I just turned on my computer and saw the news about Israel’s attack on the Palestinian aid flotilla, which according to the AFP report (the only one I’ve seen so far) killed at least eight activists on the ship.
I will make no substantive comments yet, since I have not read enough yet to make them, but I can and will say this much. Yesterday, when I was writing my post on the aid flotilla — which at that point was not yet in Israeli waters — I titled the post, “Israel Threatens To Use Lethal Force Against Palestinian Aid Flotilla.” You don’t see that title because I changed it before publishing the post. I changed it for two reasons, one practical and one ethical. The practical reason was that I knew using that title was a probable violation of TMV’s “newspaper standards,” because I was speculating about a terrible action — it hadn’t happened. And ethically, my conscience bothered me about using the word “lethal” because, as I said, it hadn’t happened, and because Israel had not said it would use lethal force — only that the flotilla would be met with warships that would warn the flotilla to leave or be boarded and be taken to Ashdod. I thought that perhaps it was unfair to use the word “lethal,” as if I expected Israel to kill people.
Well, I can’t say I should have used the word, because the practical issue, as of yesterday, still remained. But what I can say is that I gave Israel far more credit than it deserved when I gave it the benefit of the doubt. There no longer seems to be any reasonable doubt that the Israeli Defense Forces will act like storm troopers if given the slightest chance.
UPDATE: Okay. Wow. It seems like I inadvertently gave Israel too much credit even in this post which I wrote precisely because I had already previously given Israel too much credit. I just finished reading Joe Gandelman’s typically exhaustive roundup of coverage, and I now see that when Israel attacked the Palestinian aid flotilla, the flotilla was in international waters. I implied, above, that the flotilla was actually in Israeli waters, when I wrote, “Yesterday, when I was writing my post on the aid flotilla — which at that point was not yet in Israeli waters — I titled the post, ‘Israel Threatens To Use Lethal Force Against Palestinian Aid Flotilla.’ ”
Yes, folks, I did actually assume — without even thinking about whether I should — that if Israel attacked the flotilla with lethal force, the flotilla must have been in Israeli waters. I’m not sure why I did that.
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