In the war on Gaza, Israeli politicians and generals have repeatedly quoted the words: “The boss has gone mad!” originally shouted by vegetable vendors in the market, in the sense of “The boss has gone crazy and is selling the tomatoes at a loss!” But in the course of time the jest has turned into a deadly doctrine that often appears in Israeli public discourse: In order to deter our enemies, we must behave like madmen, go on the rampage, kill and destroy mercilessly.
In this war, this has become political and military dogma: Only if we kill “them” disproportionately, killing a thousand of “them” for 10 of “ours”, will they understand that it’s not worth it to mess with us. It will be “seared into their consciousness” (a favorite Israeli phrase these days). After this, they will think twice before launching another Qassam rocket against us, even in response to what we do, whatever that may be.
It is impossible to understand the viciousness of this war without taking into account the historical background: The feeling of victimhood after all that has been done to the Jews throughout the ages, and the conviction that after the Holocaust, we have the right to do anything, absolutely anything, to defend ourselves, without any inhibitions due to law or morality. When the killing and destruction in Gaza were at their height, the Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir” was awarded a prestigious prize in America. The subject of this outstanding film is the Sabra and Shatila massacre carried out by a Christian Lebanese militia, under the auspices of the Israeli Army, during Lebanon War I. Hundreds of helpless Palestinian refugees who were trapped in their camp, men, women, children and old people, were killed and the film describes this atrocity with meticulous accuracy, including Israel’s part in it.
It is hard to say how many women and children were killed in Gaza while this award ceremony was going on in the US, but it is clear that the massacre in Gaza is much worse than that 1982 event, which moved 400, 000 Israelis to leave their homes and hold a spontaneous mass protest in Tel-Aviv. This time, only 10,000 stood up to be counted.
Lebanon War I lasted for 18 years and more than 500 of our soldiers died. The planners of Lebanon War II decided to avoid such a long war and such heavy Israeli casualties. They invented the “mad boss” principle: Demolishing whole neighborhoods, devastating areas, destroying infrastructures. In 33 days of war, some 1,000 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, were killed — a record already broken in this war by the 17th day. Yet in that war our army suffered casualties on the ground, and public opinion, which in the beginning supported the war with the same enthusiasm as this time, changed rapidly.
The smoke from Lebanon War II is hanging over the Gaza war. Everybody in Israel swore to learn its lessons. And the main lesson was: Not to risk the life of even one single soldier. A war without casualties (on our side). The method: To use the overwhelming firepower of our army to pulverize everything standing in its way and to kill everybody moving in the area. To kill not only the fighters on the other side, but every human being who might possibly turn out to harbor hostile intentions, even if they are obviously an ambulance attendant, a driver in a food convoy or a doctor saving lives. The firepower was also used to sow terror — shelling everything from a hospital to a vast UN food depot, from a press vantage point to the mosques. The standard pretext: “We were shot at from there”.
This would have been impossible, had not the whole country been infected with blunted sensitivities. People are no longer shocked by the sight of a mutilated baby, nor by children left for days with the corpse of their mother, because the army did not let them leave their ruined home. It seems that almost nobody cares anymore: Not the soldiers, not the pilots, not the media people, not the politicians, and not the generals. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni smiled while talking about the ghastly events.
Even Heinrich Heine could not have imagined that.
The planners of the war chose the timing with care: During the holidays, when everybody was on vacation, and while President Bush was still around. But they wanted the horrors of Gaza to stop before Barack Obama’s inauguration.
When there is a cease-fire, the first question will be: Who won?
In Israel, all the talk is about the “picture of victory” — not victory itself, but the “picture”. The Israeli leaders will boast of two “achievements”: The end of the rockets and the sealing of the Gaza-Egypt border (the co-called “Philadelphi route”). Dubious achievements: The launching of the Qassams could have been prevented without a murderous war, if our government had been ready to negotiate with Hamas after they won the Palestinian elections. The tunnels under the Egyptian border would not have been dug in the first place, if our government had not imposed the deadly blockade on the Strip.
But the main achievement of the war planners lies in the very barbarity of their plan: The atrocities will have, in their view, a deterrent effect that will hold for a long time.
Hamas, on the other side, will assert that their survival in the face of the mighty Israeli war machine, a tiny David against a giant Goliath, is by itself a huge victory. According to the classic military definition, the winner in a battle is the army that remains on the battlefield when it’s over. Hamas remains. The Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip still stands, in spite of all the efforts to eliminate it. That is a significant achievement.
The very fact that a guerrilla force of a few thousand lightly armed fighters held out for long weeks against one of the world’s mightiest armies with enormous firepower, will look to millions of Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims, and not only to them, like an unqualified victory.
In the end, (1) Hamas will have to give up the launching of rockets, (2) Israel will have to open wide the crossings between the Gaza Strip and the outside world, and (3) the entry of arms into the Strip will be stopped (as far as possible), as demanded by Israel. All this could have happened without war, if our government had not boycotted Hamas.
However, the worst results of this war are still invisible and will make themselves felt only in years to come: Israel has imprinted on world consciousness a terrible image of itself. Billions of people have seen us as a blood-dripping monster.
Even worse is the impact on hundreds of millions of Arabs around us: Not only will they see the Hamas fighters as the heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own regimes in their nakedness: Cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous.
