international armed conflict of some kind (and it really does look like one to me), the blockade becomes legal. You might still think it is wrong (I do), but that is a different matter. I guess nobody here would object to a quarantining of Gaza.

I think dsquared at 50 and John Meredith at 51 are not talking about the same thing. “Strategic bombing” is bombing intended to cripple an enemy’s capacity to make war by impeding the production of weapons and other war materiel (as opposed to tactical bombing, which is directed at enemy forces actually engaged in combat). Civilian casualties are an inevitable result, but are historically regarded as legitimate as long as the attacker takes reasonable steps to limit them.

The RAF started off WWII with the best of intentions about restricting its bombing to factories engaged in war production, but quickly found that it was unable to hit those targets or even consistently come within miles of them . So it switched its strategy to “dehousing the civilian workforce,” because that was something it could do. (The USAAF was slower to switch its approach, but eventually did so with enthusiasm.) “Terror bombing” is as good a name as any for that, and yes, there is a broad consensus that it amounts to a war crime.

There may not have been a starvation blockade of Germany in WWII, but the US Navy submarine force enforced a very effective one against Japan. I just finished this book, in which the author argues that if the strategy of destroying Japanese merchant shipping had been pursued sooner and more vigorously, the Pacific war could have been ended, not only without the atomic bomb, but without most of the costly island battles of 1944-45.

From a humanitarian point of view, however, the thing about blockade is that it is inherently a weapon directed against noncombatants, because the target nation is going to give priority to feeding its military.

The truth is that war is a war crime, and just war theory is the thinnest and patchiest of hardened crusts over a lake of magma. Sherman had it right.

dsquared,

While I don’t claim to have examined any studies that might quantify the relative shortage of food in WWII UK vs the Third Reich, everything anecdotal I have seen and read suggests that Europe under the Third Reich had a much more serious problem. Look at pictures of Germans from late in the war, and they are notably thin, with exceptions that prove the rule (I recall one picture of Werner von Braun and his family taken upon his internment by Allied forces. The rocket scientists and their families had special rations to allow this research on “wonder weapons” to proceed unhindered, so von Braun and his family stand out amongst the others in the picture as being the only ones who look well-fed.) You read primary sources, and they keep mentioning that one of the big draws to enlisting in the Wehrmacht, or not actively trying to evade service, was that at least they tried to feed the troops enough to live and fight on. And the book you cite, Slaughterhouse Five, mentions the huge problem the baby formula factory in Dresden (that the hero worked in) had keeping workers from spooning a bit of the product on the side. Yecky as it tasted, it was presented as an alternative to starvation that made it irresistable.

Was it this bad in the UK, ever, during WWII? What I read about conditions in the UK is that people had to make do with very limited sugar, limited butter, limited eggs, limited meat. But were people spooning baby formula from the vats at their workplaces?

As to why the Reich would have trouble producing food despite being in occupation of rich agricultural lands, that is less reliant on anecdotal evidence. Sure, the UK and the US raised large armies in WWII, relative to their peacetime establishments. But Germany and the USSR were in an entirely different league. The US raised 92 divisions in that war, Germany over 500, from a much smaller population base, and their divisions required replacements at levels not experienced by US forces. This was a manpower drain we have no basis of comparison for. By the end, the Germans were going back over their medical draft exemptions and calling in even the frankly disabled. They had to put the digestive disorder people all in one battalion, the famous Magen Battalion, because many of them needed special diets to be able to function at all (I’m guessing from this that many of them had celiac disease, but haven’t read any history detailed enough to be sure.)

Agriculture in Germany suffered greatly as a result of this diversion of manpower, and even worse from the diversion of draft animals. Again unlike the UK’s and US’s forces, most of the Wehrmacht relied on horse-drawn logistics, and even horse drawn artillery pieces, at a time when, again unlike the UK and US, German agriculture was still heavily reliant on draft animals. As with manpower, the needs of the army increasingly trumped the needs of agriculture, which saw production decline.

In the occupied territories, the manpower and draft animal situation was at least as bad, with the effects of partisans avitivity and other forms of resistance to occupation thrown in for good measure. Speer’s book talks about this issue of food production, he does cite figures quantifying shortage and decline within the Reich, not anecdotes, so that part of this matter really is prety solid (subject to the limitations of Speer’s credibility).

At any rate, proven shortage or not, if there are any limits whatever on what a blockading power is allowed by law to declare contraband, then food meets the criteria as something that cannot be considered contraband. Limitations on what is legitimate contraband are much wider, if any limits are being respected, and the US went to war with Great Britain in 1812, threatened to do so early in WWI and then went to war with Germany in WWI, precisely because we claimed that these powers stepped over the line in declaring items beyond war materiale as contraband.

When the US, early in the war, first started to plan for what to do with the captured Axis leaders, they assembled the leading experts in international law to draw up an outline of what potential war crimes the Axis leadership could be charged with. Top of the list were unrestricted submarine blockades and the bombing of civilian targets. The panel of top experts was quietly dismissed, since, of course, we couldn’t very well prosecute their side for what our side was doing with greater avidity and success.

I’m suggesting that it’s time to reconvene that panel of experts on international law. Let’s go back to common sense and common decency. Let’s try to be at least as reasonable and moral as Cardinal Richelieu. It’s something to shoot for.

“I think the law is quite well established that a defensive naval blockade of a combatant’s coastline is legal (so long as it is enforced)”

That does seem a bit absurd. So Israel is allowed to blockade Gaza, provided they actually enforce the blockade, but is illegal for them to blockade it in a half-arsed or unenforced manner?

politicalfootball: “Have we given due consideration to the suicide hypothesis? As I recall, multiple bullet wounds to the head was a common suicide technique in the old Soviet Union.”

No, multiple bullet wounds would clearly be murder. One bullet wound to the back of the head, while kneeling in front of a pit, *that* would clearly meet the Dershowitzian criteria for suicide. Or should I call it ‘asymmetric warfare’, as one US Navy maggot of an admiral said about some prisoners commiting (or attempting) suicide in Gitmo?

Tom, could you please clarify – for example, to whom are you replying?

Chris Bertram quotes Alan Dershowitz:

and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants.

I like that “perhaps”, as if it might turn out, after further legal cogitation by the professor, that torpedoing or bombing the convoy would be a legitimate act.

Talk about loading supposition upon supposition to score a lame point.

Dershowitz is speculating that “perhaps” the evidence might show that the “civilians” were “somewhat different from pure armed combatants”. Evidence is what it is, independent of “legal cogitation”. So far the evidence prima facie shows that the “civilians” were attempting to run a lawful blockade, were armed with lethal weapons and used them to prevent a lawful arrest.

