Following the IDF’s disastrous raid of the Mavi Marmara, the existing blockade regime on Gaza looks untenable. Hillary Clinton has said as much, William Hague has called for the lifting of the blockade and some are even calling to end the marginalisation of Hamas itself. However, a corollary to international calls for a relaxation of conditions in Gaza must be that the security concerns of Israel (and Egypt), are credibly addressed. If not, the cycle of violence will continue and the supporters of unilateral action will be grimly vindicated.

So far, these calls have not dealt with both sides of the equation beyond acknowledging that it would be a “bad thing” if Gaza is flooded with Iranian missiles. Nor do they explain how to prevent a climb-down on the blockade becoming a Hamas propaganda coup as harmful to moderate Palestinians as it would be to Israel. It would also be as damaging to Gazans as it would be to Israelis if a triumphalist Hamas rearmed, triggering a new conflict. Assurances, such as that offered by The Economist, that opening up Gaza would end Hamas absolutism by “letting other influences in”, seem feeble and unworldly.

This is not an argument in favour of the status quo but a warning that the more outsiders’ pronouncements appear short-sighted and pitched at domestic audiences, the more likely they are to be gruffly ignored. Israel’s stubbornness that it takes control of its own security owes much to the perceived failure by the international community to follow up its howls of indignation with effective preventative action. The UNIFIL force dispatched to southern Lebanon to monitor Hezbollah following the outcry over the Second Lebanese War is strongly suspected to have failed to prevent significant arms transfers from Syria to Hezbollah.

While often sincere and legitimate, criticism of Israel can crowd out discussion of whether the multilateralist approach that Israel is despised for shunning is all it’s cracked up to be. Let’s take a less divisive, non-Israeli example. In the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, India bowed to international pleas not to take any unilateral action against Lashkar-e-Toiba (the Pakistan-based group believed to have masterminded the atrocity) and agreed to let the US and UK governments put pressure on Pakistan to shut it down and extradite and/or lock up its leaders. This has not materialised. India’s reward for eschewing unilateral action was an empty UN ruling on LeT’s affiliates and the subordination of its quest for justice and security to the need to keep Pakistan sweet on the Afghan war. The point of this example is not to say that India should send a posse into Pakistan, but to show that it’s not difficult to see why some countries draw the conclusion that if they don’t look out for themselves no-one will.

On the left, it is easier to demonise Israel than it is to ask other, more searching questions about the UN-centric multilateralism has been at the core of thinking on foreign policy (the Blair years excepted): In an evermore multi-polar world, what can increasingly paralysed and politicised international organisations do beyond reaching unsatisfactory fudges that avoid the key issues? How effective at enforcing these fudges are the self-interested and inward-looking states (particularly European) that are called on to do so? Perhaps it’s also time to start thinking about how much Barack Obama, the patron saint of multilaterism, has to show for his outstretched hand besides escalating provocations from North Korea and Iran, with even Turkey, it is feared, warming to Hamas.

Israel should not be spared criticism for its foolhardy defiance of world opinion, but it should be acknowledged that the reason for that defiance does not lie as some of critics suggest in some sort of inherently aggressive and racist Israeli/Zionist psyche. Rather, it lies in an understandable mistrust of a mode of conflict resolution that, despite the pieties attached to it, often does little more than produce unstable compromises and set ominous precedents.