A new poll by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shatters several myths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first is that Israel’s blockade of Gaza in general, and its botched raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in particular, has only strengthened Hamas.

The poll, conducted between June 10 and 13, found that “despite the events associated with the Free Gaza flotilla and the Israeli attack on it,” there was “a significant improvement in the status of Salam Fayyad and his government.” If elections were held today, 45% of Palestinians would vote for Fatah and 26% for Hamas, compared with 42% and 28%, respectively, in March. Most interestingly, Fatah trounces Hamas among Gazans: 49% to 32%. Fayyad, who had zero political support when he took office three years ago, would now edge out Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh in a presidential matchup, 36% to 32%. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would rout Haniyeh, 54% to 39%; that is up from 50% to 40% in March.

Why the upsurge? Because the blockade is working: “Only 9% say conditions in the Gaza Strip today are good or very good while 35% say conditions in the West Bank are good or very good.” Moreover, while 62% of Gazans and 60% of West Bankers “feel that their personal safety and security and that of their family are assured,” the Gaza figure is down from 70% in March, while the West Bank figure is up from 55%. Strong majorities in the West Bank say the economy, health care, education, and law enforcement have improved since Fayyad became prime minister.

Myth No. 2: Palestinians’ prime concern is ending Israeli settlement construction. In fact, the poll found a huge majority, 60% to 38%, opposing a ban on Palestinians working in the settlements; in the West Bank, where the settlements actually are, support dropped to 34% percent. And since Palestinians work in the settlements almost exclusively in construction, the obvious implication is that they prefer construction to continue, so that they can have jobs.

Why? Because most Palestinians’ actual prime concern is supporting their families (something that really shouldn’t surprise those liberals who believe all people want the same things), and the settlements are a major employer. It will be years before the Palestinian economy is capable of providing an alternative. Thus by demanding a freeze on settlement construction now, Barack Obama and his European counterparts are merely generating massive Palestinian unemployment. It turns out that Palestinians would rather they didn’t.

Myth No. 3: Israel’s war on Gaza last year was counterproductive. Actually, 57% of Palestinians now support efforts by Hamas to prevent rocket launches at Israeli towns, while only 38% oppose them. In June 2008, six months before the war began, the opposite was true: 57% of Palestinians favored rocket attacks on Israel. In short, the war achieved exactly what it was meant to achieve: discouraging rocket fire.

But here’s one thing that really is counterproductive: Western governments making policy based on what they want to believe rather than on the facts. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

Jennifer rightly decries Barack Obama’s lack of leadership in stymieing a UN effort to set up an “international inquiry” into Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla. But Congress need not wait for him to act; it could pressure the UN to desist all by itself, via its power of the purse.

The salient precedent occurred in 1974, when “UNESCO voted to exclude Israel from one of its regional working groups because Israel supposedly altered ‘the historical features of Jerusalem’ during archeological excavations and ‘brainwashed’ Arabs in the occupied territories,” as Front Page magazine recalled in a 2003 essay. Congress retaliated by suspending funding for the organization. UNESCO eventually gave in and readmitted Israel.

The U.S. provides 22 percent of the UN’s budget, so Congress has plenty of leverage. Nor need it threaten to pull the plug on the entire UN: it could deprive some specific UN agency of that 22 percent, as it did with UNESCO in 1974. And because Congress is far more pro-Israel than Obama, trying to work through Congress makes sense.

Even Congress, however, wouldn’t take such a step without strong pressure from American Jews. Jennifer has repeatedly (and rightly) bemoaned this community’s unwillingness to confront Obama, but another issue is at play here, too: American Jews, being overwhelmingly liberal, are reluctant to support an Israeli government that many deem “right-wing” or “hard-line” (to quote the mainstream media’s favorite terms).

What they fail to realize, however, is that even Israel’s left considers a UN inquiry utterly unacceptable. Here, for instance, is what Ze’ev Segal, legal commentator for the far-left daily Haaretz, said on June 4: “Recent experience — both the Goldstone Committee’s report on last year’s war in Gaza and the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the separation fence – shows that international probes related to Israel are irredeemably politically biased, due to the political composition of international bodies like the UN.” And again, two days later: “Israel cannot agree to an international investigation, which would be political and biased.”

