Gaza flotilla attack: there are shades of grey on both sides

If the Israelis should not have dropped the wrong kind of forces from helicopters, the protesters were surely wrong to have placed themselves in harm’s way in such large and disparate numbers.

The worldwide chorus of criticism over Israel’s seizure of the Gaza Freedom flotilla has become so deafening that there must be something to be said in Israel’s defence. Let’s try.

Mind you, launching special forces onto the decks of crowded vessels in darkness – and in international waters, too – those Israelis don’t make it easy, do they?

As the Israeli commentator Yossi Melman srote in Ha’aretz yesterday, don’t they remember anything from their own brilliant Zionist propaganda coups of the 1940s – sending crowded boats full of European Jewish refugees to break the Royal Navy’s blockade of British-mandated Palestine? The other side obviously remembered.

Does this sound familiar this week? The armed British assault on the SS Exodus in 1947 and its aftermath were such a “success” – ie a PR disaster for the Brits after three people on board died – that Leon Uris wrote the book Exodus about it and Otto Preminger made a movie out of it. For Exodus, substitute Mavi Marmara.

Needless to say, the French were unhelpful and the British left Palestine to its unhappily divided fate soon after. We still live with the consequences.

But, then as now, in such conflicts where ardent protagonists on both sides see everything in black and white, the sensible reaction is surely to start looking for shades of grey.

I happened to be reading John le Carre’s Islamist thriller A Most Wanted Man over the holiday weekend, and it was a subtle study of everyone’s ethical greys, right up to the last few pages when the author clearly decided to finish it quickly and go out for lunch.

So let’s look for greys. If the Israelis should not have dropped the wrong kind of forces from helicopters – always scary when overhead – the protesters were surely wrong to have placed themselves in harm’s way in such large and disparate numbers.

I mean to say, would you want old people and women with children – especially with children – on a trip like that, however strongly you felt about the plight of Gaza under siege?

When I read of people doing that sort of thing, I’m afraid it reminds me of Mrs Jellaby in Dickens’s Bleak House, who espoused all sorts of good causes far from the home and family she so neglected.

We understand why activists feel moved to do such things, but we don’t always have to approve. Every day, I pass within sight and sound of the activist camp on Parliament Square, protesting about all manner of things such as “peace in Afghanistan NOW”. I’m not sure they’re doing anyone but themselves much good.