IMPEDANCE!

We need to look beyond Hamas’s “resistance” and see what could be next. A dictionary or electrical terms tells us it could be “impedance”, an even more complicated concept that incorporates, but moves beyond “resistance.” We need to explore “impedance” because it seems “resistance” has been thrown from the same rooftop that Fatah members were.

I understood “resistance” as defined by Hamas and Hizzbollah to be the doctrine of attacking Israel to end the occupation. Since to Shia Amal villagers secure behind the Lebanese border, or a newly independent Gazan, there had never been an Israeli retreat, “resistance” meant “attack”. Clever Arab spin-meisters became enamored with “resistance” as a perfect word to convey multiple meanings while leaving the heroic impression of a fighter for freedom. Perhaps they watched old Humphrey Bogart movies where he was in the “resistance” wearing a trench coat and smoking a filterless cigarette. The world press interviewed hundreds of Southern Lebanese villagers and Gazan citizens who all swore that to the end they would “resist” Israel.

The second characteristic of resistance is, of course, fighting back when actually attacked. So in Gaza, what do we see the Hamas fighters doing? What actions do we see from the tens of thousands of “resisters” who paraded in their green headbands and black facemasks, who held aloft their rifles and were swaddled in their dynamite stick suicide belts? We see them “resisting” by hiding behind and throwing their women and children into harms way. Their “resistance” seems to be hoping that Al Jazzera or CNN or the BBC will create enough worldwide revulsion to bail them out. Their “resistance” fighters are hiding in cellars, hospital wards and closets. They have gone to ground and not in the electrical sense. The only thing they seem to have “resisted” is the urge to fight like men and engage their enemy in any meaningful way. Hamas leaders are dressed as women and evading detection by pretending to be nurses and orderlies.

Abandoned and forsaken by everyone including the “resister” in chief Nazarallah, who quickly denied involvement in the latest Lebanese missal attack. One could only laugh at his disparity between his haughty flowery words and diminutive actions. He too is conducting the war from a hidden bunker like the wizard of Oz, with lots of noise and smoke emanating from behind a curtain.

Once again, as it has been in every war since 1948, Arab pronouncements are not matched by Arab deeds. The Hamas and Hizzbollah bouquet of vitriol and hate that blooms daily from their mouths about “defeating the Zionist aggressions”, has become a wilted, fetid pile of corpses thrown in the path of the IDF.

On the other hand, perhaps Hamas and Hizzbollah are not as dumb as they seem. Perhaps the west is dumber. It often seems so. In recent articles and editorials in Time Magazine and in the New York Times, knowledgeable Mid-East observers have chosen not to take Hamas and Hizzbollah at their word, not to hear their rhetoric and not to accept their pronouncements. These western observers know better, they can read into the minds and hearts of Khaled Meshaal and Hassan Nasrallah and conclude that they are just kidding about restoring Israel to the Wafa Islamic trust.

Here from Martin Indyk in Time Magazine’s January 19th edition, is an example of this wishful western thinking, “He will need to announce a series of mechanisms for achieving it, including; resumption of Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations, rebuilding of the West Bank and Gaza economies and PA security capabilities, initiation of US-sponsored direct negotiations between Israel and Syria, and operationalizing the Arab League peace initiative.” What if Hamas and Hizzbollah are just not interested? Can’t Hamas and Hizzbollah be true resistance fighters and not want any of the above?

Here is Nicholas Kristof in the Times placing the blame for creating hate and extremism on the Israelis. He finds one Sari Bashi who quotes her six year-old nephew telling us how happy he will be when in response to the Israeli bombing, “hopefully-maybe the Qassam Brigades will now fire rockets at the Israelis.” As if there were never Qassams fired from Gaza before. There you have it. The entire Arab mindset of willful, factual ignorance, self-righteous revenge fantasies straight from the mouth of a six year old presented by the New York Times as inevitable logic and truth. Instead of being horrified at this, always a victim mindset, Kristof sees it as an Israeli failure and reports it as a warning. I read it as degraded people forever locked into a cycle of delusion.

Let’s just spend one more moment here. The Qassam Brigades are a front of deniability for Hamas and are sworn to the utter total and complete destruction of Israel and Jews. They have been firing rockets and sending suicide bombers to Israel (thus committing war crimes) forever. But, in the mind of the six year old quoted here, they are victims’, only avengers. They are not responsible for any of their prior rocket attacks or other acts of aggression. The Israeli attacks are out of the blue actions of a crazed, mad population.

The Arab world believes this. There is little we can do about that, but to try to get the western mind to accept this reality is just plain sick. Kristof, Indyk and Time’s Tim McGirk (in a complete rehash/mishmash of the Tony Judt article in the 2003 NYROB), are in essence carrying forward a haughty, superior and paternalistic way of looking at the Arab world. One that pretends to know better what they are saying then they do when it comes to pronouncements about the fate of Israel. Worse, it gives additional cover to the Arab attackers by discounting and eliminating all responsibility for their words and actions.

On the other hand, Edward Luttwak and Natan Sharansky in recent articles in the Wall Street Journal are much closer to the truth. They are willing to actually listen and understand the words of Hamas and Hizzbollah and credit Israel with responding to those words and actions in a legitimate and effective manner.

“Resistance” is a code word intended to confuse and obscure. It is one thing to fool a six year old in Gaza; it is another to confuse American journalists. The last thing the western world needs now is a collection of mid-east intellectuals with a fifth column mindset.