This article was first published as a guest blog post on The Electronic Intifada. It has since been modified and reformatted for this site.

The United Nations-led Palmer Report on the May 2010 Gaza-bound Flotilla has been released. The PDF file can be found here. The most prominent finding of this report is that Israel acted properly and in complete “self-defense” although its military units acted with “excessive and unreasonable” force. This conclusion appears at face value to be openly critical of Israel’s military engagement of the Flotilla, but it ultimately features a new and much more subtle form of whitewashing: it acknowledges Israel’s abuses but blatantly lets them slide, doing absolutely nothing about them except to passively pass along the blame to those in Gaza making the naval blockade necessary and “legitimate”.

Here are some interesting quotes from the Palmer Report and my take on them. Brackets indicate footnotes in the original document.

“We have made it clear that we consider that Israel was entitled to impose the naval blockade. It follows that Israel was also entitled to enforce it. The manner of its enforcement, however, raises serious issues of concern.” (Page 51) [Read more...]