Just like all the unstudied initiatives which collapse when they hit reality and its repercussions, it now seems that the campaigns that were launched in Lebanon and then in Iran to organize trips for ships to head toward the shores of the blockaded Gaza Strip, have also bumped against the reality of the cost of such a step. The initiatives started with the Freedom Flotilla that was sponsored by the Turkish government, and ended with the massacre that was committed by the Israeli troops at sea. This entailed an international campaign against Israel which redirected the attention toward the suffering of the Gaza population and forced the Israeli government to adopt limited measures to alleviate the blockade. However, this campaign did not reach the level of securing international support for the initiatives aiming at achieving what has come to be known as "the lifting of the blockade" imposed on Gaza. This is especially true since, by definition, this "lifting" can only be executed by force, i.e. by clashing once again with the Israeli troops which corroborated their previous decision to prevent any ship from entering the territorial waters of Gaza. Such a clash will carry a hefty price to be paid by those standing behind it, especially since the issue at this level is not related to Turkey, i.e. the state that is still favored by the West and which some political powers inside Israel and from outside the Likud bloc still wish to maintain truce with it, but to Iran, and consequently to Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which do not enjoy any favors in the West. The international position was clear in the case of the last ships campaign to be launched from Lebanon and Iran, in saying that these initiatives might this time end with wide-scale military confrontations between the organizers and the powers backing them up on one hand and the Israeli army on the other. Were the organizers aware of this truth and were they ready for the confrontation? It appears they were not, and the proof of that was the statement issued by the secretary general of the international committee for the support of the Palestinian Intifada, Hussein Sheikh al-Islam, who stated that he cancelled the dispatch of the Iranian aid ship, which was supposed to sail to Gaza today, "to avoid giving the Zionist enemy" any pretext, after Israel addressed a letter to the United Nations in which it said that the presence of Iranian and Lebanese ships on the shores of Gaza will be perceived as a war declaration against Israel. Now the question is: Does the Iranian regime need a pretext to declare war on Israel? Quite the contrary, this Iranian regime was expected to seek any pretext to clash with the Israelis and eradicate their state from the region, as it is threatened by the head of this regime from time to time. However, for the evasion of the confrontation with Israel to become the slogan of this stage, this stands as proof for the extent of the "realism" reached by the Iranian political mind in dealing with the crises that might face it. It is a realism that brings back to mind the position of Iranian Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei during the last Israeli war on Gaza, when he issued a fatwa banning young Iranian men from heading to the Strip to partake in its defense, telling them: "You must beware of the fact that there is nothing we can do at this level." On the Lebanese level, Hezbollah declared it was distancing itself from the ships departing from the Lebanese shores, which clearly pointed to this blessed "realism" we are talking about, firstly because the party is well aware of the threats that could be entailed by such a decision on the situation in the South and the truce of the fait accompli between it and the Israelis, and secondly, because these ships cannot head directly from Lebanon to Gaza and must depart from other ports such as the ports of Cyprus, where it is unlikely that a ship publicly sponsored by Hezbollah will be allowed to leave for Gaza.
