To attack unarmed people with all the weapons of the modern army simply illustrated an extremely inhumane attitude, Dr Paul Oestreicher told the Otago Daily Times yesterday.
"The whole thing is profoundly disturbing and is, in every sense, a breach of both morality and law."
Dr Oestreicher, a visiting fellow for Peace and Conflict studies at the University of Otago, is in Dunedin working on a project on the abolition of war.
A founding member of Amnesty International, he grew up in Dunedin after escaping Nazi Germany as a child.
With a Jewish background, his view was that the Jewish people should survive, but that the state of Israel was aggressive in its occupation of a land that did not belong to it, and blocking aid to people deprived of the basic necessities was inexcusable, he said.
Dr Oestreicher said he wished the flurry of international censure following the incident would be a turning point, but he did not think it would.
He expected other nations would simply make formal statements about how terrible the incident was and not make any changes to their policies on relations with Israel.
Nothing would change unless the United States withdrew its unconditional support of Israel, he said.
But that was unlikely, as the US entered mid-term elections, during which support from some powerful Jewish backers was crucial.
The incident illustrated more publicly what Israel had been doing in Gaza for a long time, and he expected the state would regret what had happened with the flotilla.
"In the long run, this sort of behaviour will be very damaging for Israel, which is fomenting so much anti-semitism around the world."
Israel felt the world was against it, so it could do what it liked and its actions were backed by a large section of public opinion in Israel, which was profoundly racist, he said.
Dunedin woman Christina Gibb (80), a former peacemaker in the West Bank with the principally United States-based Christian Peacemakers Team, said the actions of the Israeli marines were "absolutely appalling".
Although no longer actively part of the team, she visited the West Bank for 10 days in April, after her last three-month visit in 2007, and everyone she spoke to told her, without exception, the situation for Palestinians had worsened.
"[Israel's] done their utmost to cut them off and squash them."
She would not believe a suggestion from Israel that the activists in the flotilla would have been armed and fired on the marines.
"They always plead self-defence."
