Weekend Recap and the Flotilla Raid

This Shabbat was pretty quiet. Boaz went home and I stayed with Shoko in Dimona and got to meet Orr's new boyfriend. I tried making gazpacho and it came out pretty tasty but it's been a while so it wasn't so soupy. I'll have to try again. I spent the rest of Shabbat re-reading all of "One State, Two States." Good read.

Yesterday in Conflict Resolution our professor split up the class into those who are pro-Israel and pro-Palestine and then had each group present the other's narrative. I was the Palestinian spokesman and I had to tear apart the Zionist narrative, which I did quite thoroughly by explaining that parts of the traditional narrative just aren't true, highlighting inconsistencies and using a time honored tradition of Palestinian spokesmen: lying. And then it was there turn to tear apart the Palestinian narrative and they did kind of a lackluster job. I wanted to switch sides.

Then I had Oil Politics. I was nervous because I hadn't had so much time to go over the chapter I was supposed to present. But it all worked out in the end. We talked about the history of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. Pretty cool stuff.

Today I woke up, went to my computer and opened Haaretz like I do every morning. But unlike every other morning, today I read that while I was sleeping, Israeli commandos stormed the Gaza Flotilla and ended up killing nearly 20 protesters. I was very upset and so was everyone in my Geography class. We discussed the incident for a while and I kept thinking how it was that Shayetet 13, the elite of the elite, caused such a debacle. Why did they land with M-16s firing? Why did they bring guns at all? Why didn't they just bring riot gear? Then I read Ron Ben-Yishai's article on Ynet (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3896796,00.html ) which explained that they didn't land with guns blazing and in fact they brought paintball guns to avoid casualties. They only started using their handguns after they were shot at, stabbed and thrown off the top deck and off the boat (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3896996,00.html ). Watch the video on that link, it's unreal. It's awful that people were killed but I can't understand why the protesters fought back. They had a win-win situation going. If they got through to Gaza, they won. If they were arrested by Israel, they won. Instead they attacked Israeli marines and now nearly 20 people are dead and dozens more are in the hospital. This all happened after Israel said that if they dock in Ashdod, all their humanitarian aid would be transfered to Gaza. Nothing good will come from any of this.