Nearly seventy years ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade. This is the description that would now appear in the history books — if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in Israeli media about the Hamas “terrorists” using the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploiting the women and children as “human shields.”
In this war, the disparity between the forces, between the Israeli Army and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite. Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.
True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli Army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.
Immediately after the shelling of the UN Fakhura School in Jabaliya refugee camp became known throughout the world, the army “revealed” that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: A falsification.
So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror-command post, every civilian government building a “symbol of Hamas rule”. Thus the Israeli Army retained its purity as the “most moral army in the world”.
The truth is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak — a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral insanity”, a sociopathic disorder. The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip though it won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is deeply rooted in the population — not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past — but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.
From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers. Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: To avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare — and that has been its Achilles heel.
A person without imagination, like Barak cannot imagine how decent people around the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white shrouds ready for burial, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, twisting with pain and crying out: “Mama! Mama!”
Al Jazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home. The failure to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to grasp the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it.
Even if the Israeli Army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse. If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.
What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. In the end, this war is a crime against the State of Israel too.
