Well, John, you don't really expect any group of pundits to label themselves as a "right-wing lobby", do you?
I read this column in today's Jerusalem Post. Bear in mind that it is written by an Israeli centrist who was a long-time supporter of Oslo. I think the Israelis have really crossed the Rubicon in their own thinking about the necessity of the war that they are now fighting:
MIDDLE ISRAEL: On strategic surprise
By Amotz Asa-El
(April 4) It was "just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do," said Franklin Roosevelt as early reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached him.
FDR - according to biographer Frank Freidel - meant that it was just like the Japanese to plot war while discussing peace. Whether or not FDR was actually not surprised on that abstract level remains unclear; what is clear is that in the narrow military sense Japan accomplished at Pearl Harbor complete surprise.
At the same time, it is also clear that with all due respect to their daring and originality in launching it, the generalissimos who masterminded Pearl Harbor ultimately led their regime, country and nation to catastrophe.
The same goes for Yasser Arafat's suicide war.
While there were those in our midst who - unlike this newly sober Middle Israeli - dismissed the Oslo process all along as a ploy, in the narrow military sense even they were caught off guard. When Oslo was launched, Israeli skeptics expected landmines, roadside bombs, car bombs, Katyusha attacks, border infiltrations, airplane and hostage hijackings, but not a massive invasion of our public domain by youngsters brainwashed to disrespect life, both their own and their victims'.
In this respect, we failed to implement French military thinker Ferdinand Foch's time-honored recommendation - to avoid the enemy's strategic surprise.
Naturally, we are not the first ones to be strategically surprised.
No American anticipated the magnitude, manner, location or timing of Japan's attack; Rome never expected Hannibal to cross the Alps, and Stalin refused to believe his ally Hitler was actually attacking him even when Russia was already awash with Messerschmidts, Panzers, and Einsatzgruppen murder squads.
Still, at the end of the day all these master surprisers were unconditionally defeated. Hannibal and Hitler committed suicide, and Pearl Harbor's mastermind, Admiral Yamamoto, though killed in battle rather than as a suicide, evidently sought that kind of death, as he wrote in a poem to the thousands of troops Japan was sending to their deaths:
Wait but a while young men!
one last battle fought
gallantly to the death
and I will be joining you
GENERALLY, these and other strategic surprisers ultimately lost because while they successfully detected the enemy's weaknesses, they nonetheless failed to appreciate his strengths, namely defensive durability and offensive resolve.
The Japanese (though not Yamamoto, who opposed attacking the US), misled by America's interwar isolationism, thought Roosevelt would be reluctant to fight offshore. As it turned out, America had no compunction fighting not only at Pear Harbor, but also in Tokyo itself. Hitler was convinced the Slav warrior was racially inferior to the Aryan, and the Communist economy could never defeat German technology. As it turned out, on the battlefield the Russians fought tooth and nail and in the workplace they mass-produced the superb T-34 thousands of kilometers beyond the war zone. Hannibal thought Rome would disintegrate politically and be spread thin militarily. Eventually, even when he was marching southwards, Rome's allies in central Italy remained loyal, while he was losing his strategic rear in Spain to Scipio's counter-offensives.
WHERE, then, does all this lead here and now?
Tragically, it leads to doing what the enemy assumed - and still assumes - the Jews will never do. As New York Times foreign-affairs columnist Tom Friedman has written this week, the resort to massive suicide bombings is not a matter of desperation - the world is brimming with desperados who refrain from taking innocent lives - but a strategic choice stemming from a cold assessment that the Jews' appreciation of human life is higher than anyone else's.
Yet, while indeed poignant, this analysis is incomplete. The whole truth is that the Palestinian experience and calculation is that Israel not only sorely laments its own losses, but also won't target civilians. And if this can be assumed, then one can by design make that population produce, equip, harbor, and shield the very people who will be made to kill Israeli civilians.
Friedman, a land-for-peace fan as veteran as this one, concluded that "Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay."
To be effective, that blow must target civilians. That is what the Jewish state was not expected to do, and that is what will make the enemy understand it means business.
This may or may not end up with Nablus, Jenin or Kalkilya carpet-bombed, but it will begin with the bombings of mass-gatherings of people who openly support terror.
The moderately estimated 60,000 Germans who got killed in Dresden by a British-led attack of more than 2,000 bombers, and the 25,000 Afghans recently killed by American air raids have had a lot less to do with their leaders' crimes than the Palestinians who crowd suicide-terrorists' funerals while chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel!"
Shimon Peres still suggested the other day that most Palestinians do not condone terror. That can no longer be assumed. It has to be demonstrated, and that demonstration can only be convincing when Palestinians openly confront the terrorists who deprived them of the over-arching peace deal Israelis like this one offered them only 18 months ago.
Now Israel must attack in the only effective way, and at whatever cost. If Egypt and Jordan sever diplomatic ties, so be it. If Syria joins the fighting, we'll do whatever that would entail.
Military Intelligence must be shifted from the defensive footing of detecting the next attack, to an offensive footing that will determine how many casualties it will take to make the enemy concede what Emperor Hirohito effectively conceded in his famous surrender broadcast to the Japanese people, namely that wholesale violence is a two-way street.
The world - the same world that accepts the daily slaughter of Israelis in our own homes - will scream in hypocritical disgust, but it's better than us spending our days mourning and our nights despairing.
We have the moral duty, we have the historical license, we have the physical means, and we have no choice.
jpost.com |
