Israel Attack Threatens

to Sink Own Credibility

The pre-dawn raid by an Israeli commando of a six-ship flotilla of humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip and its famished Palestinians, once again makes Israel look as if it’s its worst enemy.
The official party line for the attack, that may have left dead more that 9 people, was, of course, self-defense, an overused, self-serving paranoid device, the “world-is-out-to-get-us” rhetoric, that seems to always wind up prevailing within the country’s ever-expanding borders.
But for the Israeli public opinion, it’s another embarrassing episode highlighting an electoral apathy that’s given a free pass to its militaristic elite for way too long.
And to supporters of Israel’s right to exist the world over, it’s yet another indefensible act that will only feed the increasingly vicious network of its political enemies who’ll use it to enlist yet more victims to its cause, if only to give it a legitimacy otherwise lacking.
Left without a leg to stand on is the U.S. and its own doubting, ever critical allies, at a point when pressures on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, to invoke but one of the issues directly affecting Israel’s security, could be reaching a boiling point.
With this huge shot on its own foot, Israel managed to both squander even more the support from its most powerful ally, already busy with bloody conflicts and countless enemies next door, and drive another nail on its fragile geopolitics, more and more resembling the shoot-’em first, ask questions later that some thought had been sensibly left behind in the Old West.