Which would supports Dershowitz’s conclusion that the “civilians” were closer to “combatants” than pure “innocents”. The sort of thing that happens all the time when irregular forces and their supporting elements confront a regular military.

Even then its another stretch to suggest that Dershowitz would contemplate the sinking of the blockade runners. Although then again maybe he would, he does not seem to have been to cut up about the sinking of the USS Liberty.

None of which is to suggest that the IDF’s behaviour was beyond reproach. It behaved legally, but not wisely. These kinds of incidents are inevitable when one people’s military force occupies another peoples territory.

Sorry to be unclear — I did indeed mean the relief after the war. The blockade continued for some time after Nov. 1918, since there was no “surrender” just an “armistice.” Cats in Berlin were served up as “roof rabbit.”

As I recall, multiple bullet wounds to the head was a common suicide technique in the old Soviet Union.

Aren’t a substantial number of Israelis recent immigrants from the Soviet Union? Maybe they learned the technique there and provided on-the-spot instruction to the blockade runners.

Anyway, IIRC the dispositive issue in cases like this isn’t the fact that the entry wound is on the back of the head (since that can also occur when shooting fleeing targets), but the presence of gunpowder residue on the back of the head, which indicates point-blank range, leading to an inference that the target had already been immobilized or had surrendered.

“That does seem a bit absurd. So Israel is allowed to blockade Gaza, provided they actually enforce the blockade, but is illegal for them to blockade it in a half-arsed or unenforced manner?”

As I understand it, yes, that is right. A blockade is legal (if it is legal) only if it is enforced.

the alternative to principled killing is unprincipled killing.

The alternative to pretending your murders are principled is admitting that they aren’t.

Gaza is not a state. It’s a refugee camp.

John Meredith @ 89:

I see no reason to call murder by state action something other than murder. This has very little to do with the Middle East.

As to the current topic, depraved indifference to human life might be the most accurate description. Yes?

And further to #93, this is why the state of relations between Israel and Gaza matters a great deal with respect to the blockade. Because the injured party when Israel boards a Turkish ship in international waters and kills nine Turkish citizens is Turkey, not Gaza. Turkey, and any other nation, has the right to assume that their ships can go about unmolested in international waters in all but extraordinary circumstances.

If the “blockade” was enforced by Israel in its own territorial waters (which include those waters which would be territorial to Gaza if it was a state, which it isn’t), then Israel can basically do what it likes to interdict shipping, because it is sovereign over its territorial waters and if it wants to stop ships going to Gaza it’s allowed to.

But that’s not what happened. The Turkish ship was raided in international waters. Turkey (and anyone else who cares about international navigation) has the right to expect that this won’t be done, except in cases of a proper, legal blockade. One of the characteristics of such a blockade is that it occurs in the context of a conflict between parties that recognise each other as belligerents. Thus, the position in international law is that if you’re going to claim the right to mess other people’s ships around in international waters, you have concomitant responsibilities which are inconvenient to you.

The point is that if you’ve got a purely domestic conflict against insurgents, you have to keep it domestic, which means not messing around in international waters. If your conflict is international, then you have to recognise that it is actually a war, not a domestic counterterrorist campaign. You can’t have your cake and eat it (that’s for Israel – for Gaza, the rule is “you can’t have your cake at all, because of the blockade”).

And once more, the whole problem arises because the legal argument has been constructed backwards, from what the IDF did, to something that looks like a legal justification for it. If it had been constructed forwards (from the relevant law, to what it’s permissible to do), then they would have waited until the ship was in their own territorial waters. I don’t know why they didn’t, but they didn’t.

I suspect that Sebastian’s response would be that the difference between “Israel’s territorial waters” and “International waters” isn’t really one of justice. But actually I think this it’s a very important one.

blah blah recognised as a belligerent, blah. Apparently you’ve read the Opinio Juris post, so have I, so can our readers and when they have they can make up their own minds about whether you’re being honest here, y81.

Maybe everyone else is aware of this, but someone other than d squared who is fairly sure the blockade is illegal is Craig Murray.

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/0/why_san_remo_do.html#comments

Unlike a lot of participants in thnis debate, he seems to have had soem claim to knowing about international maritime law before this incident; which may conceivably count for something.

Can a non-violent movement can ally itself with a violent movement without compromising itself beyond redemption? Or can it redeem the violent movement?

Are you implying that trying to get humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza is the equivalent of aiding Hamas? That actually seems to be the logic some people are pining their hopes of legitimacy on – anything that helps the civilian Palestinians helps Hamas, which means people who do so are actively aiding a terrorist organization, and so they are terrorists themselves and can be dealt with accordingly.

I don’t think many people would agree with the premise, except insofar as it was constructed as an after the fact justification for certain actions.

But it certainly isn’t unjust as an abstract proposition.

If you’re going to distinguish between justice and legality, wouldn’t you have to conclude that all blockades are unjust because their impact (both in terms of enforcement, and in terms of the effect on the blockaded territory if the blockade is successful) falls primarily on noncombatants, who, by definition, aren’t perpetuating the conflict that allegedly justifies the blockade?

As an abstract proposition you can ignore the things that may or may not make this blockade worse than any other, but as an abstract proposition blockades in general are pretty damn bad. Arguably right up there with firebombing and nuking of cities. (Blockades are to bombing as slow strangulation is to a bullet to the head: the result is the same, only the schedule is different.) They’re a collective punishment, and not even in the “you’re wearing the same uniform and thus supporting the same organization” sense.

it does seem that some people in this discussion think that Israel actually sent troops out to the flotillathat night expressly to murder protesters but luckily decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that nine victims would be about enough

The deaths of some flotilla members were completely foreseeable results of sending troops to attack the flotilla. If you don’t want people to get killed in a firefight, don’t start a firefight. Israel’s disregard for this fairly obvious concept could support an inference that whoever gave the go-ahead for this attack *did* want people to get killed in a firefight, or at least didn’t care.

Accepting responsibility for use of deadly force makes it hard to blockade if you’re not prepared to kill people, but since Israel clearly is prepared to kill, that’s not really an obstacle for them.

I’m a little amazed that people are willing to twist themselves into such knots in attempts to justify willingness (not necessarily eagerness, but willingness) to kill one set of civilians in order to perpetuate the pointless misery of another set of civilians. Raw tribalism triumphs over all, I guess, but I didn’t expect its triumph to be quite this complete.

