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I agree with Haaretz's posts which view the Israeli acts of piracy and hijacking as unbelievably ill-thought-out acts.

This article sums it up quite nicely, and I'll post a couple more after which expand on the point. (It would be interesting to see if anything this candid appears in US newspapers?)

Seven idiots in the cabinet
By Yossi Sarid

This time, it was all foreseeable. Even this newspaper warned in advance about the possibility of defeat in victory. As preparations for the big sea confrontation proceeded, it became increasingly clear that it would end badly.

After all, the troops were being prepared by seven idiots and their subordinates - people who cannot see beyond the ends of their noses.

We are periodically told that Israel has never had a forum of leading ministers so businesslike and thorough; even Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman displays insight and responsibility at meetings, says Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

And who will attest to Barak's own talents and judgment? Perhaps those soldiers who never returned from battle? Seven ministers versus seven ships - not aircraft carriers, or even destroyers, but small boats, laden with hundreds of people. Not all are righteous, but neither are they terrorists. But suddenly, without warning, this barely seaworthy flotilla became a threatening armada.

Before the battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson, like the Allied commanders before D-Day, understood that their country's fates hung in the balance. It's enough to make you despair when thinking about our leaders: For them, every day is D-Day. So what will happen when total war actually breaks out here?

And it's disturbing to think about our army, which trips every time it is ordered to march. And don't believe their promises that next time will be different. There are always plenty of excuses, but judged by the results, it's always the same old disaster.

Elite units are supposed to know how to take over a ship without sinking the state, how to overcome passengers wielding clubs and knives without sowing death, how to keep two pistols and a rifle from being wrested from them.

But a physical confrontation should never have been allowed to develop to begin with. If this was indeed a "political/media provocation," we should never have let ourselves become entangled in it.

Had we simply let the flotilla reach Gaza - an option that was proposed - a cry of victory would indeed have erupted from the other side, but it would have died out in a day or two. But the Israel of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak, of ministers Moshe Ya'alon and Benny Begin, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Eli Yishai and even Dan Meridor, is vying with Hamas and Hezbollah over who can produce the most resounding demonstrations of strength - which amount to nothing but humiliating evidence of weakness.

How did we so become so devoid of confidence in our ends that we instead put our trust in ways and means that dead-end on every passing ship? Had only we at least not dropped the soldiers one by one straight into the angry mob.

What ought to come next is a demand for a probe, but it seems pointless. Stupidity knows no bounds, and it is a ministerial prerogative. And what is boundless is also unfathomable.

So the septet will persist in its evil ways, endangering us more than any ship could, for madness will rule us. That gang in Jerusalem will insist on drowning us again and again, for there is no courage to change even after all the disasters.

And we will continue to fear our leaders - as if we didn't have enough to fear in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... t-1.293418

A failure any way you slice it
By Reuven Pedatzur

Perhaps the commanders of the Israel Navy and policymakers should have read history books before sending special forces to raid boats carrying civilians.

The operational details of Israel's takeover of the flotilla of boats headed to Gaza won't be clear for many days, if ever. But there's no need to wait for a blow-by-blow account to point out that from the military point of view, it is hard to understand how an action that the Israel Navy spent so long planning ended up in so severe a debacle.

And that's without even addressing the questions that arise regarding how wise it was to carry out a military action against civilian craft in international waters.

First, there's the breakdown in intelligence. The navy and the intelligence agencies had the rare opportunity of being able to keep the ships and their passengers under surveillance for a long time. How is it possible that their preparations to attack boarding Israeli soldiers were not detected? Why didn't they know that knives, axes and perhaps even guns and other light arms had been readied?

The intelligence agencies had plenty of time to learn exactly who the people on the boats were and to evaluate how dangerous they were. Presumably, it was not the peace activists whose identities were known who attacked the boarding party with axes and gunfire. That the commandos were taken by surprise is simply incomprehensible.

