Keith I am more likely to subscribe to the theory of 'major military cock-up' these are by no means unknown in history

Neither is the tendency to present such a cock-up resulting in an unacceptable loss of life as something different in order to 'save face' a prime example of which was disastrous charge of British cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose lines have made the charge a symbol of courageous warfare

Writing in Haaretz Reuven Pedatzur reports

"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."

"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."

From the same newspaper

Fiasco on the high seas by 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

The Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was no Exodus.

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.

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? "


Given the reaction in Israel - not to mention internationally - it is not difficult to see how a government prepared to sanction the forging of British Australian and Irish passports to enable a state sponsored assassination had no compunction other than to put the best possible spin on this attack in international waters.