Netanyahu: Israel's legitimacy is being attacked

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Wednesday that Israel's legitimacy is being attacked, during a Knesset discussion on Israel's collapsing international status.

"We know that the attacks on Israel are threatening its existence, since we constantly hear people saying 'go back to Poland or Morocco'. They are essentially telling us to dismantle the Zionist enterprise."

"They want to strip us of the natural right to defend ourselves. When we defend ourselves against rocket attack, we are accused of war crimes. We cannot board sea vessels when our soldiers are being attacked and fired upon, because that is a war crime."

<snip>

"The Palestinian side promoted the Goldstone report, organized boycotts, and tried to prevent our entrance into the OECD. The Palestinian Authority has no intentions of engaging in direct talks with us," Netanyahu exclaimed.

"I call on Abbas, yet again, to enter direct talks with us, because there is no other way to solve the conflict between us without direct dialogue. How could we possibly live side by side if they can't even enter the same room as us?"

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-israel-s-legitimacy-is-being-attacked-1.297914

Or are you unfamiliar with, for example, the Tilman case? WATERGATE? Bush's missing millions of emails? Bush's military record? The 18 minute gap?

I am sure you are also deeply concerned about the recent ethnic strife between the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz people. I look forward to seeing your threads questioning the legitimacy of their government.

What about the legitimacy of a Palestine state?

Right now there are two different people claiming to be the Prime Minister.

Would be to join the fight against Netanyahu and his pro-death, anti-peace policies. The Likudnik obsession with preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state does the people of Israel no good at all.

The only way to defend Israel's legitimacy is to speak out when its government does insane and pointlessly dangerous things, like expanding the illegal settlements and continuing to impose collective punishment on Palestinians.

The hawk politicians and the IDF high command are the true enemies of Israel. There's no good reason you should believe anything any of them say or carry their water in this forum.

into a widespread threat of "THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!"

And existential fear pushes perceptions further and further to the right.

a Jewish Zionist of South African descent (who used to do research for the Israeli army), a Turkish Jew, 2 Turkish Muslims, and an American Jew when the Gaza flotilla incident occurred. All of them said that it was a stupid thing for Israel to have done and at least some of them predicted that it be the end of Israel (including the Turkish Jew). No, Netanyahu, Israel's legitimacy is not being attacked, you attacked and potentially mortally damaged your legitimacy all on your own. When even a Zionist and a Turkish Jew (whose loyalties would at best have been conflicted) think you behaved stupidly, you're in BIG trouble.

But does he accept any reponsibility for his failure? No. It's all about the other guys and their nefarious intentions, nothing about Bibi and what an incompetent self-absorbed hack he is.

The fact is that Netanyahu is simply using the GW Bush defense. His invocation of fear in regard to the very existence of Israel is nothing more than the first offering of dictators, authoritarians and despots since time began. It is exactly the message used by BushCo in their raping and pillaging of the American Constitution. Quite simply, BiBi and BushCo are birds of the same feather. At the root of it all though is money and power. Both thrive and profit handsomely from the notion of perpetual war. It fills their and their allies pockets and keeps them in power which is why they ALWAYS invoke existential fear, racism and scapegoating as the first line of defense for their crimes.

along with the much touted "right to exist" however what the international community is really calling into question is legitimacy of Israel's actions not it's legitimacy as a nation as Netanyahu and Israel's "supporters" imply

Is threatening Israeli legitimacy.

All the weapons in the world cannot protect Israel from its own blind stupidity.

Netanyahu makes it sound like it was the other way round.

Israeli soldiers boarded each of the six ships.

Why were the soldiers only attacked on this particular one and not on any of the other five ships in the flotilla?

I was watching live streaming video from the Yardim Vaki and you could hear explosions in the background but there was no boarding during that time albeit very short as the transmission was jammed

it really makes no difference Israel killed 9 people no matter how you try to justify their deaths as somehow being deserved

Also, why pretend Israel just decided to murder 9 innocent humanitarians for no reason whatsoever?

What's the point?

is the attempts to desecrate the memories of the people killed by defaming them.

I don't understand how the answer to that question relates to the question I asked.

Can you clarify?

My question was a direct response to that claim.

If the poster's statement is true, that soldiers were attacked because they boarded a ship, then shouldn't the soldiers have been attacked on all the ships they boarded?

We know that this did not happen, which begs the question:

Why did the soldiers boarding of this ship lead to an attack while the soldiers boarding of the other ships in the flotilla did not lead to an attack?

the Mavi Mamara was the first boat boarded which I believe it was, the use of deadly force during that episode may well have acted as a deterrent to the other boats however it should be also noted that there were IHH members on at the very least the Yardim Vaki

If bank robbery is usually successful and occasionally the clerk has a gun and shoots the robber, then they fact that I've robbed five other banks doesn't mean that when I get shot at the sixth it wasn't because I was robbing the bank.

My question is based on what actually happened, not vague analogies.

Do you have any insights into why things went they way they did on only one of the six boats in the flotilla and not on the other five?

If you insist on playing dumb and want it spelled out even more plainly, being attacked is something that sometimes, but not always, happens as a result of boarding a ship.

Your question is entirely irrelevant and at attempt to divert attention away from my point that the attack on the IDF was in no way unprovoked or unjustified; the answer is "Because on five of the ships the protestors chose not to defend themselves, either because they didn't want to be murdered or because they prefered a purely non-violent protest, while on the Mavi Marmara a significant minority of the protestors chose to fight back".

If you went to a rally to protest the US involvement in the Iraq war and the police tried to force you to remain in a "protest area" would you be justified in attacking said police officers with whatever items you could get your hands on? Would you be justified in trying to steal their weapons and take shots at them?

Even if you believe the answer to be yes, are those actions consistent with a non-violent, anti-war, pro-peace movement?

I think it is fair to say that your second point is quite a salient one.

The people on the other boats were looking to participate in a non-violent protest, while a significant minority of people on the boat in question were looking to participate in - what would be the opposite of a non-violent protest? A violent confrontation?

If everyone involved in the flotilla (on all six ships) had engaged in a non-violent protest, would anyone have gotten killed?

If everyone involved in the flotilla had remained totally non-violent, I suspect that no-one on the flotilla would have been killed, but that the border between Gaza and Egypt would still be sealed and that Israel would not have relaxed its blockade, and so more people would have died in Gaza as a result.

I think it very likely that the protestors on the Mavi Marmara who tried to defend themselves against the IDF knew that the IDF would overeact and that some of them would probably be killed as a result, and wanted this to happen - they calculated, quite correctly, that it would result in more pressure to lift the blockade.

Also, I presume you don't need me to point out that an analogy between Israel attacking a ship in international waters and the police enforcing the law is both absurd and offensive. If Israel had had any legal or moral right to board those ships, trying to resist by force might arguably have been wrong; since it had none whatsoever, the defenders were entirely in the right.

so the 'police' in your analogy were operating without jurisdiction and as such became little more than thugs in uniform. As such they had no more rights to board the vessel uninvited than Somali pirates and could be lawfully resisted. For exercising this right to defend their ship from illegal boarding 9 people died and dozens more were injured.

A 19 year old kid was shot 5 times including point blank in the face and back of the head. Care to rustle up an analogy for THAT?