Every people elevate the profession in which they excel.
If a person in the street were asked to name the area of enterprise in which we Israelis excel, his answer would probably be: Hi-Tech.
And indeed, in this area we have recorded some impressive achievements. But the profession in which Israel is not only one of the biggest, but the unchallenged Numero Uno is: Liquidations. This week this was proven once again. Every reporter, every commentator, every political hack, every transient celeb interviewed on TV, on the radio and in the newspapers, was radiant with pride. We have done it! We have succeeded! We have “liquidated” Imad Mughniyeh!
He was a “terrorist”. And not just a terrorist, a master terrorist! The list of his exploits grew from news report to news report, from headline to headline.
His “liquidation” was a huge, almost supra-natural, achievement, much more important than Lebanon War II, in which we were not so very successful. The “liquidation” equals at least the glorious Entebbe exploit, if not more.
As chance would have it, the “liquidation” was carried out only a few days after I wrote an article about the inability of occupying powers to understand the inner logic of resistance organizations. Mughniyeh’s “liquidation” is an outstanding example of this. In the eyes of the Israeli leadership, the “liquidation” was a huge success. But to Hezbollah, things look quite different. The organization has acquired another precious asset: A national hero, whose name fills the air from Iran to Morocco. The “liquidated” Mughniyeh is worth more than the live Mughniyeh, irrespective of what his real status may have been at the end of his life.
Therefore, Hezbollah has no interest at all in belittling the status of the liquidatee. On the contrary, Hassan Nasrallah, exactly like Ehud Olmert, has every interest in blowing up his stature to huge proportions.
If Hezbollah has lately been far from the all-Arab spotlight, it is now back with a bang. In the struggle for Lebanon — the main battle that occupies Nasrallah — the organization has scored a great advantage.
Multitudes joined the funeral, overshadowing the almost simultaneous memorial parade for his adversary, Rafik Al-Hariri. The more Israeli propaganda enlarges the proportions of Mughniyeh, the more young Shiites will be inspired to follow his example.
The career of the man himself is interesting in this respect. When he was born in a Shiite village in South Lebanon, the Shiites there were a despised, downtrodden and impotent community. He joined the Palestinian Fatah organization, which dominated South Lebanon at the time, eventually becoming one of Yasser Arafat’s bodyguards (I may even have seen him when I met Arafat in Beirut).
But when Israel succeeded in driving the Fatah forces out of South Lebanon, Mughniyeh stayed behind and joined Hezbollah, the new fighting force that had sprung up as a direct result of the Israeli occupation.
Israel now resembles the person whose neighbor overhead has dropped one boot on the floor, and who is waiting for the second boot to fall.
Everybody knows that there will be revenge. Israeli security organs are issuing dire warnings for people going abroad. The media has magnified these warnings to the point of hysteria. Such worries are far from baseless. All the past “liquidations” of this kind have brought with them dire consequences:
• The classic example is, of course, the “liquidation” of Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas Mussawi. He was killed in South Lebanon in 1992 by Apache gunships.
In revenge, Hezbollah blew up the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, as well as the Jewish community center there. The planner was, it is now alleged, Imad Mughniyeh. More than a hundred people perished.
• Before that, Golda Meir ordered a series of “liquidations” to revenge the tragedy of the Israeli athletes in Munich. The result: The PLO became stronger and turned into a state-in-the-making, Yasser Arafat eventually returned to Palestine.
• The “liquidation” of Yahyah Ayyash in Gaza in 1996 resembles the Mughniyeh affair. Hamas reacted with a series of sensational suicide-bombings and brought Binyamin Netanyahu to power.
• Fathi Shikaki, head of Islamic Jihad, was “liquidated” in 1995 by a bicyclist who shot him down in a Malta street. The small organization was not eradicated, but on the contrary grew through its revenge actions. Today it is the group which is launching the Qassams at Sderot.
— Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was actually being “liquidated” in a street in Amman by the injection of poison. The act was exposed and its perpetrators identified and a furious King Hussein compelled Israel to provide the antidote that saved his life. The “liquidators” were allowed to go home in return for the release of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin from Israeli prison. Meshaal is now the senior political leader of Hamas.
• Sheikh Yassin himself, a paraplegic, was “liquidated” by attack helicopters while leaving a mosque after prayer. He became a martyr in the eyes of the entire Arab world, and has served since as an inspiration for hundreds of Hamas attacks. The common denominator of all these and many other actions is that they did not harm the organizations of the “liquidatees”, but boomeranged. And all of them brought in their wake grievous revenge attacks. Why, then, are the “liquidations” carried out?
The response of one of the Israeli generals who was asked this question: “There is no unequivocal answer to this.”
I suspect that the real reason is both political and psychological. Political, because it is always popular. After every “liquidation”, there is much jubilation. When the revenge arrives, the public (and the media) do not see the connection between the ”liquidation” and the response. In the present situation, there is an additional political motivation: The Israeli Army has no answer to the Qassams.
The psychological reason is also clear: It is satisfying. True, the “liquidation” — as the word shows — is more appropriate for the underworld than for the security organs of a state. But it is a challenging and complex task, as in a Mafia film, which gives much satisfaction to the “liquidators”.
Ehud Barak, for example, was a liquidator from the start of his military career. When the “liquidation” ends in success, the executioners can raise glasses of champagne.
A mixture of blood, champagne and folly is an intoxicating but toxic cocktail.
