I truly hate the
issue of Gaza versus Israel as I have good friends on both sides.
It's about the only issue that currently splits liberals from each
other.
The fellow here
makes a good case for the Israeli side. Essentially, Israel is under
siege by a foe that will settle for nothing less than their complete
destruction. Hamas doesn't want to simply co-exist with Israel, they
want to annihilate the state and all its people.
The case that Hamas
makes to the people of Gaza is also pretty straightforward. The
people of Gaza are locked into an “open-air
prison” that even Pope Francis condemns. They have no seaport
of their own, no airport, their border is sealed on all sides, their
access to fishing on the sea is very restricted. I haven't heard much
lately about residents of Gaza being hungry or having their food
supplies restricted, but that certainly did happen in the past, until
Egypt had its revolution and partially opened their border with Gaza.
“So, all right,
Mr. Smarty-pants, what would you do? How would you square the
circle?”
Back during the late
80s, I did a lot of reading on guerrilla war, including several books
on the Vietnam conflict from left-wing, middle-of-the-road and
right-wing perspectives. My following of the Iraq War has very
largely confirmed the conclusions I reached back then.
In every guerrilla
movement, there are two components, the hard-core fighters, the ones
who run things and compose the propaganda and who promise to take
over when the fighting is done. Then there are the people at large.
The people are the ones constantly just trying to live their lives,
to get out of the line of fire, to raise crops and children as best
they can amid all the gunfire. It is quite impossible for the
hard-core fighters to succeed without at least the tacit
cooperation of the people.
Thousands of South Vietnamese, appalled by Diem’s corruption and
brutality against Buddhists and suspected communists, rushed to fight
with the NLF. Those unwilling or unable to fight – including women,
children and the elderly – gave support in other ways, such as
providing food, safety and information about enemy troop movements.
So how does an
occupier win a guerrilla war? By allying oneself with the people and
thus robbing the fighters of the support without which they can't
survive. As Mao Zedong had
put it: “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish
swims in the sea,” (There's a more comprehensive quote here,
on a page where Mao emphasizes that guerrillas must treat the people
well, so as to gain their enthusiastic support) so if one “drains
the sea” by addressing and solving or at least mitigating the
grievances of the people, the hard-core fighters will be left high
and dry and will not gain power.
It is of course
possible that the Palestinian people in Gaza will still be motivated
to annihilate the Israelis after their conditions are softened and
mitigated and their existence is rendered to be less than a
concentration camp, but people in general tend not be fanatics and if
they find they can live their lives, stay out of the line of gunfire
and raise crops and children in a relatively unmolested fashion,
fanaticism tends to die in those circumstances.
The people of the
Middle East have demonstrated this through their attitude towards
America over the past decade and a half. They have shown that
“The publics in every nation polled in both 2008 and 2009 showed an
increase in confidence in Obama compared to Bush--on average 37
points.” Obama was, and remains, much less aggressively
in-your-face than Bush was and so maintains a much higher degree of
popularity than his predecessor did.
I believe that
Israel would do far better to try and separate the Palestinian people
from the hard-core fighters of Hamas via policies that lessen the
harshness of their lives than through the current policy of
collective punishment.