Thus, by backing Israel on this issue, American Jews would be supporting not just the government they hate but also the left-wing opposition they adore.

And while American Jews sometimes wonder how much clout they really have under a Democratic administration, the consensus seems to be “plenty.” Consider, for instance, this New York Times piece on Turkey’s radicalization, which quoted unnamed “analysts” as saying that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s behavior toward Israel “boxes in the Obama administration, forcing it into a choice between allies that the Turks are sure to lose.”

Bizarrely, the Web version offers no explanation of this assertion. But in the print version of the Times‘ overseas edition, the International Herald Tribune, the next paragraph does: “‘If Obama is faced with the choice of the American Jewish community or Turkey, he’s not going to choose Turkey,’ said a former American diplomat.”

The same would undoubtedly be true were Obama faced with a choice between American Jews and a UN flotilla inquiry. Unfortunately, American Jews have yet to present him with such a choice.

Anyone looking for an explanation of the Homeland Security Department’s multiple failures to prevent terrorist attacks on the American homeland might want to consider this one: because the department is too busy targeting a leading Israeli counter-terrorism agent.

On June 30, a California court will consider the department’s request for a deportation order against Mosab Yousef, on the grounds that he “provided material support” to a terrorist organization — namely, Hamas. Yousef was indeed a Hamas member — unsurprisingly, given that his father is the movement’s leader in the West Bank — and was even arrested by Israel for it. But while in jail, he was persuaded to become an Israeli agent.

For the following 10 years, from 1997-2007, he was Israel’s top agent inside Hamas. His former handler in Israel’s Shin Bet security service credits him with foiling dozens of suicide bombings and supplying intelligence that led to the arrest of many of those on Israel’s most-wanted list.

In 2007, he decided he’d had enough and moved to the U.S., where he sought asylum. He also went public with his conversion to Christianity some years earlier and began writing his memoir, Son of Hamas, which was published earlier this year.

Incredibly, it was on this book — in which he details his work in Israel’s behalf at great length — that the Homeland Security Department based its request for Yousef’s deportation. The request notes, for instance, that Yousef himself described numerous occasions on which chauffeured Hamas terrorists around.

Well, of course he did. It was precisely his proximity to Hamas’s centers of power — by serving as a chauffeur for his father and other leading Hamas members — that enabled him to obtain such valuable intelligence. Had he refused to have anything to do with Hamas, he would have kept his hands clean, but he also would have been useless as an agent.

This deportation request prompts many questions. One is why official Israel has not been raising a storm in its former agent’s behalf — though a fair answer would be that official Israel has zero pull with the current administration. Another is what kind of message this sends to American agents — many of whom must also dirty their hands to produce vital intelligence. Will they, too, face deportation on account of their former involvement in terrorist organizations, should they someday seek asylum in the U.S.?

But the best question of all is the one Yousef himself asked on his blog: “If Homeland Security cannot understand a simple situation like mine, how can they be trusted with bigger issues?”

David wondered yesterday why revolutionary statements by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had been largely ignored by the mainstream media, and suggested that perhaps it’s because “it doesn’t fit well with the current climate of radically de-legitimizing the Jewish state.” But there could be a far less sinister reason: The smarter Middle East hands have figured out by now that what Arab leaders say in English to American audiences is meaningless; what matters is what they are willing to say in Arabic to their own people. And so far, Abbas shows no sign of being willing to say the same in Arabic.

Granted, the statements represent progress: Even in English, I can’t recall Abbas ever before so openly acknowledging Jewish historical ties to the Middle East or Israel’s claim to (part of) Jerusalem. But in Arabic, the standard narrative continues to be that Jews are colonial interlopers with no claim whatsoever to the land. And as Max Singer of the Begin-Sadat Center perceptively noted, until this changes, peace will be impossible: Palestinians will not make peace unless they believe they can do so honorably, and this “depends on whether the Jews are colonial thieves stealing land solely on the basis of force, or whether they are a people that also historically lived in the land.”

