Blockade running is dangerous and can carry with it significant consequences, including death. Ask Rhett Butler or Han Solo, they know. I’ve been reading a lot about the blockade running incident which occurred on Monday. Of course, many of the reports are devoid of any real analysis–or facts, for that matter–and reflexively blame Israel. Leave it to Charles Krauthammer to make sense of it all:
But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the [Israeli] blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel — a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.
In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded (“quarantined”) Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.
Oh, but weren’t the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza — as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.
Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel’s inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.
The occupants of these ships knew full well the consequences of running a blockade. What is more, the objective of the flotilla was not about delivering humanitarian aid, but provoking a response from Israel. What really turns the stomach is the faux outrage in the “international community” over this. You’ve got every nation under the sun running to the United Nations wanting a full and total condemnation of Israel’s actions. What a joke. North Korea continues to repress its own people and sinks a South Korean naval vessel without any consequences. Iran is a hop, skip, and a jump away from an operational nuclear weapon but these diplomats want to waste their time on this. This is nothing more than international cosmopolitanism at its finest.
At the end of the day, Israel has the right to defend itself. The international community will never accept that basic premise, however. Having said that, I still think that our engagement in the Middle East has become a resource drain and a strategy liability. Playing “peace broker” is a favorite pastime of the Washington foreign policy establishment, but trying to broker peace in the Middle East is a fool’s errand.