Not able to lash out at enemies, Israel has turned against its friends, writes Abdel-Moneim Said Most probably the furore surrounding the savage Israeli assaults on the Freedom Flotilla on 31 May 2010, which led to the death of nine people among whom were eight Turks and one American of Turkish origin, will eventually blow over as has been the case with other no less saddening tragedies that have darkened the skies, land and seas of the Middle East. The convoy originally consisted of eight ships, though two were held up for technical reasons (isn't this another familiar phenomenon in the Middle East?). All told, the convoy was carrying some 750 humanitarian activists and aid workers who sympathise with the people of Gaza. The Turkish flag ships departed from Istanbul to join the other three at the port of Limassol, Cyprus, from where the six ships together set sail for Gaza on 29 May 2010. The lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, bore the brunt of the Israeli attack, and thus received the most media attention. It had been purchased by Insani Yardym Vakfy (IHH), an Islamic charity organisation known to support the Palestinian cause and that engages in numerous relief, aid, healthcare and other philanthropic projects. Founded in the early 1990s, IHH broadened its activities from assisting the urban poor in Istanbul to supplying aid to Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s. Since then, according to some estimates, the foundation has made its presence felt in over 100 countries. Israel failed to persuade Ankara to prevent the Freedom Flotilla from attempting to break the siege on Gaza and the flotilla organisers also rejected an Israeli proposal asking it to ship the relief cargo onboard the vessels to Israel from where it would be transferred into Gaza by international aid organisations and the UN under Israeli supervision. It was thus clear that the primary aim of the mission was to break the blockade on Gaza without waiting for Israeli permission, and hence to change the three-year long status quo. The immediate repercussions from the attack are well known, from the initial outcry and protests to an emergency session of the UN Security Council and angry condemnations issued by the UN secretary-general and other international organisations. Amidst this din, Arab governments are in a quandary. They, too, are bellowing protestations and denunciations. But the denunciation, as generally happens, will beg another, because not a few will begin to ask the question: Now what? After all those declarations are we going to stop there, or is there something else we can do? And between the lines we read the question as to whether the Arab countries should mount a "militant" operation against Israel or instead encourage and abet the people who carry out such operations, in order to make life for Israel difficult or at least to make it pay the price for its aggression. As usual, the only country that is being told to undertake a long list of actions is Egypt, which is expected to expel the Israeli ambassador, withdraw its ambassador from Tel Aviv, and cut off existing economic relations. But what is the next step after taking all these steps? No one stops to ask when other Arab countries are going to recover their occupied territories. The Arab countries have experienced this dilemma since 1948 as they went between war and truces and settlement processes. It was an endless cycle with no way out. No one could offer peace and no one could wage a victorious war. Rather we marched through a train of incidents and responses, whether an air battle, a skirmish or a full- fledged war, or an attack on a ship, as just occurred. The dilemma has also been experienced by Israel, which appears determined never to live a stable life. No matter how high the per capita GDP in Israel, Israelis will never have the opportunity to enjoy it, not as long as the Israeli government and Israeli policy is incurring hatred for Israelis everywhere. Israel can now see its ugly face in the mirror of its severely, perhaps irreparably, damaged relations with Turkey. Turkey's NATO status had brought it close to Israel in Middle East politics, and with the peace process Turkey found a cover to forge an alliance between Ankara and Israel. Turkish-Israeli relations were by no means ordinary relations, and they certainly were not just about a balance of trade in excess of $5.2 billion. The two countries had forged extremely close military and intelligence ties and conducted numerous joint air and naval manoeuvres. Were you to visit Antalya in southern Turkey, you wouldn't know whether you were in a Turkish or Hebrew-speaking town from the number of Israeli tourists there. Such phenomena speak of close bilateral relations, as those that exist between Belgium and Holland, for example. Israelis say that this is the kind of peace they want. So what comes next? Turkey cannot sever itself from the long cultural and historical legacy it shares with the Arab world, or even its economic and strategic relations with Arab countries, so it cannot disregard the Palestinian cause. Israel cannot alter the fact that its establishment in the middle of the Middle East rested on an aggressiveness that targets friends if it cannot target foes. The Middle Eastern dilemma has landed everyone in an inescapable cage. Or perhaps it is more in the nature of a hole into which they keep digging themselves deeper. If they even try to scramble up the sides, more dirt keeps caving in on them. The succession of several generations and six decades of intransigence have not been enough to compel them to find a way out of this historical trap. The Freedom Flotilla from this perspective is not the tragedy of a group of compassionate civilians. It is the living embodiment of a confrontation between a group of people who avoided dealing with the issues that initially brought on the blockade and moved on to the attempt to alleviate the effects of the blockade and, on the other hand, a state that has no enemies at hand to strike, so it has started to lash out at its friends instead. Caught in the muddle of the endless dilemma, those friends could only fire another barrage of condemnations and international and regional declarations. And so another page in history turns.