It would be nice to think that Abbas’s statements last week were a dry run for the more difficult job of telling his countrymen the same things in Arabic. Far more likely, however, is that his goal was simply to woo liberal American Jews, who are presumably close to the Democratic administration, in the hope that they will in turn use their influence with the administration to help him secure his real goal — which is not a deal with Israel, but a deal with Barack Obama.

And that is not mere cynical speculation. It is, almost word for word, what a close associate quoted Abbas as saying less than three weeks ago.

According to the Jerusalem Post‘s invaluable Khaled Abu Toameh, Abbas Zaki, who sits on the central committee of Abbas’s Fatah party, told the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi paper in May that at a recent meeting with U.S. envoy George Mitchell, “President Abbas told Mitchell that the Israelis are no longer peace partners as much as the Americans are,” and therefore urged the U.S. to present its own peace proposals instead of waiting for an Israeli proposal.

“The Palestinian Authority is negotiating with Washington and not with Tel Aviv,” he added, lest anyone miss the message.

That interview, incidentally, occurred several days before Israel’s botched raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla. Numerous Western commentators have since blamed that raid for thwarting peace efforts. But as long as Abbas remains determined to negotiate with America rather than Israel, there can be no serious peace effort to thwart.

The report that Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israeli jets transit its airspace to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities indeed shows, as Jennifer noted, that progress in the “peace process” is not necessary to secure Israeli-Arab cooperation on a grave mutual threat. But it also constitutes a vote of no-confidence — by both Saudi Arabia and at least someone in the U.S. administration — in the anti-Iran sanctions that the UN Security Council approved last week.

At a time when the Muslim world is still seething over Israel’s botched raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, nothing could be more embarrassing for Saudi Arabia than a report that it is cooperating with the hated Zionist entity in planning an attack on another Muslim country. Under these circumstances, only one thing could motivate a Saudi official to actually confirm this cooperation to the London Times: sheer terror.

And the report’s timing — just days after U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed the new round of toothless sanctions a great achievement, even as he openly acknowledged that they will not stop Iran’s nuclear program — makes the source of this terror clear: Saudi Arabia is now convinced that the West, in general, and Americans, in particular, will do nothing substantive to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Saudi Arabia has thus concluded that the only hope of making Tehran rethink the program’s wisdom is a credible threat of force. By agreeing to let Israeli jets transit its airspace, thus shortening the distance they would have to fly, Riyadh has greatly increased the credibility of this threat by making an Israeli strike more feasible.

The same logic applies to the U.S. The Obama administration has repeatedly and publicly trumpeted its efforts to thwart an Israeli strike; indeed, the Times reported that Washington still refuses to let Israeli jets transit Iraqi airspace, which the U.S. controls. Moreover, Obama continues to invest great efforts in outreach to the Muslim world. That a U.S. “defense source” confirmed this story to the Times and even asserted that the deal was concocted “with the agreement of the [U.S.] State Department” is deeply embarrassing to the administration, depicting it as downright hypocritical: publicly voicing full-throated opposition to an Israeli raid even as it secretly brokers a deal with Riyadh to facilitate such a raid.

And here, too, the motive is clear: at least someone in the administration has concluded that truly painful sanctions — the kind that might actually affect Tehran’s behavior — are never going to be enacted, so the only hope is a credible threat of military force.

It is, of course, encouraging to learn that both Riyadh and at least some parts of Washington still have a grasp of reality. Yet given the almost unanimous agreement among Western leaders that a military strike on Iran would be disastrous, it is deeply discouraging that they nevertheless remain incapable of mustering the will to enact the kind of sanctions that are the only alternative to such a strike — other than a nuclear Iran.

The flotilla crisis once again highlighted Israel’s public-relations failings. It’s mind-boggling, for instance, that only two days after the crisis broke did the government finally realize that it needs a permanent “virtual situation room” where people overseas can get up-to-date information about any breaking crisis. Yet while drastically improving Israel’s own efforts is essential, it’s not sufficient. Israel also needs more help from American and European Jewish organizations.

Many such organizations already do yeoman work, but more can and should be done. In an interview with Haaretz last month, for instance, Judea Pearl, who teaches at UCLA, noted that the anti-Israel movement on U.S. campuses is “nationally orchestrated.” Its leaders “act quickly and uniformly all over the campuses” and train “new cadres every year.” Hillel, in contrast, “thinks it can act locally, so they don’t have a national program to train people, send them to campuses and teach them how to respond.” He said he occasionally gets e-mails asking him to speak out on Israel issues, but only from small organizations — never from Hillel or any other “major Jewish organization.” That is a travesty.