This is the perfect opportunity to hark back a few years, when Alan Dershowitz reminded John Rogers of a bar story.

Well it is obvious that the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas is not an armed conflict exactly like others that have gone before, and there is lots of room to argue the toss about the legality of the blockade from that point of view, but if you accept Israel’s argument that they are in an international armed conflict of some kind (and it really does look like one to me), the blockade becomes legal. You might still think it is wrong (I do), but that is a different matter. I guess nobody here would object to a quarantining of Gaza.

The problem is – this is false. Israel claims that it’s actions were legal under something called the “San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflict at Sea”, already referenced by several people. The problem is, the SRM claims that boardings in international waters to enforce a blockade, but only if the blockade allows humanitarion aid through, ie, blockades to prevent arms and war materiel from reaching the enemy is permissible. Blockades which inflict suffering on the civilian populace through denial of nonmilitary items is not.

As in so many other things, Israel and it’s apologists are reserving for themselves the right to define words and terms like “occupation” and “humanitarian aid”. They are unwilling to let a third party make the determination of what counts as humanitarian and what isn’t, so that say, seeds, fishing rods, children’s toys etc are considered weapons or war materiel of some sort. This isn’t a hypothetical, btw. When the Rachel Corrie was captured, it was inviting Israel to let the UN inspect the shipment for anything like ammunition, small arms, etc. Israel, of course, refused.

I’d say that it’s pretty much a sure thing that this blockade is illegal under the SRM and only apologists would think otherwise.

“It’s a diet when you control the food spigot, it’s starvation when someone else does. The UK put itself on a diet in WWII, to free up resources for the war effort. German-occupied Europe was starved. Olmert and his intended audience may no longer recognize the difference, but I think most of us can.”

It’s starvation when people, you know, starve.

The situation in Gaza is very bad. But it’s not famine. No observers have reported starvation. Food insecurity, yes, but not starvation.

The Nazis killed several million people, including millions of Jews, by manufacturing famines in Poland and Ukraine. When you compare Israeli actions to those of Nazis in “German-occupied Europe” you really should be sure that the situations are comparable.

In his piece June 7, Elie Wiesel just comes out and calls the activists combatants:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/06/07/2010-06-07_the_activists_wanted_violence.html

…because it was in a war zone, the activists were armed and lying in wait for the IDF, etc. And he knows all this because he’s checked out “video clips made by both Israelis and their prisoners, and also from their testimonies.”

Well, if you can’t trust the IDF’s video editors, who can you trust?

Also, I’m sad to say I share Glen Tomkins’ cynicism about JWT in practice. (Or is it pessimism? I’m not sure of the best adjective.) Witness Obama’s twist on the “just obeying orders” defense: he’s given CIA torturers a pass not on the grounds that they were ordered to do blatantly illegal and bad things (and hence might have faced harsh punishments if they had refused), but merely because they believed it was legal.

John Meredith @89 and others who are curious about how much this was premeditated:

I’m finding conflicting reports in English about the autopsy results. The Guardian says 4 shots total, 2 to the head, and gives more detail. I’d like to find a link to the original. According to ABC News and WaPo, the autopsy of Furkan Dogan, the 19-year old US citizen killed in the attack, found that he was shot four times in the head with 9mm bullets (most of the bullet wounds examined in the autopsies were from 9mms) from a distance of <0.45m. If I understand right, 9mm bullets are used in handguns, not automatic weapons. Hence the description of his killing as an execution.

Also, one person was shot on the top of the head, which corresponds to an eyewitness reports that the IDF helicopters were firing onto the Mavi Marmara before boarding, which is also presumably why the crew resisted the landing party.

I think multiple eyewitness reports talk about the helicopters laying down suppressive fire before boarding, which is how one person was killed before the boarding.

I think this is part of a pattern of the IDF using defensive tactics or weapons in an aggressive way, so that people get killed. Hence the repeated instances of demonstrators being shot in the head with teargas cannisters–these shots must have been aimed to hit their targets in the head, and not to release teargas at their position, because to actually release teargas you aim for the ground where you want the teargas cloud, not at head level.

ABC report: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Media/american-killed-gaza-aid-flotilla/story?id=10814848

eyewitness account:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cQ69oKFtVg&feature=player_embedded

As to whether the assault was premeditated, and not simply a bungled attempt to capture the boats, an article in Maariv 3 days before the raid shows that the IDF and Netanyahu were publicly talking about how there could be a need to use deadly force on the boats, which they were afraid would participate in terrorist attacks. Caption for the article reads: "On the way to violence; one of the boats is on its way."

Max Blumenthal quoting the Maariv article:

This operation was approved by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak and will be led by the commander of the Navy, Lieutenant Colonel Eliezer Maron, who is nicknamed “Cheney.” If the people aboard the boats will not agree to turn around, the operation will transfer to the stage of force. “We are afraid that there will be a terror attack by the boats,” said a high ranking officer. “If terrorists have gotten on the boats or if there is an intention to use hot weapons against our forces, we will use full seriousness and caution. We want to avoid using force but as soon as there will be danger to the life of our forces we will be forced to use live fire as a last resort.

http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/06/the-flotilla-raid-was-not-bungled-the-idf-detailed-its-violent-strategy-in-advance/

I think all of this, especially the Maariv article, supports the claim made up-thread, that the Israeli gov’t is trying to maintain a permanent state of war with Palestinians that gives cover to their attempts to confiscate land, water, and so on. Shouting “war” raises the stakes and drowns out any questioning of the appropriateness, necessity, or proportionality of particular actions. In other words, “we’re at war, our existence is threatened, so anything goes.” Which works out great for them, because the longer their existence is threatened, the longer they can go on receiving US military aid, taking Palestinian land, and so on, and this has the added benefit of acknowledging a real fear by Israelis and some segment of the diaspora, while also creating more justifications for that fear.

Re: principled killing, I admire those who call on states not to kill anyone ever again, but I see that as rather a long-term goal.

drawing the Luftwaffe up to try to stop the bombers, and destroying it (by means of P51 escort fighters newly fitted with drop tanks).

This is I think a touch ex post facto, like the argument that German AA batteries would otherwise have been used on the Russian front, etc. Legitimate targets would still have required defense. The P-51s were actually an argument *against* terror bombing, because they made daylight raids feasible, so that targets smaller than “a city” could be attempted.

the strategic bomber boys were actually succeeding by late 1944 in shutting down the German war machine—by going after synthetic oil production

*This* was the way to shut down the Luftwaffe, and the Wehrmacht too, but was largely an American preoccupation. Arthur Harris screamed bloody murder (so to speak) when anyone tried to get him to bomb something other than civilians.

Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury:

Area bombing not only failed to win the war, it probably prolonged it. * * * After both the ball bearings and the dam raids, Speer waited in fear for repeat attacks. That they did not come was in large part thanks to Harris.

Speer of course is not a 100% trustworthy source, but Adam Tooze agrees at least that German industry was crippled by “severing the rail links and waterways between the Ruhr and the rest of Germany,” not by burning down cities, and that Bomber Command erred in 1943 by shifting its focus from western German industry.

Did the post from which Anderson quotes suggest that I was defending area/terror bombing, as opposed to attacks against war production and transportation? That was certainly not the intention.

(The argument for the importance of the latter to winning the war is from Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won Anderson has evidently read it. Overy may of course be wrong, but he’s highly regarded.)

That was certainly not the intention.

And I certainly didn’t mean to imply that. I was rebutting the “persuasive argument” and what you had “seen argued.” Sorry for any mistake on my part.

Leaving aside the argument about the state of relations between Israel and Gaza, I’m not sure it’s right to argue that some form of blockade would be legal and leave it at that, without agreeing that any actual blockade which is being enforced in practice is lawful. Blockading powers don’t have very wide discretion. There are plenty of specific rules on aspects like diversion, the treatment of the ships, the materials which should be allowed to pass through the blockade, and the treatments of their crews, which have to be observed for a particular blockade to be lawful. And I’m not sure they were in this case.

Bianca Steele – It’s the nature of these sorts of lists to be irrational. I don’t know about the dried fish/frozen fish reasoning, but many of the distinctions are efforts to draw lines between things can be consumed only by end-user consumers and things that would be useful as an input into a value-added operation – so that things that can be used in an office, a bakery, etc. are barred. It’s a conscious effort to cripple the economy.

A good discussion of the blockade is here: http://gisha.org/index.php?intLanguage=2&intItemId=1798&intSiteSN=119

It’s a conscious effort to cripple the economy.

According the SMR that Israel wanted to use to justify it’s actions, This is illegal. They’ll have to find some other quasi-official documentation to shore up claims of legality.

Apologies in advance if these points have already been made (I made it through about 75% of the comments – then got tuckered).

1) 9mm ammunition is the standard of the Israeli Uzi. The wounds don’t sound at all surprising considering the nature of the (automatic) weapon, the close range of the encounter, and the chaotic positioning on deck. You can see the soldiers carrying Uzis as they were lowered onto the deck, by rope, from helicopters.

2) Israeli soldiers were being assaults with lead pipes before their feet even hit the deck (one was even thrown overboard). You can reference footage of the boarding released by the IDF. Claims that this was a “peaceful protest” are either errant, or are employing a strange definition of the word “peaceful”. Countless other ships have been boarded by the IDF without incident.

3) The floatillas were not blocked. They were directed to a port where they could unload their “humanitarian aid”, but refused to do so. There have been complaints that the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza is inadequate, and is possibly being hampered by IDF rules, but this is a separate issue.

4) It is irrelevant whether the impetus or motivation for a blockade is legal with regard to running a blockade. What matters, only, is that the blockading nation has announced that a blockade exists. Once a nation has announced that they have established a blockade (they must do this), civilian ships are obligated to avoid the blockade (no matter the underlying justifications for the blockade). Running the blockade, particularly when aware of its existence, is not a legal action. The blockading forces must first tell the ship to turn back, then fire over the bow, then they can board, defend themselves if necessary, and finally can sink the ship if boarding fails and the ship still refuses to turn back.

I make these points because they are, roughly speaking, the facts – at least, to the best of my knowledge.

Portraying this event as a “massacre” requires, I think, grand speculative leaps of imagination. Many ships have been boarded, and this was the only violent incident. The IDF had nothing to gain from a “massacre”. The crew assaulted the boarding party. Considering the weaponry at the IDFs disposal and the number of attackers on deck, casualties were light. There is nothing at all that indicates a massacre.

We might, depending on our political dispositions, imagine that the floatilla was merely making a protest; however, even if this was their intention, they failed to accomplish it the moment they attacked the boarding crew. We might be tempted to grant them a pass on that, after all, everyone makes mistakes, and it must be frightening to see soldiers descending on one’s head, but it doesn’t change the fact that, at best, at the very best, it was a botched protest.

At worst, in the process of manufacturing an incident, the foatilla “protesters” have potentially damaged the credibility of real humanitarian groups. You know, the kind that maintain political neutrality. Remember those?

Why is Gaza allowed to import frozen fish but not dried fish?

Because frozen fish spoils when the power goes out, which, in Gaza, it does quite a bit. (File under ‘petty venality’.)

“Why is Gaza allowed to import frozen fish but not dried fish?” – bianca steele

Dried fish can be more easily stockpiled. Mind you, if you can import salt and frozen fish, you can dry your own with some extra effort. Still, it’s not exactly arbitrary.

2) Israeli soldiers were being assaults with lead pipes before their feet even hit the deck (one was even thrown overboard). You can reference footage of the boarding released by the IDF. Claims that this was a “peaceful protest” are either errant, or are employing a strange definition of the word “peaceful”. Countless other ships have been boarded by the IDF without incident.

The overwhelming evidence indicates that the IDF fired on this ship before attempting to board. You don’t think the fact that Israel admitted the footage was edited was maybe a clue that it was useless as to indicating what the context was?

3) The floatillas were not blocked. They were directed to a port where they could unload their “humanitarian aid”, but refused to do so. There have been complaints that the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza is inadequate, and is possibly being hampered by IDF rules, but this is a separate issue.

This is precisely the issue. Are you seriously saying you’re just hearing about this for the first time – and from one side only. Very few people are against a blockade that keeps out arms and war materiel. Quite a few people are concerned that this blockade is a punitive response against a civilian population and that not enough is passing through.

4) It is irrelevant whether the impetus or motivation for a blockade is legal with regard to running a blockade. What matters, only, is that the blockading nation has announced that a blockade exists. Once a nation has announced that they have established a blockade (they must do this), civilian ships are obligated to avoid the blockade (no matter the underlying justifications for the blockade). Running the blockade, particularly when aware of its existence, is not a legal action. The blockading forces must first tell the ship to turn back, then fire over the bow, then they can board, defend themselves if necessary, and finally can sink the ship if boarding fails and the ship still refuses to turn back.

