Guess What this Post is About – Gaza Again

Lisa Goldman wrote a great post about the situation here. Lisa is an Israeli who strongly opposes to the war. She mentioned many Israeli bloggers who share her views, and was kind enough (I think?)  to mention my blog, along with Liza Rosenberg’s as bloggers who “justify” the war.

I started formulating my reply to Lisa’s post as a comment there, but it was getting way too long, so I moved it over here. This is addressed at Lisa Goldman, so my apologies to other readers for my using the second person.

Essentially, if I’m reading this right, your claim (or one of them at least) goes like this:
Yes, you sometimes need “you have to crack some eggs in order to make an omelette” but you don’t think that the recipe is effective this time around. The Hamas fanatics are too driven to be effected by the killing. They have no mercy for their own people – they even shoot them themselves – so this time the sought after “deterrence” will not be achieved. We’re cracking eggs for nothing here.

Now, continuing with this line of logic – and this isn’t “quoting” you anymore – if you were to think that the recipe would work, that we can deter Hamas from launching more rockets with this operation, then maybe the eggs (civilian suffering) would have been worth it? I guess, with some balance between the number of eggs and the size of the omelette?

See, this is where I am myself torn about this operation. I feel sick to my stomach, literally, with what’s going on in Gaza. It’s horrible, awful… I hate it. Honestly, I do. It’s just that while I think Israel has made many many mistakes vis-a-vis the Palestinians, nothing justifies the Hamas attacks on Sderot for 8 years. It gets them nothing and only hurts civilians. And yes, I do think Israel has a right and obligation to defend its own citizens (not necessarily Jewish even – 20% of them are Arab – they deserve that very same protection too).

My point is, with the Hezbulla in Lebanon, a bunch of fanatics in their own right, the war did have the deterrent effect. Yeah, yeah, I know they were shouting about their victory off the roof tops, but look at them now – they’re not shooting, are they? even in the height of the “carnage” in Gaza, they don’t do much more than give lip service.

Maybe you’re not giving the fanatics of the Hamas enough credit? Maybe they’re more rational than what you imply? Maybe a death toll high enough will make them think again next time? It sickens me to write this, but the HA showed us that it worked with them.

Lisa, you mentioned a few of the great sketches of Eretz Nehederet – Israel’s leading satire TV show. Let me add my own telling of one of their sketches. Remember the “Dam Arabvision”? A play of word on the Eurovision song contest and the words “Arab blood”. It went something like this:

The operation in Gaza gets votes from various countries in the world. Each vote is the number of Palestinians which that country “allows” Israel to kill before they start demanding we stop. The Italians are “cheap” with only 600. The Germans are far more “generous”, allowing for 6000 casualties. We then move to the Hamas in Gaza, who also get to cast in their vote (and in this contest, the highest is the total). The cheerful Hamas representative, broadcasting from a Gazan kindergarten, asks what the top figure so far has been. He then smiles and suggests that they double it, and add 18 (Hai, an Israeli figure of speech when you make donations). So, Hamas is all for 12,018 casualties.

You can analyze this sketch in several ways, but to me the point here was that the Hamas does have its own “price tag”. It’s cruel and inhumane, but it’s the one they put on their own people. Now, whether or not Israel, morally, can play along to the Hamas and indeed collect, I’m not sure.Yes, I do have a problem with the death toll, not to mention the overall suffering, that is acceptable to the Hamas. Since Israel is the mechanism for delivering it, I do not feel comfortable with it one bit.

The numbers thing is beyond cruel, I know. Each person is a world. Every family is a universe, every child scared out of his wits, let alone injured or killed, is a tragedy of an umimaginable scale, in my book.  It’s tragic that to politicians this is a numbers game – but there you go.  Let’s be honest, it is for most people, in one way or another. Would anyone protest against the operation if we could get Hamas to stop firing the rockets with only 2 casualties on the Palestinian side? I think not. So, it’s numbers, isn’t it? And so far, Hamas is the one playing with the tab. They could have decided on asking for a ceasefire last week. It would have ended the killing – right away. But apparently, in the Arab blood contest, they are perfectly ok with higher numbers.

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