The BBC for some time now have been happily spreading the narrative that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is 'illegal under international law', so I was interested to read in the BBC's report on the leaked UN report on the flotilla incident:
'But the report also concludes that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is legal'If the BBC are happy to accept the report's findings that:
'Israeli forces did use excessive force when they intercepted the Turkish-led flotilla trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza.', and the BBC will be. If the BBC are happy to repeat that particular finding then they should also be happy to repeat just as often that 'Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is legal'. BBC presenters should also correct callers to phone-ins who claim that the naval blockade is illegal with the words 'but the UN report says that the naval blockade is legal', however somehow I doubt that this will happen.
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I saw this and wondered how they managed to choke this one down. Have you noticed how they did it though (at least certainly at the start) when they did via the NY Times article. It kind of puts some distance between them and the UN viewpoint.
I think however this has something to do with them accepting the lesser of two evils in terms of the report's findings. All the Plamer report has really done in this aspect is agree that legal interpretation of international law at sea from San Remo in the Turkel commission report is sound, which shouldn't really be a surprise as one of the members of the Turkel commission was a key contributor to that manual.
Having read the Palmer report there is another narrative that hasn't seen the light of day in MSM reporting. That finding is that the so called humanitarian aspect was secondary to the publicity that they sought and that their intention was to attempt a breach of the blockade, in other words there was a real desire to cause an incident. In other words this wasn't bad Israel trying to prevent humanitarian assistance at all. This was a group with little real concern for the humanitarian plight of Gazans compared to opportunity to use them as basis for point scoring which would have blown the lid off the entire Gaza problem.
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