© Momen Faiz/NurPhoto/Sipa via AP
For its part, Israel knows who's to blame for the 100-plus Palestinians dead and the thousands wounded during the demonstrations: Hamas. "They're pushing civilians - women, children - into the line of fire," Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu claimed this week, with no evidence whatsoever. The Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, tweeted that Hamas's "tools for infiltrating Israel" include "children," "disabled civilians," and, most terrifyingly, "rope tied to fence."
But there's a stupendous historical irony to Israel's manufactured outrage: Israel itself claimed that a far less stringent embargo by Egypt in 1967 was a legitimate casus belli for Israel to attack Egypt (which led to Israel seizing control of Gaza and eventually imposing the embargo on it).
Israel opened fire first during the Six-Day War on June 5, 1967, with an air and land attack on Egypt. But, Israel declared, Egypt had actually started the war several weeks before, when it blockaded the Straits of Tiran, which prevented Israel from shipping goods through the Red Sea.
But if it were legal for Israel to bomb and invade Egypt in 1967 and then occupy Palestinian land for decades, it logically follows that Palestinians in Gaza have had the right to attack and occupy Israel ever since the Israeli blockade began in 2007. Fair's fair. This absolutely doesn't mean that Palestinians should do that, even if they somehow could, which they can't. But the silent hypocrisy surrounding the issue is bleakly funny - Israel can fire missiles, drop bombs, and seize land when subjected to a blockade, but Palestinians are monsters when they throw rocks and burn tires in response to a much more suffocating siege.
Israel's 1967 legal stance can be found in a speech at the U.N. by the country's then-Foreign Minister Abba Eban. Here's the key paragraph:
The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through armed violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side. From May 24 onward, the questions who started the war or who fired the first shot became momentously irrelevant. There is no difference in civil law between murdering a man by slow strangulation or killing him by a shot in the head. From the moment at which the blockade was imposed, active hostilities had commenced and Israel owed Egypt nothing of her Charter rights. If a foreign power sought to close Odessa or Copenhagen or Marseilles or New York harbor by the use of force, what would happen? Would there be a discussion about who had fired the first shot? Would anyone ask whether aggression had begun?It's fairly rare online, but it appears on the website of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and relevant excerpts can be found on the website of the IDF, in a paper called "Self-Defense in International Law: The Case of the Six Day War."
Map of the Suez Canal, the Rea Sea Port in Eilat, Israel, and the Straits of Tiran
In fact, Eban's heartfelt denunciation of blockades seems far more applicable to the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
In 2006, the Bush administration pressed the Palestinian National Authority to hold elections, but was surprised when Hamas won a majority of seats on the Palestinian Legislative Council. Rather than accept the results of the election, the Bush administration tried to organize a coup by Fatah, America's clients, to overthrow the Hamas-led government. This backfired spectacularly, leading Hamas to seize control of Gaza, with Fatah holding power in the West Bank.
During this period, Israel mercilessly tightened its control of Gaza's borders, at times going so far as to prohibit the import of such goods as nutmeg, fishing rods, and A4 paper. More significantly, restrictions on building materials and fuel made it extremely difficult for Gazans to rebuild after several brutal bombing campaigns by Israel.
© UN GCHA
Before joining First Look, Jon Schwarz worked for Michael Moore's Dog Eat Dog Films and was Research Producer for Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. He's contributed to many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Slate, as well as NPR and Saturday Night Live. In 2003 he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of mass destruction.
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Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had previously come under sharp criticism for his failure to aid Syria and Jordan against Israel; he had also been accused of hiding behind the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed at Egypt’s border with Israel in the Sinai. Now, however, he moved to unambiguously demonstrate support for Syria: on May 14, 1967, Nasser mobilized Egyptian forces in the Sinai; on May 18 he formally requested the removal of the UNEF stationed there; and on May 22 he closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, thus instituting an effective blockade of the port city of Elat in southern Israel. On May 30, King Ḥussein of Jordan arrived in Cairo to sign a mutual defense pact with Egypt, placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command; shortly thereafter, Iraq too joined the alliance.
In response to the apparent mobilization of its Arab neighbours, early on the morning of June 5, Israel staged a sudden preemptive air assault that destroyed more than 90 percent Egypt’s air force on the tarmac. A similar air assault incapacitated the Syrian air force. Without cover from the air, the Egyptian army was left vulnerable to attack. Within three days the Israelis had achieved an overwhelming victory on the ground, capturing the Gaza Strip and all of the Sinai Peninsula up to the east bank of the Suez Canal.
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