Glick Sees the Flotilla Mess as Yet Another Israeli Failure

As always, Caroline Glick offers much needed clarity, this time on the meaning and ramifications of the flotilla mess:

...Given the months-long build-up to the NPT review conference, and the weeks-long build-up to the Turkish-Hamas flotilla, that surprise cannot be attributed to a lack of information. What it points to rather is a cognitive failure of Israel's leaders - from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu down - to understand the nature of the war being waged against us. And it is this fundamental failure of cognition that has landed six soldiers in the hospital, Israel's international reputation in tatters and Israeli spokesmen - from Netanyahu down - searching for a way to describe a reality they do not understand and explain how they will cope with challenges that confound them.

The reality is simple and stark. Israel is the target of a massive information war that is unprecedented in scale and scope. This war is being waged primarily by a massive consortium of the international Left and the Arab and Islamic worlds. The staggering scale of the forces aligned against Israel is demonstrated by two things.

The Hamas abetting Free Gaza website published a list of some 222 organizations that endorsed the terror-supporting flotilla. The listed organizations hail from the four corners of the earth. They include Jewish anti-Israel groups as well as Christian, Islamic and non-religious anti-Israel groups. It is hard to think of any cause other than Israel-bashing that could unite such disparate forces.

The second indicator of the scope of the war against Israel is far more devastating than the list of groups that endorsed the pro-Hamas flotilla. That indicator is the fact that at the UN on Friday, 189 governments of 189 countries came together as one to savage Israel. There is no other issue that commands such unanimity. The NPT review conference demonstrated that the only way the international community will agree on anything is if its members are agreeing that Israel has no right to defend itself. The NPT review conference's campaign against Israel shows that the 222 organizations supporting Hamas are a reflection of the will of the majority - not a minority - of the nations of the world.

This war against Israel is nothing new. It has been going on since the dawn of modern Zionism 150 years ago. In many ways, it is just the current iteration of the eternal war against the Jewish people...

If we are to win the current phase of the eternal war, we're going to have to be a lot smarter than our enemies and think of ways to not hand them these PR victories on a silver platter.

Update: Then again, Claudia Rosett is a pretty smart cookie, too, and she has a slightly different take on the matter:

The real crisis here is not the fate of the Gaza Terror Flotilla per se, whose organizers have now got the headlines they wanted. The blood is on their hands. The real crisis involves the profound unwisdom of a democratic world that finds it easier to criticize and condemn Israel than to face the mortal threats proliferating in the Middle East. While the headlines, the political grandstanders and the UN Security Council now focus on this propaganda coup prepared by supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah is rearming in Lebanon, Turkey is engaged in a dangerous shift from its old alliances with the West toward new partnerships with Syria and Iran, and Iran continues its march toward the nuclear bomb. Does anyone in the West really believe that the threat here is to Israel alone? In this latest clash over the terrorist enclave of Gaza, the real question that wants answering is why did no democratic country send its ships to Israel’s aid, to make common cause against this terror-loving flotilla? Or – with the blessings of the UN, Turkey and armed “peace activists” — are terrorist-run enclaves such as Gaza, dedicated to the extermination of entire nation states, now to become an accepted feature of the international system?

I have a bit of a problem with the word "become," since it implies that the transition--from terrorist-run enclaves not being accepted to their becoming accepted--has yet to occur. In reality, that acceptance has been plain ever since Yasser "That's My Baby" Arafat addressed the world sporting a gun belt and the by now all-too familiar crapola about the colonialist, imperialist Jews usurping Arab land.