Israeli leaders pass buck

[Matt Rees]

The present Israeli government seems to make a specialty of dropping the ball. The only thing the top ministers won’t drop is the buck. They’re very adept at passing that.

Testimony last week revealed the lack of responsibility at the top of the Israeli government. Before a committee investigating a fouled up military operation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both said they take responsibility for the attempted takeover of a Turkish boat May 31 which left nine of the protesters aboard dead. Of course, they immediately added that “taking responsibility” doesn’t mean they were actually “responsible” for what happened.

That was someone else.

Netanyahu said it was Barak’s fault. The Defense Minister said it was the army’s fault, and also Netanyahu’s fault. On Aug. 11, the army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, testified. He said he “takes responsibility” for the operation, and then argued that it wasn’t a failure. In fact he was “proud” of the soldiers who took control of the boat, which was steaming toward Gaza to break the Israeli blockade.

So that’s all cleared up then. Nobody was responsible for the failures of the raid. But the raid was also a good thing. Even if it did result in the broadest international vilification of Israel for some years.

Even the leader of the opposition, Tzipi Livni, says she wants to testify before the committee to “take responsibility” for the Gaza blockade, which was initiated while she was foreign minister in the previous government. The policy is good, she says, but Netanyahu isn’t running it correctly, which makes it look bad. So her taking of responsibility is also just a way of showing that someone else is responsible for the thing no one wants to take responsibility for.

When there’s so much talk of responsibility, it usually means somebody must have done something very irresponsible.

Read the rest of this post on my blog at The Man of Twists and Turns.