I know of many Palestinians who do not like Hamas. Yet
for them, the Gaza war is about the siege – part of their own war of
independence. Israelis refuse to get that.
In
The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ excellent documentary,
former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara speaks about a certain
inability to understand the enemy – one that stems from a lack of
empathy.
In the film, McNamara, a brilliant systems analyst, who is today
associated more than anything with the Vietnam War, says that part of
President Kennedy’s successful management of the Cuban Missile Crisis
was his administration’s ability to put itself in the shoes of the
Soviets and understand their point of view. “In the case of Vietnam,” he
says, “we didn’t know them well enough to empathize.” As a result, each
side had a completely different understanding of what the war was
about.
This understanding came to McNamara only in 1991, when he visited
Vietnam and met with the country’s foreign minister. McNamara asked the
foreign minister whether he thought it was possible to reach the same
results of the war (independence and uniting the south with the north)
without the heavy losses. Between one and three million people died in
the war, most of them Vietnamese civilians. This does not include the
hundreds of thousands of casualties in the war against the French, which
took place shortly before. Approximately 58,000 American soldiers were
also killed in the Vietnam War.
“You were fighting to enslave us,” yelled the foreign minister at
McNamara, who in turn replied that that is an absurd notion. The two
nearly came to blows. But as time passed McNamara understood. “We saw
Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says, whereas what the
foreign minister was trying to tell him was that for the Vietnamese it
was a war of independence. Communism was not the heart of the matter for
the Vietnamese. They were willing to make the worst sacrifices because
they were fighting for their freedom – not for Marx or Brezhnev.
Nations will make inconceivable sacrifices in these kinds of
struggles. An entire one percent of the Jewish population was killed in
the 1948 war. The public accepted it painfully and with a stiff upper
lip because they felt, just like the Vietnamese, that they were fighting
for their lives and for their freedom. We have become so much more
susceptible to loss, not because we went soft, but because we have a
deeper understanding that despite all the “we’re fighting for our
future” slogans, 2014 is not 1948.
Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed in all three military operations
in Gaza, not including the Second Intifada. Most of them were civilians.
I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These
are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives,
whether due to its fundamentalist ideology, political oppression or
other aspects of its rule. But they
do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it.
+972′s full coverage of the war in Gaza
The demand that the people of Gaza protest against Hamas, often heard
in Israel today, is absurd. Even if we disregard the fact that Israelis
themselves hate protests in times of war, they still expect the
Palestinians to conduct a civil uprising under fire. The people of Gaza
support Hamas in its war against Israel because they perceive it to be
part of their war of independence. A Hamas warrior who swears by the
Quran is no different from a Vietcong reciting
The Internationale before leaving for battle. These kind of rituals leave a strong impression, but they are not the real story.
Israelis, both left and right, are wrong to assume that Hamas is a
dictatorship fighting Israel against its people’s will. Hamas is indeed a
dictatorship, and there are many Palestinians who would gladly see it
fall, but not at this moment in time. Right now I have no doubt that
most Palestinians support the attacks on IDF soldiers entering Gaza;
they support kidnapping as means to release their prisoners (whom they
see as prisoners of war) and the unpleasant fact is that most of them, I
believe, support firing rockets at Israel.
“If we had planes and tanks to fight the IDF, we wouldn’t need to
fire rockets,” is a sentence I have heard more than once. As an Israeli,
it is unpleasant for me to hear, but one needs to at least try and
understand what lies behind such a position. What is certain is that
bombing Gaza will not change their minds. On the contrary.
A
Palestinian crying near rubbles of his home after the latest round of
Israeli attacks against Al Shaja’ia, Gaza City, July 20, 2014. (Anne
Paq/Activestills.org)
“But if they didn’t fire rockets or launch terror attacks there would
be no siege. So what do they want?” the Israeli public asks. After all,
we already left Gaza.
Back to McNamara and
The Fog of War. If the citizens of
Vietnam would have abandoned Communism, McNamara told the Vietnamese
foreign minister 1991, the U.S. wouldn’t have even cared about them.
They could have had both their independence and their unity. But in the
eyes of the Vietnamese, things looked completely different. As soon as
they managed to drive out the French, in marched the Americans.
Colonialism simply never stopped. The choice was between a corrupt
U.S.-sponsored regime in the south and a horrific war with the north.
For the Palestinians, the choice is between occupation by proxy in the West Bank and a war in Gaza. Both offer no hope, and
neither are forms of freedom.
The Israeli promise — that an end to armed struggle will bring freedom —
is not trustworthy, as the experiences of past years has shown. It
simply never happens. The quiet years in the West Bank have not brought
the Palestinians any closer to an independent state, while the truce in
between wars in Gaza has not brought about a relief from the siege. One
can debate the reasons for why this happened, but one cannot debate
reality.
Hamas tells the Palestinians the simple truth: freedom comes at the
cost of blood. The tragedy is that we usually provide the evidence.
After all, the evacuation of settlements in Gaza came after the Second
Intifada, not as a result of negotiations. The Oslo Accords came after
the First Intifada; before that, Israel turned down even the convenient
London Agreement between Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein.
Israelis are convinced they are fighting a terror organization driven
by a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Palestinians are convinced
Israelis are looking to enslave them, and that as soon as the war is
over the siege will be reinforced. Since this is exactly what Israel
intends to do, as our government has repeatedly stated, they have no
reason to stop fighting.
Hamas may accept a ceasefire soon. Its regime might collapse. Either
way, it is only a matter of time before the next round of violence.
Human lives are not cheaper for Palestinians than they are for us. But
nations fighting for their freedom will endure the worst sacrifices.
Like in
Shujaiyeh.
***
An excerpt from
The Fog of War. The part I refer to starts at 11:46 minutes:
Originally posted in Hebrew on Local Call.
I
am an independent journalist and editor. I have worked for Tel Aviv’s
Ha-ir local paper, for Ynet.co.il and for the Maariv daily, where my
last post was deputy editor of the weekend magazine. My work has
recently been published in Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, The Nation and
other newspapers and magazines.
More…
I was born in Ramat-Gan and
today live and work in Tel Aviv. Before working as a journalist, I
served four and a half years in the IDF.
