It’s going to be illuminating to see what the New York Times comes up with for an editorial in respect of the so-called “aid flotilla” that sought to run the blockade of Gaza. This afternoon, on a Times’ blog called The Lede, Robert Mackey put up a post suggesting the events earlier in the day echoed the events of 1947. His post quoted one Israeli blogger as asking pointedly, “Will This Be the Palestinian Exodus?” It was a reference to the violence with which the British intercepted the Haganah packet, Exodus, as it sought to run an earlier blockade. The Times blog yesterday quoted a dispatch issued by the Times in 1947, reporting that one crewman of the Exodus, a Christian activist, was accusing the British of having fired on Jews armed with nothing more than potatoes and canned goods.

What the Times blog failed to quote was the attitude of the Times itself, which back in 1947 issued an editorial sharply critical of the decision of the Zionists to bring the Jews on the Exodus to Israel in the first place. The Times wanted the Jews to suffer through their desperation while the United Nations tried to find a peaceful solution via some kind of 11 nation committee. It seems the General Assembly had called on “all governments and all peoples” to observe a truce and, as the Times put it, “to refrain meantime from ‘any action’ which ‘might create an atmosphere prejudicial to an early settlement of the question.’” Quoth the Times: “Despite this proper and reasonable request, there arrived on the coast of Palestine, two months later, a company of 4,500 unauthorized Jewish immigrants, aboard the ill-fated Exodus.”

“Reckless” is the word the Times used to describe the how the truce request was ignored by “those who arrange and finance unauthorized immigration into Palestine.” It called such ignoring the “first act in a tragic story.” The Times was not entirely against the Jews; it concluded its editorial by noting that America had made its own contribution to the tragedy by not being welcoming enough — by keeping “our doors, and our hearts” closed — to the refugees trapped in Europe, a minority of whom, it said, were Jews. It noted that had America, after the war, taken a more generous attitude, “some of these voyagers on the Exodus might now be well on their way to become useful American citizens, and for others faith and hope would be kept alive.”

The one thing the Times failed to credit then was the idea that the real source of hope for the Jews was the prospect of Israel itself. That hope was made clear in the months and years after the voyage of the Exodus in 1947, if it had not been made so clear, at least to some, in the millennia before. So what has the Times learned since then? Is it still blind to the Zionist idea? Will it back the desire of those aboard the Turkish-backed flotilla to get to Gaza 60-some years after it failed to back the Jews who sought to get to Israel? Or will it finally see that there is no parallel between the voyage of the Exodus, which was filled with refugees with no home, and the voyage of the Turkish flotilla, which is part of a war to destroy the home that was finally built to accommodate the exodus from Europe of those Jews who survived the Holocaust and made it to the land they’d been promised?