Again, this completely false . . . by the rules Israel has said it is abiding by, the SRM for international conflict at sea. It states – and this is Israel’s official justification mind you – that boarding a vessel in international waters is legal if it is suspected of attempting to run a blockade. It also states – and this is the part that is not cited by Israel – that boardings are legal unless the blockade does not permit humanitarian aid through and if the blockade is punitive in nature towards a civilian populace.

As I said, this has been covered extensively over the last several days, so you should have no trouble checking these facts out for yourself.

“Why is Gaza allowed to import frozen fish but not dried fish?” – bianca steele

Dried fish can be more easily stockpiled. Mind you, if you can import salt and frozen fish, you can dry your own with some extra effort. Still, it’s not exactly arbitrary.

Is this like the chemicals found under my kitchen sink and in my garage that make me into a suspected terrorist bomb maker? By that logic, I’ve “stockpiled” a couple of weeks worth of food in the pantry.

The book Architects of Annihilation has some interesting things to say about Nazi food policy and starvation in Europe – Germany was definitely running out of food by the end of the war and the leadership were terrified of their own population starving. That book argues that exterminationist policy was partly driven by the fear of domestic starvation. It’s quite interesting. It’s also interesting to compare the bland and venal way people in the Nazi hierarchy talk about conquered populations with the language of the modern-day defenders of starvation, blockades, etc.

Japan was definitely starved, the US didn’t just sink ships either – it bombed canals within Japan, roads, farms and any infrastructure supporting food distribution (I read about this in Dresden I think). Those of you lucky enough to visit Matsue in Japan can see at the Matsue Whitehouse an example display of the kind of food that Japanese civilians ate near the end of the war – a large bowl of miso soup, a rice cake, a few shreds of dried fish and half a bowl of rice a day, for example.

The US also practised starvation in Vietnam. John Kerry got one of his purple hearts for a comic incident involving throwing a grenade into a rice barrel. I wonder if part of the reason the American left is having difficulty dealing with issues like Gaza might be connected to these aspects of their own history. I mean, if your much-admired and decorated war-hero lefty Presidential candidate is also a war criminal, your discussion of just war theory must surely be a little fraught.

” So do you now agree that what Israel did is not legal?”

I don’t think I ever argued that what Israel did was legal, not here or in the last thread. I don’t think I stated that I support the destruction of the Gazan economy. I simply pointed out that that is the unstated goal of the embargo. I do think I have argued that comparisons of Israel to Nazis, whether intentional or merely unintentional hyperbole, are invidious. It seems to me that what we have on this blog is the equivalent of George Bush’s line, “If not with us you’re with the terrorists” — i.e.., if you don’t support the destruction of Israel, you must be a Likudnik. The level of discourse here is utterly Bushian – there are evil people, and then there is us. Attempts to explain the motivations of real people — people who are behaving badly, but not insanely — are consistently met with hoots of derision from people who would rather inhabit the fantasy world of their own ideologies than make any effort at all to understand people different from themselves.

Whoops! Looks like we’ve been trolled by another glibertarian conservative. I’ve just done a search on “Will Allen”, and what I see does not make me think it’s worth the effort to engage in any further corrections. Let’s just say he lives in Megan McArdle country with everything that implies about the style of argument and leave it at that.

“This is bizarre to say the least.” – ScentOfViolets

It is. Maritime law is filled with oddities. The idea, I’m told, is that there is an escalation. Something like this:

1) The blockading ship hails the foatilla. If the floatilla responds, the blockading ship can instruct it to follow them to a port, or turn back, or prepare for boarding. This is usually where it ends: with a diversion in course, or a peaceful boarding.

2) If the floatilla doesn’t comply, the blockading ship must fire a shot across the floatilla’s bow before boarding (I’m under the impression that this has been the case since the 19th century – I imagine cannon balls flying over a wooden mermaid).

3) If the floatilla still refuses to co-operate, they can be boarded by force (this is what happened).

This is why it is not controversial that the IDF fired at the ship before boarding. They were required to by law.

@ James Allen: there’s some difference between “firing a shot across the bow”–a warning shot that’s intended to hit no-one and nothing–and firing at the people on the boat. It’s the latter we’re talking about here.

With some of what you’ve said I agree. Neither the caliber of weapons used to shoot the flotilla participants nor the range at which they were shot nor the number of bullets tells us whether the shootings were premeditated executions (“When I get on board that ship I’m going to blow away that guy”) or spur of the moment (“This guy’s swinging a pipe at me–got to stop him NOW”). It’s inconclusive. Even the shot which reportedly struck the top of the head is, in itself, inconclusive; it could have been a shot fired before the boarding started, or during the post-boarding fight (though that seems less likely due to the risk of hitting an IDF soldier in the melee; any eyewitness accounts of just when that happened?).

That’s one thing that’s so disturbing about the IDF confiscating all the recording devices afterwards: we don’t get what we need to discern the timeline and the tactics. That, plus the heavily-edited IDF video, plus the eyewitness accounts contrary to the IDF version, makes me suspect the IDF is hiding a lot. You?

However, when you say that violence against the commandos disqualifies the participants from being “peaceful protesters” you’re–as with the shot across the bow–confusing very different things. (And you’re not stating a fact, but giving an appraisal.) The flotilla was, as a whole, a peaceful protest against Israel’s blockade. To conclude that they became something else–something less legitimate seems to be your suggestion–is to expect them to behave as pacifists when attacked. Isn’t that a bit much? You don’t have to behave like Gandhi or King to be a peaceful protester; you just have to protest peacefully. It doesn’t mean you have to sit and take it when you’re shot at and raided for having protested.

“And you’re not stating a fact, but giving an appraisal.” – Jeremy A

True; I tried to separate that claim from the rest, clearly without success.

What I am not saying, is that the floatilla crew stopped being peaceful protesters when they fought back. What I am saying, is that they stopped being peaceful protesters when they attacked. Possibly, they stopped being peaceful when they didn’t cooperate with requests to change course. I have no reason to think that they were acting in self defense, nor do I expect pacifism – from the crew or from the IDF.

Of course, there are always questions about evidence; however, the few members of the crew I’ve seen comment on the incident, were not only blissfully ignorant of the law surrounding their action, but their stories largely contracted the footage that has been released – including claims that the crew didn’t fight at all. Certainly it would be nice to have more information, including any material that may have been recorded by the crew.

You do pose an interesting question though: must one be a pacifist to be a peaceful protester? I would say yes, when the content of that protest includes illegal actions, or actions that could reasonably be considered aggressive. I say this because the only difference between military tactics and protest is a pacifist reaction to confrontation. Without pacifism, it’s simply baiting – a lure.

sg, debating the point about whether the from-the-helicopter shot was, in itself, evidence of premeditation could be more gruesome than it’s worth. Suffice it to say I wasn’t disagreeing with your overall appraisal of the situation, just making a small observation about one bit of evidence.

