“The rage of imbeciles is filling the world, “ is a sentence I’ve just come across in the fine book in which the French and Catholic Georges Bernanos expressed the dismay he felt at the time of the Spanish civil war. Worse was soon to come, of course.
On the face of it, the Hamas onslaught against Israel is indeed the rage of imbeciles. It is the third such onslaught in the space of the last seven years. Nothing has come out of the first two except death and destruction, the major part falling on the Palestinians whose cause Hamas claims to be promoting. The third spells more death and destruction.
Not imbeciles at all, the Hamas leadership consists of hard realistic cynics, experienced in conspiracy and crime. Why then do they fire barrages of rockets that twice have provoked a severe Israeli response, and are doing so a third time likely to be more devastating still? To Israelis, as to all Westerners with their costs-and-benefits calculations, this repetition is imbecilic. To Hamas, however, any other course of action would look like surrender and dishonor, both of which are worse than defeat. Since codes dictated by ideology trump rationality, it’s not open to doubt, nor even to discussion.
The recent call for ceasefire illustrates the non-meeting of minds that follows from these cultural differences. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s offer to suspend bombing was presented by Hamas as evidence that they had him on the run. The mere suggestion of peace was enough to land him and Israel in a position of weakness. Vice versa, Hamas felt that the moment had come to act like the stronger party, demanding concessions and firing off yet larger barrages at civilian centers.
The sole positive course left to Netanyahu is to show that Israel is not in fact the weaker party. Israeli troops have accordingly moved into Gaza. The one and only way to make sure that there will not be a fourth Hamas onslaught down the road is to neutralize and destroy the rocket arsenals in Gaza. Disengagement of those troops without having first destroyed these stock-piled rockets would be evidence of genuine imbecility — worse is then bound to come, and quite soon too.