I doubt whether anyone who lives in Israel was surprised by the report issued Wednesday by the state comptroller (which harshly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus handling of the May 2010 Turkish flotilla bound for blockaded Gaza). The failures, the mistakes and the carelessness were all widely documented in real time and later deeply investigated by the various probe committees and internal and external inquiries. As early as two years ago, it was already clear to all that no intelligence had been gathered ahead of the operation, in which Israeli commandos clashed with Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara, and nine Turks were killed. We already knew that alternatives weren't considered, that Israeli forces hadn't prepared for the possibility that massive force would have to be employed, and that not enough discussions and fieldwork had been done before the incident. This was suggested to a limited extent by security expert Giora Eiland's internal Israel Defense Forces investigation, and to a higher degree by the Turkel commission that conducted a public investigation, and by a plethora of interviews and reports. The state comptroller did present the same failures in a clear, intelligent and accessible manner, but his bottom line issued far too late is not any different than everything we already knew: The takeover of the Marmara was a failure. I would like to remind anyone who thinks that they (the Turks) deserved it that we are paying the price for what happened every day in the form of the Gaza blockade that was partially lifted, not as a product of considered decisions, but as a (justified) knee jerk reaction after the fact. We are also paying the price in form of deteriorating relations with Turkey, to the point of actual danger. In fairness, the comptroller admits in his report that it is possible that proper preparation would still not have changed the outcome. He places all the blame on the commanding political echelon that failed to complete a proper preparation process. Some commentators rushed to connect the dots between the flotilla and Iran comparing the report on the Marmara incident to the potential report that will (perhaps) be written after an Israeli attack on Iran. They can all relax: Netanyahu knows full well that attack equals war equals an investigative committee with his own head on the line. That is one experience he would probably prefer to forgo. The way to avoid such an investigation involves treating the dangerous root problems that surfaced in the comptroller's report on the flotilla and the National Security Council Law: the over-dominance of the military in the face of total weakness by the political echelon (as demonstrated in the dynamics between the National Security Council vs. the IDF, the Foreign Ministry vs. the Defense Ministry, government public diplomacy officials vs. the IDF Spokesperson's Unit) and the automatic decision to use force over other alternatives. These failures are not exclusive to Netanyahu. Previous prime ministers all promised to change this dynamic, but didn't. In this arena, though important, the comptroller's report didn't add or detract a thing. The report won't change world orders, and the comptroller's successors will address the same issues in future reports as well. The "wisdom of hindsight," as Minister Ze'ev Binyamin (Benny) Begin on Wednesday quoted his late father Menachem Begin as having said, "is wisdom, but it is also in hindsight." It seems that upon retiring, the comptroller came down with a serious case of wisdom of hindsight, and that is a shame. He provided us with too much information on what we already knew, and didn't do enough to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