On the other hand, if there was indeed apprehension in the navy that the people on the boats would resist violently, then the actual form that the boarding took raises questions. Why weren't teargas grenades dropped onto the decks before the commandos stormed the ship?

The claim made by the IDF Spokesman that the soldiers' lives were in danger and they feared a lynching is hardly complimentary to the men of the elite naval units.

But do these troops, whom their commanders describe as "the best trained and most effective in the world" expect to be faced with the danger of being lynched by a mob of civilians wielding knives and clubs? Especially seeing as this was a military operation that was carefully planned over a number of days?

Also unclear is why the soldiers were not given clear orders not to open fire with live ammunition under any circumstances. The IDF has sufficient means for gaining control over rioting mobs using non-lethal force. And if the navy brass informed the decision-makers that there was a reasonable chance that firearms and other weapons would be used and civilians killed, then there is room for doubting the judgment of the policy makers who approved this mission.

Either way, the inefficiency and the panic that overwhelmed the commandos, leading to the deaths of so many, raises worrying questions about their skillfulness and operational capability.

The decision to act at night is also problematic. Presumably, some of the commotion and the hysteria on the ship was a result of the fact that neither the soldiers nor the civilians could see clearly what was going on. This is a sure recipe for escalation on the part of people who have to guess without being able to see who is approaching them and what they are doing.

In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis broke out. U.S. president John F. Kennedy decided to impose a maritime blockade on the island, to prevent Soviet

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/op ... t-1.293446

Another - along the same lines (again from Haaretz):

Fiasco on the high seas
By Ari Shavit Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Moshe Ya'alon are supposed to know history. They are supposed to know there was no greater mistake than that of the British with regard to the illegal immigrant ship Exodus in the summer of 1947. The brutality employed by the British Mandate against a ferry loaded with Jewish refugees turned the regime into an object of revile. It lost what is now called international legitimacy. British rule over the country ended just 10 months after the Exodus fiasco,

The Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was no Exodus. It carried not Holocaust survivors but provocateurs, many of them extremists. But a series of baseless decisions on the part of the prime minister and the ministers of defense and of strategic affairs turned the Marmara into a Palestinian Exodus. With a single foolish move, the Israeli cabinet cast the Muslim Brotherhood in the role of the victim and the Israel Navy as the villain and simultaneously opened European, Turkish, Arab, Palestinian and internal Israeli fronts. In so doing, Israel is serving Hamas' interests better than Hamas itself has ever done.

Netanyahu, Barak and Ya'alon have neither vision nor charisma, but they once seemed to have good judgment. The sole promise made by their cabinet was not to make hasty decisions like the one that led its predecessor into the Second Lebanon War. It was supposed to handle Israel's strategic interests with utmost seriousness and responsibility. On the night of May 30th the cabinet broke its promise, demonstrating extreme, unforgivable lack of judgment in the face of the Palestinian flotilla.

During the 2006 war in Lebanon I concluded that my 15-year-old daughter could have conducted it more wisely than the Olmert-Peretz government. We've progressed. Today it's clear to me that my 6-year-old son could do much better than our current government. Even a child would have seen the imbalance in the risk-threat assessment in overpowering the flotilla ships. Any smart kid would understand that you don't sacrifice what is important for what is not. But the cabinet did not understand. Under the leadership of Netanyahu, Barak and Ya'alon it came to a patently unreasonable decision. It was a decision of complete fools.

Endless questions are being asked. What happened to Israel's vaunted creativity? Why was the worst of all possible options chosen? Where was the army chief of staff? Where were the intelligence services? Why did we walk into this trap, which we managed to avoid in all the years of the second intifada, with our eyes open? Why didn't we see that instead of tightening the siege on Gaza, we were about to tighten the siege on ourselves?

Perhaps the most troubling question in the wake of this fiasco on the high sea is this: Who is navigating our ship of state, and toward what catastrophe are the captains of this ship of fools steering us?

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.293415