James, whether the flotilla participants “attacked” or were “aggressive” is part of what’s at issue here. Actually, between us at the moment it seems to be the key issue. I’ve heard no claims that they didn’t fight at all, myself. Certainly the Israeli government is keen to convince us that everything the IDF did was legal and reasonable while all who opposed the IDF broke the law and were the aggressors, and were terrorists whose real goal was not humanitarian but to break the blockade and allow arms into Gaza to be used fiendishly against Israeli civilians, and on and on. If one buys that line, then the protesters of course look like the bad guys and there’s less (though still significant) reason to criticize the IDF.

For reasons such as those stated by others here (including some nicely summarized by sg in #147) I don’t buy that line. To me it’s more plausible to conclude, until further evidence supports revision, that the Israeli raid was aggressive and disproportionate and wrong.

That aside, there’s still the issue of whether those who use violence automatically disqualify themselves from being “peaceful protesters.” You say “the only difference between military tactics and protest is a pacifist reaction to confrontation. Without pacifism, it’s simply baiting – a lure.” I say that’s setting the bar unreasonably high, and the last part is false.

Imagine a peaceful march sincerely protesting racial discrimination. Suppose the police attack the protesters with clubs and dogs. Suppose that instead of following King’s advice to take blows without retaliating, the protesters follow Malcolm X’s advice to “kill that dog.” Killing the dog is not peaceful, but the protest was still peaceful. It was the response to the attack that wasn’t peaceful. And responding that way does not prove the initial protest was “bait” or in any way anything but a peaceful protest. It may simply show that the protesters were not pacifists about personal self defense.

Regardless of what qualifies as peaceful protest, there’s the issue of whether it much matters whether one is peaceful. Although peacefulness carries a cachet of moral high ground, surely it doesn’t by itself determine whether one is on the right side.

What I am saying, is that they stopped being peaceful protesters when they attacked.

They didn’t attack. They *were* attacked.

I have no reason to think that they were acting in self defense

You mean other than the heavily armed people dropping onto their ships from helicopters? That’s an attack. And it wasn’t the flotilla that initiated it.

Just an example of what is not known: a video of a group of protesters who are actually trying to intervene in the beating of another protester could easily be passed off as an unprovoked attack with simple editing.

How do you intervene against heavily armed individuals? You either submit to have your heads cracked like coconuts as a diversion, or you fight your way in, I suppose.

Oops. I said, “If one buys [the Netanhayu] line, then the protesters of course look like the bad guys and there’s less (though still significant) reason to criticize the IDF.”

Not “significant”; tons. Which goes back to the Dershowitz bit. Netanyahu said that if this flotilla were not stopped, then the blockade would be broken, and then others–somehow, maybe–would ship arms to Gaza to aid in Hamas’ attacks on Israel. If that’s supposed to justify military force, in the form of a nighttime commando raid, it’s pathetic: the “threat” posed by this flotilla is distant, indirect, and uncertain. Treating the people on it as combatants becomes akin to bombing steelworkers because their output might go to the war effort. Next we bomb the taxpayers for their support. Or we invade Iraq.

“Not that I expect it’s anything but a waste of time to someone who has a butter wouldn’t melt answer for everything.” – Chris

Thin evidence merits a thin response. But read on. Clearly, there is work to be done. Oh, and thanks for the link. I was just curious.

“To me it’s more plausible to conclude, until further evidence supports revision, that the Israeli raid was aggressive and disproportionate and wrong.” – Jeremy A

See, that’s interesting, because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I see it exactly the other way around. Here’s a more detailed example of the kind of thing I find troubling: the claim that the IDF fired onto the deck, possibly killing and/or wounding several of the crew, before boarding. This is an extraordinary claim to me. I’m not a soldier, but if I try, for a minute, to pretend I am, I find it difficult to imagine firing into a crowd and then ordering a few of my men to drop from helicopters into the middle of that crowd. I think I would want the deck cleared before I dropped men onto the ship. We’ve already fired at the deck, I would say to myself, why not continue to do so until the deck is cleared? No. I don’t think that’s very likely. The IDF isn’t suicidal.

What I think more likely is that the IDF landed on the deck as soldiers not expecting confrontation, then were attacked. Defending themselves, with lethal force, is a proportionate response to the attack we’ve all seen the footage for. It’s tragic, but it isn’t wrong.

Anyway… more interesting stuff: violence and protest.

I see what you mean about the “whole”, and we’re in agreement except for one caveat.

“… when the content of that protest includes illegal actions, or actions that could reasonably be considered aggressive.” – me

What I mean here is the central content, or aim, of the protest; not some random occurrence. In the case of the floatilla, the central aim of the protest included running a military blockade. In the case of your average march, where a permit has been acquired and so on, it’s a different story. In the later case, the central aim of the protest is neither illegal, nor aggressive, in the former, it was both. Reason for this caveat to follow.

“Regardless of what qualifies as peaceful protest, there’s the issue of whether it much matters whether one is peaceful. Although peacefulness carries a cachet of moral high ground, surely it doesn’t by itself determine whether one is on the right side.” – Jeremy A

At what point did high moral ground stop relating to rightness? The reason I think pacifism is a necessary component of illegal and/or apparently aggressive protest isn’t because it gives one higher moral ground, but because doing otherwise is reckless, and gets people needlessly killed. Which, I think, is wrong.

“Possibly, they stopped being peaceful when they didn’t cooperate with requests to change course.” – me
‘So there are no such things as “peaceful non-cooperation” and “non-violent resistence”?’ – herr doktor bimler

Hence my usage of the ever hedging word “possibly.” Ever heard of possibly? The hedging is for a weird reason though. I’m not sure a boat moving through a blockade can be considered peaceful. I’m torn on it though. Is refusing to divert a plane that speeding toward a building peaceful resistance? Certainly not. But a boat. I’m still not sure. So… possibly.

“Yes, James, but the fact that the protesters want one and the Israelis don’t is precisely the reason you should believe the protesters’ accounts and not the IDF’s.” – derrida derider

I wish it were that simple. Israel doesn’t trust the 3rd party, and the protesters, as far as I know, didn’t chime in about an investigation until after Israel had rejected one (regardless, it seems to me that many of the floatilla survivors have vivid imaginations). I really do think it’s unfortunate that a 3rd party inquiry wont happen, but it’s no reason to convict or exonerate anyone.

