About fifteen years ago, a movie
whose name does not bear (if I’m spelling that right) mentioning
thought it humorous to invent an Israeli girl named Ariel Sharon
performing in a Florida club as… er, an ecdysiast. Her stage name
was, you guessed it, The Gaza Strip.
That gag has turned deadly serious in recent years. It began when
the not-yet-noticeably-comatose Prime-Minister-qua-General of the
same name stripped Israel of its de facto sovereignty in that
territory. The idea was to get almost two million Arabs off
Israeli land, while giving them an opportunity to make something
of themselves. They could autonomously begin improving their lot,
show the world how hep they were to the 21st century and create
an impressive model as a forerunner for an ultimate resolution of
the “Palestinian Problem.”
What actually happened was that the Gazans elected Hamas, who
evicted Fatah, destroyed all the industrial buildings Israel had
set up earlier, and announced their version of the Final
Solution. Turned out to be unoriginal; some Austrian guy with a
funny mustache had thought of it first. The good news is Hamas
does not have the firepower to destroy Israel. What it does have
is the ability to lob rockets randomly into a sizeable segment of
Israel, putting about a fifth of its population at daily risk of
death showering from the sky.
In a landmark essay which unaccountably did not earn a Pulitzer,
I explained in these
pages in July 2005 the potential for the terrorists to win
the War on Terror. They can do it by specifically limiting
themselves to small random strikes. By forcing entire populations
to live in fear, they are just as effective as powerful nations
with huge arsenals. Does it matter to an individual citizen
whether he is facing a nuclear bomb to kill him as one of a
million or a penny-ante rocket to kill him as one of nine?
Why does Hamas behave so unreasonably? This question befuddles
Western intellectuals. They assign this intransigence to
fanaticism, zealotry, mob hysteria, whether religious or
nationalistic. What they miss is the cunning rationality of the
Hamas approach. Hamas is holding all of Israel hostage, not
merely Gilad Shalit. Just as the Somali pirates are the single
most effective economic force in the world today, Hamas is an
effective political force by employing similar methods. Why feed
your hostages when you can leave them at home and lob rockets in
their direction?
The climactic “strip,” however, comes when you goad the big guy
into striking back. Hezbollah modeled this in Lebanon. They were
an illegitimate group, internationally vilified, as they launched
rockets into Israel day in day out for years. But when it finally
struck back, blasting a lot of buildings and people into Kingdom
Come, Hezbollah hunkered down and took Israel’s best shot. Here
and there, a school gets hit or a hospital, a big shelter with a
bunch of families jammed in, and the international demand for a
ceasefire becomes overwhelming. At the end of the day, Hezbollah
emerged as a legitimized movement, now a faction within the
ruling coalition in Lebanon.
Hamas expects the same, and the signs are all there confirming
this strategy. Articles are cropping up everywhere about the
inevitability of dealing with Hamas as a real international
player. Why, shunning them has been a Bush policy, rendering it
Neanderthal by definition. The new Obama broad-minded open-minded
progressive inclusive hope-oriented change-inspired visionaries
will not make the same mistake. They would no more leave Hamas
out of deliberations of Mideast policy than they would leave
Oprah out of decisions defining the future of American culture.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. The mean little guy
torments the nice big guy with little pinpricks until the big guy
finally slugs him. At that point, all the do-gooders show up to
brush off the little guy and prop him up. Wagging righteous
fingers at the big bully, they go back home, leaving the
troublemaker rewarded.
The United Nations has settled all this with a resolution.
Resolved: new elections must be held in Gaza forthwith; Hamas may
not participate; the rocket scientists in Gaza need to hold their
fire; Israel may blast away until such time as the above three
are implemented. Oops, my mistake. That was actually my proposed
resolution. But that would be serious, like a term paper on
Solzhenitsyn. More entertaining to watch the strip show.
