I’m glad that the war in Gaza is over. How long the peace will last is anyone’s guess, but peace is peace. War is a Bad Thing and so peace must be a Good Thing.
When war breaks out, people can’t help taking sides. They treat the conflict as if it were a sporting contest, only with deadly effect. Rollerball, a fine film now lost in the mists of time, developed this theme on a minuscule canvas.
Of course, partisan division is precisely what happened here. The choices people made typically depended on the news they were consuming. Since truth is famously the first victim of war, the ‘facts’ were carefully curated to promote a desired line. Families split, friends broke up, and, yes, dinner parties were desecrated.
My relationship with Noah (the kindest of men) did not escape unscathed. Some of his best friends are Jews and his sympathies understandably became engaged. I remained clinical and lofty – I’m like that.
In just such a spirit of dispassion, I examined the Israeli retaliation to the onslaught. I suggested the Israeli government expected the attack and geared itself for a full-scale reprisal. If it miscalculated, it was only in its assessment of the gravity of the attack. The facts demonstrated as much.
Noah was outraged. No one could be so calculating, he cried. No one could be so heartless as to leave innocent members of the public defenceless. I said that politicians were forever curating scenarios in just such a way. I reminded him that Hitler had staged an attack by criminals in Polish uniform to justify his invasion of that country. “Poles apart”, he muttered, quite cleverly I thought.
That’s history
But that’s history. Now we have peace, we can look back and try objectively to decide why the carnage happened and who is predominantly to blame.
My take is that Hamas is the main culprit. It makes no bones about its hatred of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. From the river to the sea is not some nursery rhyme, but a triumphalist call for the overthrow of the Israeli state and the extermination of the Jewish people living in it.
No one seriously suggests otherwise; if they did, the tenets of Islam, which call for the killing of infidels in general but Jews in particular, should clear up the confusion. What lingering doubt there might be can be resolved by a trip through the tunnels, rat runs of terror, and a consideration of the unprovoked rocket attacks that nightly rained down on the embattled Israelis.
The genocidal fervour is not reciprocate. So far as I can gather, the Israelis don’t desire the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza. They want to live their lives in a peaceful world segregated from their deadly neighbours. So it seems from the fact that, in 2008, all Jews were ordered to withdraw from Gaza lest their continued presence in the land bedevilled neighbourly relations.
Over the years, the Israelis were content to act defensively in the face of the continuing attacks. But, once Hamas invaded territory with such terrible brutality, retaliation was inescapable.
Support of experience
The sweep through Gaza was ruthless, bloody and uncompromising. It had to be if the clean-out was to be successful and the hostages to be recovered. Those who say measures were excessive and disproportionate have yet to explain how lesser means might have served the purpose. “All’s fair in love and war” may not be Von Clausewitz, but it has the support of experience down the years.
Still, the war shouldn’t have been so horrible, and it shouldn’t have lasted so long. That it did is ultimately the fault of Hamas. It boobed constantly.
@ Hamas believed that, once the attack was launched, the Arab world, Hezbollah not least, would mobilise and crush the Israelis in their remorseless grip. Boob one.
@ Hamas believed that it would win political gains by taking the hostages and doling them out to advantage. If this worked previously, it certainly didn’t now. Boob two.
@ Finally, they believed that the United States, softened by liberal angst, would force Israel to capitulate. Third, and biggest, boob.
Apogee of impotence
Boobs like these can only have one result: abject failure. Now Hamas and its supporters have nothing to do but dress up in headgear and march through Western cities screaming abuse. This is the apogee of impotence.
The propaganda machines will churn out their narratives, but the facts don’t lie. This is a tragedy, a terrible one, and the capitulation by Hamas that the peace represents is only the next step in a long journey into a more harmonious world.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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