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Jeffery Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic, says most Israelis think their government appeared incompetent in its recent raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla. Goldberg is now in Jerusalem. He speaks with anchor Marco Werman.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Jeffrey Goldberg is in Jerusalem.  He writes for the Atlantic magazine and he says Israelis are worried that the commando raid made their leaders appear incompetent.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG:  Most people who are following this, which is really everyone, believe this was ill thought out, ill prepared, that there was no intelligence used, I guess I both senses of the word.  No actual intelligence and no on-the-ground understanding of what they were dealing with.  One person told me that the Israel Army believed that it was going to be dealing with a group of 50-year-old Swedish women wearing khafiyas.  And, quite obviously, that was not what these commandos found on that one boat.  And of course the deeper issue is whether they should have been trying to stop these boats at all in this manner.  And then the even deeper question that people are asking is, is the blockade of Gaza, the political blockade of Gaza, is it helping Israel or hurting Israel?

WERMAN: How much has the incident on the Mavi Marmara eroded support for the Gaza blockade among the Israeli public?

GOLDBERG: Well I don’t think that you’re going to find a lot of Israelis who are sympathetic to opening that border.  Remember, the Israeli experience with Hamas, which runs Gaza, is thousands of rockets that were launched before the war last year.  Keep in mind something else, the other political units in the Middle East that don’t want this blockade ended include Egypt, the government of Egypt and the government of the Palestinian authority, the moderate Palestinian government on the West Bank, which is much more complicated than people think.  So when the Palestinian President Abu – - goes to Washington next week, I seriously doubt, I could be wrong but I seriously doubt, that he is going to ask for the blockade to be lifted when he meets privately with President Obama, who obviously could influence Israel to end that blockade.

WERMAN: I imagine many Israelis do not want to see a string though of events like what happened to the flotilla on Monday.

GOLDBERG: No, and this is why there is this feeling one picks up that someone needs to be punished.  The people I talked to are wondering who is going to pay on the political level.  The Israeli press is very rough on its government and I saw a headline this morning which I’m paraphrasing is “What to do with the seven idiots?”  The seven idiots being the seven senior ministers of the government.  I mean the headline actually said what are we going to do with these idiots?  You don’t see that on the Op Ed page of the New York Times.  It’s a lot more polite when they talk about the American government.  The attitude is one of extreme anger at the way this situation has unfolded.

WERMAN: Now you just met with the son of a friend of yours who serves in an elite Israeli Army unit similar to Flotilla 13, the Naval Commando unit in the news.  What did he tell you?

GOLDBERG: You know what he said?  This is the most interesting thing.  He said we cannot afford in this region to look like Keystone Cops and he said look, the reason people died on the ship was because they had underprepared, too small, under-armed force went in to try to fix this problem.  That always happens, it’s not just Israel.  Think about the L.A. riots, the Rodney King riots.  I can give a lot of examples of this.  The most dangerous situation is when you send in an ill-prepared, under-armed, poorly instructed force with weapons to deal with a situation that quickly gets out of hand.  I think you’ll see in the Israeli political culture in the coming days some really very, very hard questions asked about the decision making here.  Whether it opens up the blockade, I don’t know.  My guess is no.  Understanding this government and understanding its priorities, my guess is that the blockade will stay put.  But this is a disastrous situation for Israel and the pressure on Israel might be too much for the government there on this particular question.

WERMAN: Jeffrey Goldberg there speaking to us from Jerusalem.  He’s a correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of “Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror”.  Jeffrey thank you very much.

GOLDBERG: Thank you.

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