Overseas Jewish groups are vital to the information effort because even people who genuinely care about Israel often lack the time and energy to amass relevant information. Two examples illustrate the problem. Sometime after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, I mentioned to my mother that ever since the withdrawal, Israel had suffered daily rocket strikes from Gaza. Having a daughter there, she clearly cares greatly about Israel. Yet she was shocked. “I had no idea,” she said. “That’s never reported in the American media.” And indeed, it wasn’t.

Example two: a European diplomat accredited to the Palestinian Authority once asked me why, when the anti-terror Mahmoud Abbas replaced the pro-terror Yasir Arafat as PA leader, Israel had not seized the opportunity to make peace. As part of my response, I e-mailed him a list of every Palestinian terror attack committed during Abbas’s year in sole control of the PA, before Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006. He was shocked; he hadn’t realized that terror continued under Abbas. Yet as a diplomat, he certainly knew more than most Europeans and certainly cared more; most Europeans don’t correspond with right-of-center Israeli journalists in an effort to obtain maximum information from multiple viewpoints.

In both cases, anyone who regularly read an Israeli paper online would have known the relevant facts. But most people don’t, and won’t. And that’s where Jewish organizations come in: by amassing and distributing information — to community rabbis, student organizations, and many others to whom they have far better access than Israel’s government — they could serve as vital intermediaries.

Information matters. The excellent information AIPAC gives Congress, for instance, undoubtedly contributes to Israel’s strong bipartisan support there. Better information also explains why many European leaders are far less anti-Israel than their publics. But Israel, though it needs to do much more, can’t do it alone. Faced with a massive worldwide delegitimization campaign, it desperately needs overseas Jewish groups to do more as well.

The Obama administration plans to use Israel’s botched raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla to force Jerusalem to end or at least drastically ease its blockade on Gaza, because “we need to remove the impulse for the flotillas,” a senior administration official told the New York Times. That single statement encapsulates everything that is wrong with Obama’s Mideast policy — and indeed, that of the entire West: willful blindness to facts that inevitably produces counterproductive policies.

First, the statement assumes the flotilla was indeed motivated solely by the blockade. Yet the organizers themselves — the Free Gaza movement and the Turkish group IHH — have both made it clear that their agenda is far broader.

After interviewing Free Gaza co-founder and spokeswoman Greta Berlin last week, the New York Times reported that Berlin “likes to joke” about her two ex-husbands — one Palestinian, one Jewish. “But when she is not joking she says that her detractors in Israel are right, that she does not accept Israel as a Jewish state.”

In short, Berlin isn’t motivated by Gaza’s “humanitarian distress” but rather by a desire to see Israel disappear. Thus her motivation to stage anti-Israel provocations won’t vanish just because the blockade does.

IHH founder Bulent Yildirim, addressing a Hamas rally in Gaza last year, certainly talked a lot about the blockade. But according to MEMRI’s translation, he also declared that “everything is progressing toward Islam”; offered Hamas “the blessings of Saladin,” destroyer of the Crusader Kingdom, to which Islamists often compare Israel; said that if only Hamas hadn’t declared a cease-fire, “all of Turkey would be in Gaza” to help it fight Israel; and warned “the Jews” that “we are here, in Turkey, in Egypt, Syria, and everywhere, and our daughters and our boys can also defeat you.” In short, his agenda, too, is not merely ending the blockade, but ending Israel — unless you assume, as Westerners repeatedly and mistakenly do, that people like Berlin and Yildirim don’t actually mean what they say.

That leads to the second half of the equation: counterproductive policies. Ending the blockade would indeed “remove the impulse” of genuine humanitarian activists, but they were never the problem. Misguided, yes: by letting Hamas rearm freely, ending the blockade would almost certainly lead to war, which would hurt ordinary Gazans far more than the blockade does. But as the Rachel Corrie‘s peaceful docking in Ashdod this weekend and previous peaceful dockings by other aid ships show, genuine humanitarians can deliver aid without causing international incidents that inflame the entire world.