In the case of your average march, where a permit has been acquired and so on, it’s a different story.

In the case of Gandhi’s Salt Satygraha?

“In the case of Gandhi’s Salt Satygraha?” – dsquared

A great example of my point. I’m glad you agree. (you do realize that these protesters did not response violently, I hope?)

“This is indicative of a strong pre-conceived idea of what happened.” – sh

Sure it is. You know, there’s a part of me that wants to cure you of all your delusions. It’s the philosopher in me, I suppose. But you clearly see and hear what you want to see and hear (then take it out on me – which, I assure you, is pure comedy). Your “well documented” evidence is not nearly as sound as you seem to imagine it is. Like much of what has been bandied about here, it amounts to a minor conspiracy theory. And a thin one at that. I mean really.. the video? That’s “evidence” in your mind? Stunning. Just stunning. Ok, ok, I can’t help myself. Just one.

QUESTION: How are there “transcripts” of a live event, if the IDF knocked out the satellite feed and confiscated all recording materials?
ANSWER: The IDF didn’t do that until after they were attacked.
CONCLUSIONS: is this a) indicative of a planned premeditated attack on the part of the IDF, b) a scramble to control the situation after the fact, or c) indicative of a strong preconceived idea of what happened?

I’ll let you figure out this complex puzzle all on your own.

Let’s see, I’ve been called delusional, denounced over the content of my last name, called ill-informed (for not knowing things I’ve given no indication of not knowing), and gleefully mis-interpreted by the reading-impaired. Yeah, I think I can conclude that this is not the home of academic excellence. Conspiracy theories, misdirected hostility, amateurish deflection, petty paranoia, condescending blowhards. Have fun people.

James (assuming you’re not gone): considering other IDF uses of force, plus eyewitness accounts, I don’t find it that easy to dismiss the claim that Israel started shooting before they landed, even if the eyewitness accounts are doubtful. (They’re no more doubtful than some of the evidence you’ve given for your take.) But for argument let’s set that aside.

You in #158: “What I think more likely is that the IDF landed on the deck as soldiers not expecting confrontation, then were attacked. Defending themselves, with lethal force, is a proportionate response to the attack we’ve all seen the footage for. It’s tragic, but it isn’t wrong.”

Let’s also set aside the (huge) question of how reliable the video is and consider this in relation to:

“The reason I think pacifism is a necessary component of illegal and/or apparently aggressive protest isn’t because it gives one higher moral ground, but because doing otherwise is reckless, and gets people needlessly killed. Which, I think, is wrong.”

Replace “protest” with “action” and you have an indictment of the IDF right there.

Especially since this didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not like the IDF just happened to be walking down the street minding its own business when suddenly there was this unprovoked attack on them. Their commanders decided to put soldiers in a position where any resistance would lead to a use of force, and armed them to enable a lethal response which, surprise surprise, they used. This was needless, reckless killing waiting to happen.

I guess, like Wiesel, you might want to say it’s still the protesters’ fault for putting themselves in the midst of a military blockade. But that’s like saying “too bad your face got in the way of my fist.” It ignores Israel’s culpability for how it uses its forces.

What I think more likely is that the IDF landed on the deck as soldiers not expecting confrontation

That’s a completely insane thing to expect, that you could board someone else’s ship openly carrying deadly weapons and not start a confrontation by doing so. Why do you think they would expect it? Because they are used to dealing with a subjugated population that is cowed into meekly accepting anything the IDF chooses to do to them?

If they didn’t expect confrontation, it’s because they expected that their targets would not believe they have, let alone try to exert, any right to self-defense. And if they *did* expect that, it’s a pretty damning indictment of their normal MO, I think. That’s not the attitude of a policeman in a state with rule of law, it’s the attitude of an overseer or a medieval nobleman.

“Per the Opinio Juris points, enforcing such a blockade in international waters de facto recognises the other party as a belligerent and the conflict as a war”

I would urge the reader to read those posts and comments, and not accept dsquared’s rather tendentious summary. Prof. Heller sort of makes the point dsquared says he makes, but he gets a lot of pushback from people who have law degrees and who have read the Prize Cases, which separates that discussion from this one. dsquared seems to consider invoking doctrines and concepts from cases to be dishonest, but that is what lawyers do.

“Per the Opinio Juris points, enforcing such a blockade in international waters de facto recognises the other party as a belligerent and the conflict as a war (rather than the other party as terrorists and the conflict as a law enforcement operation), which is something that Israel doesn’t, won’t and basically can’t do.”

First that isn’t an accurate summary of the actual law. I also encourage anyone interested to read the Opinio Juris thread.

Second I’m not totally convinced that is an accurate summary of the situation. Israel doesn’t want Gaza. It hasn’t wanted Gaza for a long time. That is why we are talking about the Hamas government in the first place. If Israel was trying to maintain long term annexation or something, it wouldn’t have had non-Israeli election of a non-Israeli government. The main concern Israel has about Gaza is that it not be attacked from there. The main problem Israel has with recognizing Gaza is that if it does so now, it will just be forced to invade and occupy again because Gaza won’t stop attacking them. Israel would like to avoid that if possible. So yes, Gaza is a weird corner case.

Glen Tomkins,
there can be no reason to portray the Third Reich as in any way a victim of anything, except as part of a scheme to deny the victimhood of the Jews

Did you really mean to write that? The Second World War was not fought between Germany on the one side and “the Jews” on the other. Contradicting established scholarship on a matter as much studied by people with excellent access to the sources as the tactics used on the western fronts of that war (which is all I thought ajay was “accusing” you of) is itself pretty audacious. You could portray the poor Germans as victims of American and French revolutionism, forced to suffer in concrete form the intellectual sins of modernity, and I don’t think you would be pushing things any less.

Similarly, although Israel’s chosen strategy w/r/t Gaza and the West Bank are to say the least ridiculous, they seem to be based in a theory that international relations are a “war of all against all,” in which they need to exert more force than their opponents in order to survive. I don’t know what 21st century American rightwing Zionists like William Kristol, David Gelernter, and Abraham Foxman believe, and it’s more than possible I’m forgetting something, but I don’t remember hearing Israeli politicians talking a lot about the victimhood of the Israeli state vis-a-vis the rest of the world. What Likud and Kadimah do believe, I think, is that a government led by Hamas is objectively unacceptable to all responsible states and that they’re justified in preventing Hamas from attempting to govern an area in which they can exert “influence.”

