"Iran-Contra" from the get-go was set up in such a way as to limit itself from any of the most significant investigations; the focus was on how Congressional oversight might have been violated, and not on what was done.

Yet even so, the foreign policy establishment spanning Republicans and Democrats agreed to play by Village rules and not release the Iran-Contra commission's own study of the exact organizational predecessor of the propaganda operation which would later coordinate and help sell the Iraq War.

It's not just the same people who came back to run similar crimes and horrors in the Bush Jr. regime; it's the same model as was run before, too:

Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'

By Robert Parry (A Special Report) | The Consortium | June 30, 2008

...[H]istorians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council...

...Bush’s former White House press secretary Scott McClellan described similar use of propaganda tactics to justify the Iraq War in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

From his insider vantage point, McClellan cited the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” – and he called the Washington press corps “complicit enablers.”

None of this would have been so surprising – indeed Americans might have been forewarned and forearmed – if Lee Hamilton and other Democrats on the Iran-Contra committees had held firm and published the scandal’s “lost chapter” two decades ago.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062908.html

What would happen if an armada of ships appeared on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza to evacuate the civilians from the warzone?

If you had asked "to deliver aid / observers / etc. to the civilians of the Gaza strip," then perhaps the Israeli government would respond militarily as you suggest.

However, if an armada of ships showed up to remove Palestinians from Gaza and ship them somewhere outside of Israel and the Occupied Territories, I'm not so sure the Israeli establishment would look upon that with disfavor.

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On this question of whether or not the Palestinians' government (currently Hamas) cares more about the pursuit of power than the health and well-being of its charges, that's quite right.

It's also correct about my own government, which has conspired to ignore our own security needs, to wage aggressive war without regard to the consequences and expenses of that actions, to let citizens drown and their bodies rot in a major city via negligent inaction, and to destroy the economic capacity of its citizens to survive.

And that government has been in power for the last 8 years.

If we allow it, not only Israeli militarists but all sorts of other nations in wars, civil wars, rebellions, etc., can eternally continue to put off the required, legal negotiated settlement of internationally condemned illegalities because they're unhappy with their current negotiating parties.

For over two generations now we've been told that it's just not yet possible for the internationally recognized parties on behalf of Israel (the Government) and the Palestinians (variously, the Arab League, the PLO, Arafat, Fatah, and now Hamas), because Israeli representatives and their backers in the U.S. find the Palestinian representatives to be deficient.

Good thing that this doesn't fly in all sorts of other conflicts, otherwise there'd be no constant negotiations in Darfur / Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or for that matter there would have been no settling of civil wars in El Salvador or Guatemala. There were and are some pretty nasty parties involved in each of those disputes, and I'm pretty sure that many of them would have gladly maintained up until the point of negotiated settlement that they would love to be able to exterminate their opposition.

It's not an exact comparison, because Israel is the fifth largest military on the planet, it's nuclear armed, and suffers no existential threat whatsoever from the Palestinians, whatever the maximalist dreams of Hamas rhetoric may be.

In international affairs, it's usually understood that parties in conflict who are legally required to resolve their conflict still have to do so even when they would rather not and even if they don't like the other side.

Further, it's usually understood that the negotiations are to arrive at a legally binding resolution, which is the result of the process of negotiation; yet in this case we are supposed to wait until the two parties happen to want exactly the same things before negotiation.

It's even odder, in that one side, Israel, helped form and develop the current representatives of the Palestinians -- Hamas, as aided by Israeli intelligence and other agencies -- purposefully to undermine the legitimacy and stability of the then representatives of the Palestinians.

So, if we want to, we can reflect 10 years from now at how awful it is that the violence continues and that Israel is still seeking for a better negotiating partner among the Palestinians, whatever the current leadership may be like among the surviving Palestinian population.