Israelis have always been fiercely proud of their independence. The lesson of the Holocaust, according to Zionist ideology, is that Jews can trust no one else to protect them. This kind of thinking has been the cornerstone of Israel’s militaristic culture and the strong preference Israelis have for fighting over negotiations. The only possible benefit of this useless war is that it has exposed this line of thought as utter nonsense. Seymour Hersh, the notable intelligence analyst who writes in the New Yorker, covers many of the reasons why this is so, in “an article published this week”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact
Several important lessons come out of the Hersh article. 1. The Israeli political and military establishment is the opposite of independent: it is a tool in the hands of the U.S., something particularly dangerous to the average Israeli now that the U.S. government is run by the most openly militant war profiteers in the U.S.’ long history of war profiteering. 2. The use of vastly superior military force is totally ineffective against a determined guerilla enemy. The result is the opposite of intended - it increases popular support for the militant guerillas, and provides them the logistical infrastructure most important to them: local support. 3. Guerilla insurgencies of all sorts need to be dealt with by a combination of conflict reduction through international diplomatic intervention and pinpoint counter-guerilla tactics. There are so many worthy quotes in this article. But the final paragraph is particularly noteworthy: “Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. `Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,` John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. `The warfare of today is not mass on mass,` he said. `You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.`” Israelis continued belief in a failed militarism, repeating the same empty slogans “Let the IDF win” is mass insanity. It’s time for new thinking and new approaches.