I’d like to add slightly to what phil said:

“What Likud and Kadimah do believe, I think, is that a government led by Hamas is objectively unacceptable…”

I’d add ” …but they are not”. I don’t think we can take it for granted that one side is simply better than the other. The evidence does not support that.

Alex: An awful lot of Soviet T34’s weren’t blown up on the Eastern Front because the guns that would have stopped them were shooting upwards over German cities.

Sorry to be obsessional, but n.b. that those 88’s would’ve been shooting upwards over German factories, bridges, etc. had the Allies not opted for terror bombing.

To clarify: Hamas obviously engages in terrorism. The definition of “terrorism” in question seems to assume Hamas lacks (and will always lack) some metaphysical ich weiss nicht that prevents it from being a legitimate governing party.

On an historical note, the German U-Boat offensive came perilously close to succeeding, and was only fought off at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, and frantic technical innovation in weaponry, electronics and cryptanalysis, among other things.

Yes, but: While all of the factors cited contributed significantly to the defeat of the U-boats, the single most decisive (according to the book by Peter Padfield to which I linked upthread) was continuous aerial coverage of convoys by long-range aircraft (B-24 Liberators). The boats could only keep up with the convoys by running on the surface, and they couldn’t stay on the surface in daylight when aircraft were present; they were reduced to picking off stragglers. This could have been done significantly sooner than it actually was — the planes were there — but Harris wanted to keep every single one of them for his area-bombing campaign, and every time the argument went to Churchill, Harris won it (until, of course, he finally lost). So the bombing campaign has that to answer for as well.

Sebastian,
Then you’re saying Israel is at war with Gaza. That could be argued.

On the other side: IIRC Israel’s actions aren’t consistent with that idea. I believe they have stated explicitly that their intention is to get Hamas voted out of power and to punish Hamas (whom they consider a terrorist group hiding among a civilian population, not the government). In the same way, they appear to believe that the current Iranian regime is objectively illegitimate and thus needs to be rooted out.

Also on the other side: One state’s expressed ideology of hostility towards another is not a reason for the latter state to attack the former until the ideology changes.

Admittedly, the whole Gaza situation is stupid. Either it is its own state or it is part of another state. But, in fact, it’s neither its own state nor part of Israel.

Ever heard of possibly?
Vaguely. It is possible to point out the corollary of a hypothetical statement, a assertion that might possibly be made, even if that assertion is merely peeping over a hedge rather than being directly asserted.

Pertinent, while possibly not quite apt to this thread:

After ten minutes, two injured, seriously injured, went inside and sat on the floor, and they died after a while. Then, after twenty minutes, another three came inside. One died after a while. They were hurt in their neck, in their head, and in their stomach, in their stomach [inaudible]. And a fourth and a fifth man didn’t die. They just bleeded ’til death. I approached the soldiers with a sign in Hebrew asking them for medicine for—to give us some medical help for the two injured who are bleeding. I just for twenty minutes tried to approach them and tried to—and to ask them, and I did twice, also verbally and also by writing this sign. They refused to—they refused just to give us this support. And the two men died after maybe half an hour.

from an interview with Hanin Zoabi at Democracy Now!
Zoabi’s the Palestinian member of the Knesset who, because of her participation in the flotilla and her subsequent public accusation of IDF criminality has inspired a Facebook page dedicated to a group entitled “execute the MK Haneen Zoubi”.

“Just like that, they want to kill you, for no reason whatsoever, and that’s all they say?”

Welcome to Sebastian’s world, where one side just wants to steal land and oppress and shoot peaceful protestors in the eye, if only Hamas weren’t so violent.

Sebastian 195:
“…a hundred actual attacks… ”
Locution locution locution.
NPR presented the flotilla as “Pro-Palestinian”.
Locution.
Not false, exactly, but not truth-dedicated either, is it?
When the average American’s working with your hundred attacks against Israel per-Palestinian per day or whatever.
So. Pro-attack.
Because the truth is like the lives of the blockade runners on the boat, because the truth if it were allowed to escape and gain the light of day would support Hamas, in the same panicked illogic that sees musical instruments and newspapers, let alone chicken and donkeys, as potential support for Hamas.
People hate you when you hurt them. I know this from personal experience.
Calling what’s being done to the Palestinians “war” is no different than calling what’s been done, and is still being done to Iraq, and the Iraqi people “war”.
Invade, occupy, then call the resistance to your invasion “war”.
Locution.

“I don’t think this is right. They aren’t willing to deal with Hamas because Hamas explicitly makes war against them. They are (at least allegedly) willing to deal with governments that don’t have the destruction of Israel as part of their governing documentation.”

Actually, they had a working ceasefire with Hamas for six months in 2008–well, except that Israel never lifted the blockade, which is an act of war. Israel killed some militants on November 4 who were allegedly engaged in nefarious activity, which broke the ceasefire and in late December Hamas said it would reinstate the ceasefire if Israel lifted the blockade. Which Israel did not do.

I can’t remember if I linked to this before and the thread is too long to reread, but here’s a link that outlines the history between Israel and Hamas in the years leading up to the killing in early 2009. You will notice that Israel is responsible for most of the killing and was sometimes the one to initiate violence.

<a href="http://www.jeromeslater.com/2010/01/moshe-halbertal-and-goldstone.html"link

In war both sides have all sorts of ‘reasons’ for killing each other. Humans are great at self justification.

Yes, and it’s completely impossible to sort them out; gives me a headache. We should make some simple rule, for example: whoever the US government declares Good Guy – is the good guy. And their opponent is A New Hitler.

Chomsky gave a statement last week to Al-Ahram, an Egyptian newspaper, reprinted on the Common Dreams website, which includes the following passage:

if Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire. In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreeement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket. Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force “in self-defense” unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although—or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext, and the same is true of Israel’s current resort to force.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/06/02-8

As Chomsky has emphasized elsewhere, the right of self-defense through military force against some threat is not allowed by international law until all peaceful means of avoiding the threat have been exhausted. The application to Israel’s claim of self-defense in the present circumstances seems pretty obvious.

Any explanation why 40 of those on the lead ship had neither IDs nor Passports?
that Israel reported and stated that those folks refused to give their names…

I am surprised by Murray’s ignorance and obtuseness, piglet. Whether or not “a situation of armed conflict exists,” Gaza does not have “every right to attack Israel with rockets” if, as is the case, those rockets target civilians. On the contrary, those rocket attacks are therefore clearly war crimes.

I didn’t say any of the things you seem to be sarcastically attributing to me, rosmar; nor does what I did say imply them; nor do I believe them. The Hamas rockets are war crimes even if what Israel does is much worse.