People whose goal is Israel’s eradication, however, want to inflame the world against Israel — and also to undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself: both developments further their goal. Last week’s flotilla has already accomplished the first, and ending the Gaza blockade would advance the second.

Thus the administration’s response, far from “removing the impulse” for such provocations, will actually spark more of them, by proving that they are wildly successful. True, they wouldn’t be blockade-busting flotillas anymore. But experienced provocateurs like Berlin and Yildirim will have no trouble devising new forms.

Based on the information available three days ago, honest people of goodwill might truly have believed that Israeli soldiers perpetrated an atrocity on innocent peace activists aboard the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara. The information that has since emerged precludes any such belief.

Anyone who still believes, for instance, that these “peace activists” actually had peaceful intentions should study new video footage (see below) uploaded by the Israeli army yesterday. Taken from the Marmara‘s security cameras, it shows the “activists” preparing for battle by taking their weapons out of storage and putting them in easily accessible locales on deck, and occasionally brandishing them to get in the proper mood. In short, they did not attack the Israelis in self-defense; they had planned from the outset to do so. That is why they were able to launch the attack the moment the first soldier hit the deck, as a previously posted video shows.

The convoy’s Turkish organizer, Bulent Yildirim, also admitted today that the “activists” indeed seized the soldiers’ pistols, just as Israel claimed.

And anyone who still believes that Hamas cares a fig about the people of Gaza and their “humanitarian crisis” should study its decision not to let Israel transfer the flotilla’s aid cargo to Gaza. Hamas’s social welfare minister, Ahmed al-Kurd, said Hamas wouldn’t let the aid in unless (a) “Israel met all of the group’s conditions” and (b) it got permission from Turkey, where the flotilla was organized. A senior Israeli official from COGAT (the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) asked the obvious question: “If the aid is so urgent, my question is, why are they not allowing it into Gaza?”

Incidentally, the aid totaled “between 70 and 80 truckloads,” the official said. COGAT oversees the transfer of “between 80 and 100 truckloads of humanitarian aid into Gaza every day.”

And anyone who still believes those “peace activists” aboard the Marmara actually care about the people of Gaza and their “humanitarian crisis” should ask himself why they have yet to protest Hamas’s refusal to let the aid in. After all, if their whole purpose was to help needy Gazans, shouldn’t they be a trifle upset that the aid isn’t reaching its intended destination?

Instead, they are actively assisting the obstruction: COGAT said convoy organizers have refused to tell it who the aid’s intended recipients are — information needed to ensure that the cargo reaches its intended destination.

Finally, anyone who still has doubts about which side in this story cares about human life and which doesn’t should ponder these statements by Nilufer Cetin, one of the Turkish activists aboard the ship. Cetin insisted that she was justified in bringing her baby along, even though “we were aware of the possible danger.” She also said that though her husband refused deportation and was thus still in Israel, she opted to return “after Israeli officials warned that jail would be too harsh for her child.”

So who was showing greater concern for the child’s welfare — the woman who deliberately brought him into danger, or the Israelis who persuaded her not to take him to jail?

Yesterday’s press conference by Hanin Zuabi, an Israeli Arab Knesset member who was on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara when Israeli commandos boarded it on Monday, should be studied by every journalist or human-rights activist who ever believed a Palestinian atrocity tale. Here is Haaretz‘s report of it:

According to Zuabi, when the flotilla was 130 miles from shore, 14 naval ships approached and opened fire without warning. Only journalists, nurses and a doctor were on deck; none of them carried weapons. All the other passengers were either in their rooms or fled there as soon as the shooting began. …

Over and over, she insisted that the passengers engaged in no violence, that the soldiers had come with intent to kill and intimidate, that it was all planned in advance.

When reporters confronted her with the video footage released by the army and the soldiers’ testimony, and with the fact that several soldiers were wounded, Zuabi first evaded the questions, then finally insisted, “This is what I saw.”

