Israel Matzav

What Israel should be doing with the Palmer Commission report

One thing we ought to be doing with the Palmer Commission report is spreading it far and wide to anyone and everyone who might be interested in it. And so, in the interest of doing so, I am embedding the full report below for those of you who have not seen it yet.

After the report, I am going to share with you one smart woman's prescription for what Israel ought to be doing with the Palmer Commission report.

Palmer Committee Final Report

So what else should we be doing with the Palmer Commission report? Evelyn Gordon argues, in a piece that's behind the JPost paywall, but which she sent to me by email, that Israel should be leveraging the Palmer Commission report.

First, if anyone still harbored the illusion that the Israeli-Turkish relationship was salvageable, Ankara’s response to the report ought to disabuse them of this notion. What Turkey’s response makes clear is that Ankara never had the slightest interest in repairing its relationship with Jerusalem; what it wanted was to further blacken Israel’s international image, undermine Israel’s vital security interests and humiliate Israel by forcing it to come crawling. And given the UN’s anti-Israel record, Ankara understandably counted on the Palmer Report to do all three: blacken Israel’s image by finding it criminally culpable in the flotilla deaths; undermine its security interests by ruling the Gaza blockade illegal, thereby pressuring Israel to end it; and demand that Israel apologize to Turkey for the incident.

But when the report failed to do any of the above, Turkey flatly refused to accept its conclusions. Instead, it announced that it will pursue all the above goals by other means: It will try to secure indictments against Israeli officers and politicians in any court willing to take the case; it will appeal the Gaza blockade to a different UN forum, the International Court of Justice, which – given the precedent of the ICJ’s ruling on the security fence – would likely accept Turkey’s contention regarding its illegality; it will offer future flotillas to Gaza a Turkish naval escort, on the theory that Israel would have to let these flotillas through rather than risk war with Turkey, thereby effectively ending the blockade; and it will rescind these and other hostile measures only if Israel renders them unnecessary by surrendering unconditionally – i.e., by admitting culpability for the deaths, apologizing and ending the blockade.

In so doing, Turkey has made its position too clear for even the rosiest of rose-tinted glasses to disguise: It has irrevocably joined the anti-Israel camp, and seeks only to undermine Israel in any way possible.

But the Obama Administration’s reaction has been no less instructive. Start with the fact that US President Barack Obama worked a miracle I would have sworn was impossible: creating a UN-sponsored inquiry on Israel that produced reasonably fair and balanced conclusions. Add in the fact that Obama has been struggling to convince American Jews of his pro-Israel bona fides, and this would seem to be a golden opportunity to trumpet a pro-Israel achievement. All he would have to do is back the committee he himself established and demand that Turkey accept its conclusions (as Israel has) instead of escalating the conflict via its threatened legal and military moves.

Instead, the administration is still demanding that Israel apologize to Turkey, even though the Palmer Report pointedly avoided demanding any such thing: It said merely that Israel should express regret and offer compensation to the bereaved families – both steps Israel has repeatedly offered to take, but that Turkey rejected as insufficient, insisting nothing less than an apology (i.e., an admission of culpability) would do.

Moreover, Washington has yet to utter a word of criticism of Ankara over its refusal to accept the report’s conclusions and its crude anti-Israel threats. Even Germany’s normally anti-Israel foreign minister – who himself deemed the Gaza blockade “unacceptable” less than a year ago – managed to say that Turkey should take the report’s conclusions “seriously” and avoid “aggravating the situation.” Yet the Obama administration has been silent.

The inescapable conclusion is that Obama’s goal in establishing the Palmer Commission was in fact identical to Turkey’s: He wanted a report that would incriminate Israel and thereby pressure it to capitulate to Turkey’s demands. And since, under heavy pressure from Obama, Israel agreed to cooperate with the commission – in contrast to its usual practice of boycotting UN inquiries because the UN is hopelessly biased against it – the administration would have had strong grounds for demanding that Israel accept the report’s conclusions even had they been unfavorable.

Yet since Turkey also cooperated, the administration has equally strong grounds for demanding that it accept the report’s conclusions. The thunderous silence Washington has maintained instead speaks louder than words: This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, and now we don’t quite know what to do to achieve the desired Israeli capitulation beyond continuing our behind-the-scenes pressure for an Israeli apology.

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Israel should be leveraging the Palmer Report – and Turkey’s rejection of it – to prove to the world that Turkey under the AKP is no longer a force for regional stability; it has become a fomenter of conflict, and must be treated as such. Granted, it would be helpful to have Washington’s backing in this endeavor, but as the Obama administration’s response to the report makes clear, that won’t happen: In this spat (as in most others), Obama is backing Israel’s enemy.

Nevertheless, Israel must do its best to press this point on its own. The Palmer Report is a golden opportunity to force the world to face up to the reality that Turkey has changed. Jerusalem must not waste it by continuing the empty pretense that Ankara is still the valued ally of yesteryear.

So why isn't the Netanyahu government leveraging the Palmer report. Turning on a radio in Israel today is instructive. Tuesday morning's report about spying on the Israeli embassy in Washington has been pushed to the side. The number one story on every newscast is Robert Gates' comments about Prime Minister Netanyahu. The media is playing this story to show how Israel is isolated in the World. And Netanyahu's rival - Tzipi Livni - issued a statement as 'the Kadima party' indicating that's exactly what Gates' comments show: That Israel is isolated in the World because of Netanyahu's policies.

Two weeks before the UN vote on the 'Palestinians' unilateral declaration of independence, a vote that is likely to show just how isolated Israel is in the World, the last thing Netanyahu wants to do is to take advantage of a UN report that is favorable to us which the Obama administration would like us to ignore.

Do I agree that we are isolated because of Netanyahu's policies? Absolutely not. In fact, I believe that if Kadima were in power, Livni or Shaul Mofaz would be pursuing pretty mucsh the same policies that Netanyahu is pursuing (although the 'Palestinians' might be talking to Livni or Mofaz even if they would get no further than they have gone with Netanyahu). And I believe that the Israeli Left has done more than its share to damage Netanyahu even at a cost to Israel out of their visceral hatred toward him, and may even be advising the 'Palestinians' not to talk to Netanyahu in the hope that will eventually lead to him losing power.

Do I agree that Israel ought to be leveraging the Palmer report? Absolutely. But for the next two weeks, I think Netanyahu wants to sit tight and get through the UN story and not risk another blow-up with Obama. There are too many people out there who are waiting, hoping such a blow-up will happen so that Netanyahu can be blamed for the consequences of whatever happens at the UN.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Palmer Commission, Robert Gates, Tzipi Livni

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:35 PM