Masada by the Sea

The seeds of Islamic fanaticism have borne fruit and ripened. What we now see in Gaza is the harvest. It was long in planting and growing. Day by day, year by year, the religious, political and armed elements of Palestinian society devolved into Hamas. Now everyone including the Egyptians, Abbas’s truncated West Bank PLO, and the Bush administration are asking what happened and why, when the results were always clear to see.

First we must understand that religious fanaticism grows with fecundity in Eretz, Israel, and always has. The countless number of tourists who visit Masada—the site of self-slaughter by Jewish zealots who held off the Romans for years—are visiting a shrine to fanaticism. There was no compromise regardless of the odds. The zealots would have no slavery or cultural or political domination. God showed his disfavor by punishing the Jews with the loss of the second temple in 70AD at Jerusalem. It was not just a military defeat, it was a sign from heaven. The term zealot, used to describe the Masada defenders, is in fact a first cousin to the word “Hamas”—Arabic for zeal. From this period through the crusades, a fanatical outlook driven by martyrdom and the belief that God demands death to fulfill his goals has infused the entire region. The recent sacking of the small Christian church in Gaza was no different than the first crusade’s 1099 sacking of the Al-Aska Mosque in Jerusalem and the slaughter of almost every inhabitant in it including eastern Christians. This is the way of religious warriors either Christians or Muslims in Palestine. Today’s tit-for-tat dynamiting of the Sunni and Shiite shrines and mosques in Iraq is another echo of this ancient practice. Destroy your enemies’ place of worship and you weaken him. Once Hamas started down the path of becoming a religious army the concept of compromise was extinguished.

Second, we have failed to learn from the more knowledgeable Saudi, Syrian, and Egyptians. The lesson not learned, is never let fanatical opposition gain a toehold. Arrests, imprisonment, torture and murder are the only winning strategies when dealing with the fanatical opposition. The above governments would not exist if they did not ruthlessly extinguish the religious and political extremists who challenged them. As we obsess about Gitmo, the Saudis are holding thousands in their jails who will never be heard from again. Ditto for the Egyptians who have suppressed the father of Hamas, the Egyptian “brotherhood.” Ask the Syrians where the 20,000 bodies massacred in Hama during the war against the same Muslim brotherhood are buried. Arafat’s use of Hamas as a bad cop to his good cop allowed the movement to grow and thrive. It was the stupidity of the West to think it could be countered and contained by a corrupt dictator with his own love of blood and death.

There is a human tendency to discount the words of others; to hear them not in their true voice but in the wishful thinking ear of the receiver. This was ever so true for Hamas. Long ago they openly declared war on Israel and Jews everywhere. Their goal of exterminating the Jewish presence in the Wafa lands that constituted all of Palestine is clear. It was only the disbelief of the listener that prevented this from sinking in. Hamas has always had one goal: waging a war against military and civilian targets…and now it has a secure base of operations. In a recent poll, Gazans were asked if they thought firing rockets into Israel was effective in light of the destructive Israeli response. Some 54 percent said it was not effective, 34 percent said it should stop, but 17 percent said it should continue anyway. That is the heart of Islamic fanaticism. Regardless of the ineffectiveness of the Hamas rockets, the Israeli counter attack, the destruction of Gazan homes and schools, and the deaths of families and children, these Gazans want more of it. Never underestimate the power of an Imam’s Friday night sermon.

Now what? Sadly, Hamas will force us to give them what they want…and that is to die. While this may seem shocking it really isn’t. Recall the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. Didn’t the trapped, emaciated Jews know it was hopeless to fight the encircling Nazis? Did they ever think they would win? No, diaries from that era show that the Jews wanted to die in order to make a statement about human courage, and dignity. For years the West has watched as Gazans have attended every funeral in which chanting masses followed the enshrouded body as it was carried through the streets. If anyone looked closely at those pictures they would have seen the primal hate in those young faces. Their religious and political leaders have extolled the values and virtues of martyrdom from preschool to adulthood. The value of life in Hamas’s Gaza is measured by its extinction for the cause: the liberation of Palestine.

The Hamas leaders are preparing their own Masada. It is coming. They are armed with weapons smuggled in under the blind eye of Egypt. They have dug tunnels, unable to use sewers as in Warsaw. They have mobilized a civilian army into highly motivated cadres. They will launch wave after wave of suicide attacks on Israel. They will fire rockets. They will coordinate with Hezbollah and open a second front. Another Arab-Israeli war is around the corner, only this time it will be a state versus the Islamic militias.

In the Arab mind they cannot lose. Defeat is victory, death a solace. Read the interviews; listen to the voices of the Hezbollah mothers who have lost sons and daughters in Southern Lebanon during last summer’s “resistance.” They will tell you they only wish they had more children to sacrifice for Hezbollah. Their status in their villages is confirmed by the number of their children killed. They pray for more death and destruction. They are rearming as fast as Syria and Iran will allow.

Hamas is not going to morph into some Cuba-like state giving its sons and daughters up as prostitutes to Italian and German tourists. It is going to war. If we did not want previously to listen to the words of the Imams, and if we did not want to see the faces of the fanatics following the funerals that is understandable, but Hamas will now show us how to listen and see. We will pay the price for not hearing the words they spoke; and it will be costly.