This is a classic example of the Big Lie: even faced with incontrovertible evidence of her story’s falsity — the video footage of those peace-loving “journalists” and “nurses” attacking the soldiers, the seven hospitalized commandos — Zuabi stuck to it. And without this evidence, most of the world would surely have believed her. As David Horowitz noted in analyzing the army’s scandalous decision to withhold the footage for 12 hours, the claim that civilians overpowered highly trained commandos is not instantly plausible.

The first lesson is that the army must film every encounter with Palestinians or their supporters and make the footage readily available. It should have started doing so long ago; perhaps the success of the Marmara footage — which Haaretz said was the second-most-watched clip on YouTube yesterday, beating the third-place clip, Al-Jazeera’s version of the incident, by 150,000 hits — will finally persuade it.

The second lesson, as Noah correctly argued, is that Israel must start playing PR offense, not just defense: it can’t win if it spends all its time refuting Zuabi-style Big Lies, especially since proof won’t always be available. In June 2008, for instance, Hamas accused Israel of bombing a house in Gaza and killing seven civilians; it later emerged that the house blew up because Hamas operatives were making a bomb for use against Israel, which exploded prematurely. But since Israel wasn’t involved, there could have been no exculpatory Israeli footage even if a “film-everything” policy existed.

Noah outlined a case against Turkey, but top priority must be the case against the Palestinians. That requires a PR offensive covering everything from Palestinian hate education to Hamas’s abuse of its own people to Israel’s own legal claim to the territories.

Israelis often assume that what’s obvious to them is also obvious to the rest of the world, and therefore doesn’t need saying. That is partly why the army felt no need to immediately release the Marmara footage: Israelis already knew “their boys” weren’t wanton murderers. But most people don’t know what Israelis know. And they never will unless Israel tells them.

Shmuel Rosner at the Jerusalem Post aptly identifies two things on which the “vast majority of Israelis” would probably agree: first, “letting the flotilla into Gaza was not an option,” because ending the naval blockade would allow Hamas to import huge quantities of arms that, as recent history proves, would be used against Israeli civilians. And second, “letting peace activists stab Israeli soldiers with knives and hammer them and axe them was also not an option”: in a life-threatening situation, soldiers are supposed to defend themselves, not let themselves be killed. These two points are the heart of the matter, and CONTENTIONS contributors rightly focused on them yesterday.

Nevertheless, I can’t agree with Jonathan that given the circumstances, “the question of whether Israel’s forces might have been better prepared” is “insignificant.” Israel knows that much of the world will seize on any pretext to condemn it, justified or not; it also knows there will be many times when it cannot avoid providing such pretexts: for instance, it couldn’t let its citizens suffer daily rocket fire from Gaza forever, even knowing that last year’s successful military action against Hamas would spark widespread denunciations. Therefore, it must take extra care to avoid providing unnecessary pretexts for condemnation. And in this case, it failed to take even minimal precautions.

For instance, the radical nature of IHH, the Turkish group that organized the flotilla, was well known. J.E. Dyer detailed it for CONTENTIONS readers yesterday; similar information is available from Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. The center was founded by retired members of Israel’s intelligence community and cooperates closely with this community; anything it knows would also have been known to the Israel Defense Forces — or at least should have been.

But given that the flotilla was organized by a group with links to al-Qaeda and other “jihadist terrorist networks in Bosnia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya” — a group that actively provided “logistical support and funding” to such networks and kept weapons, explosives, and instructions for making improvised explosive devices in its Istanbul offices — how could the IDF possibly have “planned on dealing with peace activists, not a battle,” as one senior naval officer said afterward? Al-Qaeda affiliates are not generally known for peaceful demonstrations.

For that matter, neither are some of the left-wing activists Israel attracts — as nobody knows better than the IDF: it confronts them weekly at demonstrations against the security fence in Bili’in. Though Palestinian shills term these protests “nonviolent,” they are anything but: masked men routinely use slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli troops and have wounded many; one Israeli policeman was permanently blinded when a hurled stone took out his eye. The IDF would never send a lone soldier into the mob at Bili’in. So why send soldiers to rappel one by one into the mob aboard the Marmara, making them easy pickings?

This is the kind of unforced error Israel cannot afford to make. It may be unfair that Israel can’t afford mistakes that other countries make with impunity, but it’s reality. And Israel must start learning to deal with it.