Violence vs Non-violence

I just watched the video of Israeli commandos rappelling onto one of the ships of the Gaza relief convoy. It looks like the commandos and the passengers on the ships are working off two different scripts. The Israelis are working off the standard non-violent resistance script. The Israeli role is to play the heavy, intercepting a peaceful humanitarian mission in international waters. The “activists” on the convoy, by peacefully resisting, establish the moral high ground, and focus international attention on the justice of their cause.

The folks on the convoy were apparently not working off that script. They were attempting to repel enemy boarders. There is nothing non-violent about clubbing someone to death with a metal bar, which is clearly what the passengers were attempting to do.

The Israelis were clearly surprised by the ferocity of the reaction to their boarding. Near the end of the video you can see one of the commandos pointing a paintball gun at the passengers. I’m thinking they wouldn’t have been carrying paintball guns if they had planned on things turning as ugly as they did.

Of course, at some stage of the proceedings the commandos declined to be swarmed and beaten to death. They pulled out the real guns they were carrying and used them. The escalation of the violence caused ten times the international reaction that a non-violent incident would have engendered.

This has become an public relations disaster for Israel.