(HOST) Tomorrow will mark the 43rd anniversary of the start of the 1967 Six Day Arab Israeli War. This morning commentator and veteran ABC News foreign correspondent Barrie Dunsmore explains how the outcome of that brief conflict has shaped Middle East history for more than four decades.
(DUNSMORE) Heated arguments continue over who is responsible for the violence earlier this week when Israeli commandos boarded a flotilla of Turkish flagged ships carrying relief supplies to Gaza in defiance of an Israeli blockade. At least nine pro-Palestinian activists aboard the flotilla were killed and dozens injured — and several Israeli commandos were wounded. The Israeli military has videos it claims support its position that those on the boats are to blame for the bloodshed. The civilians aboard the ships have their own videos with a totally different perspective.
But, as George Packer wrote in this week’s New Yorker in an article titled, "Israel Takes the Bait": "The purpose of the convoy was not primarily to bring aid to desperate Gazans but to call attention to the Israeli blockade and turn world opinion overwhelmingly against it. …By this standard, the incident could not have gone better."
Nowadays, the struggle to win the public relations war is far more sophisticated than ever. In June 1967, for example, my report of Israeli troops taking the Suez Canal was not seen on American television until two days after the fact, giving it limited propaganda value. In contrast, the activists of the flotilla were webcasting live, right up to the moment of confrontation with the commandos. Within hours the Israeli Defense Forces had posted 20 videos on YouTube with a reported 600,000 hits.
But much of this desperate attempt to score P.R. points strikes me as missing the fundamental issue. There is a reason the region remains in a state of war — namely, because much of the Arab territory Israel captured in 1967 remains under Israeli military control. Neither side is blameless for the repeated tragic failures to resolve this problem over more than 40 years.
In Gaza today about a million and a half Palestinians are subsisting after a three-year Israeli siege that included a devastating bombing campaign in December 2008, which literally flattened Gaza and killed up to 1,400 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis died in that fighting.
Yes, Israel was responding to attacks by the terrorist group Hamas, which controls Gaza and regularly fired rockets into nearby Israeli towns. And yes, Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist.
That said, Israel is within its rights to try to ensure that humanitarian relief shipments do not contain hidden weapons. But its rules about what aid it actually allows into Gaza have been severely restrictive and often capricious. The World Health Organization says Israel has been blocking vital medical supplies and equipment from entering Gaza. And mortality rates in Gaza are now reportedly 30 percent higher than those among Palestinians on the West Bank.
This week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that the blockade of Gaza is "unsustainable" and "unacceptable." However, the dilemma for the Obama administration is how to end or mitigate that blockade, given Israel’s increasing sense of international isolation, and the powerful support it retains in the U.S. Congress.