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Israel's Naval Blockade of Gaza Is Legal, Necessary
(Bloomberg-Business Week) Dore Gold - The continuing demand that Israel should agree to an investigation - with international involvement - of its interception of a Turkish-led flotilla to Gaza last week presupposes that Israel did something fundamentally wrong. The states initiating these efforts are simply trying to deny Israel its right of self-defense. Naval blockades are a legitimate instrument that states employ for self-defense. The UN itself instituted a blockade of Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, adopting Security Council Resolution 665, which called on all UN member states "to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping in order to inspect and verify cargos." During the Bosnian war, there was an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, and as a result NATO established a naval blockade between 1992 and 1996 of its Adriatic coastline. During those years, NATO ships boarded and inspected 6,000 ships and diverted 1,500 other vessels. Ships were halted and inspected before entering the territorial waters of Yugoslavia. Saudi Arabia declared that it was placing a naval blockade on the Red Sea coast of Yemen in November 2009, in order to block Iranian re-supply of the Shiite rebellion in the northern part of Yemen. In the previous month, Yemen announced it had seized an Iranian ship named the Mahan-1 loaded with anti-tank weapons for the Yemeni Shiites. In December 2002, the U.S. learned that a North Korean ship in the Indian Ocean, some 600 miles from Yemen, was carrying Scud missiles and perhaps chemical weapons. Without permission from North Korea, Spanish commandos boarded the ship in international waters and found the missiles, but eventually let it go. The Israeli blockade is legal and necessary and its removal would lead to a flood of heavy Iranian weaponry, including long-range missile systems, coming to Hamas. The writer, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, was Israel's ambassador to the UN from 1997 to 1999.