THE CICAK.com

Israel’s Catch-22

By ANDREW LOH

Author’s warning: This article neither attempts to justify nor condemn the Israeli-Lebanon conflict, but is an extremely biased, personal perspective of the situation. Given the highly volatile sentiments surrounding it, this article will be “sensitive” for most.

Hezbollah is not made up of idiots. Its members are highly intelligent, calculating strategists. Its newest action has forced Israel into another Catch-22 situation.

First, Hezbollah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers. Israel has to do something. Do nothing and the government will fall. It’s simple psychology. You don’t retaliate, you lose face. You are weak. You get voted off.

Hezbollah: 1, Israel: 0.

I see that Israel has a few choices, with varying outcomes:

a) Israel can negotiate with Hezbollah and exchange a few thousand prisoners for two soldiers. Hezbollah wins and Israel loses face. Moreover, this will incite Hezbollah to launch MORE kidnappings to free MORE prisoners.

Israel set a precedent for this by agreeing to a similar exchange in 2004, when the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and a businessman were exchanged for 30 Lebanese and 400 Palestinian militants from Israeli prisons. Then at a mass rally, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah warned that “Hezbollah would kidnap more Israelis to use as bargaining chips… to secure the release of Lebanese prisoners.”

Hezbollah: 2, Israel: 0.

b) Force some institution to pressure Hezbollah to return the soldiers. This will not happen, as Hezbollah listens to no one. Hezbollah hasn’t listened to the UN or the international community or its government to disarm, according to UN Security Council Resolution 1701. (Conversely, Israel doesn’t listen either.)

c) Israel can invade Lebanon to whack Hezbollah up. However, Hezbollah will still win, because:

i) Although the group might lose militarily, it will win politically - casualties from the Lebanese side will definitely outweigh Israeli civilian deaths, and the world will condemn Israel, yet again. Just read the papers.

Hezbollah: 3, Israel: 0

ii) People are nothing to Hezbollah, and everything to Israel. Hezbollah sees people as Arafat the Corrupt did - as martyrs, compulsory sacrifices, collateral damage, world sympathy bait. It doesn’t care how many people, Lebanese or Israeli, die. In fact, for Hezbollah, the more people perish the better, as the world will further condemn Israel.

For Israel, however, every death counts dearly. “The Israeli public is far more sensitive to casualties,” retired Israeli Col. Gal Luft said in a 2004 Washington Post article. “Thirty dead soldiers per year were enough to create public resistance to the [Lebanese] occupation and finally bring about withdrawal. In Israel everyone has a family member who is a soldier or knows one. Funerals are covered extensively… when a soldier dies, his pictures appear on the first page of major newspapers and on national television.”

Hezbollah: 4, Israel: 0.

iii) Hezbollah hides its weapons amongst civilians. Israel, of course, seeks to minimise civilian casualties but cannot because of this often-overlooked fact. Hezbollah, on the other hand, invites mortalities, because loss of life = political gain in Hezbollah’s dictionary. Do you really think Israel is that daft to kill civilians for fun?

In a New York Times article quoted in the New York Press, Jon Egeland, who is in charge of humanitarian affairs for the UN, accused Hezbollah of “cowardly blending” among women and children. He said, “I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this… I don’t think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men.”

Hezbollah: 5, Israel: 0

iv) Israel has to INVADE sovereign Lebanon to get Hezbollah, which is bad politics. Sure kena hentam one! What to do? Lebanon is so weak, so Hezbollah is grabbing them by the balls-lah!

“Hezbollah has created a ’state within a state’ in Lebanon and must be disarmed,” its country’s prime minister Fouad Siniora once said. Siniora said the Shiite militia had been doing the bidding of Syria and Iran, and could only be disarmed with the help of the international community.

After the destructive Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah was the only faction to retain weapons during the subsequent Syrian occupation. It was under the control of the more powerful Syrian army. With the power vacuum created by Syria’s withdrawal, Hezbollah now reigns supreme in the South. The Lebanese military is small, poorly equipped, ill-disciplined, badly organised, and in no way ready to neutralise Hezbollah (Note: See this article for more information). In addition, 35 percent of its members are Shiite and are sympathetic towards the group.

Hezbollah: 6, Israel: 0

5) I think Hezbollah will batter down Israeli columns into a bloody guerrilla war, if the ceasefire doesn’t hold. Remember, every Israeli casualty inflicted is a horrendous loss to Israel, while Hezbollah just can’t wait to sacrifice more martyrs.

Hezbollah’s motto is: “You love life, we love death.” There is nothing, gushes Hezbollah’s patron Ahmadinejad, “more beautiful, holier or more eternal than the death of a martyr.” No mercy even for Israeli-Arabs, who bear the brunt of the missile attacks, martyrs they will all be. A glorious death!

What are you going to do to people who will not stop until you are wiped off the face of the earth?

What CAN you do?

Imagine if an Israeli PM said he wanted to wipe out the Palestinians from the face of the earth, to put it into perspective, okay.

Only some people can say things like that (wiping people off the face of the earth), start a war, and get away with it, and even be supported by 10 percent of the world’s population.

The irony is that Israel can win 100 brilliant, against-the-odds wars and still be insecure, destroyed forever if it loses just ONE war.

Israel is damned if it invades, and damned if it doesn’t. Israel is trapped by this ingenious, brilliant political manoeuvre by Hezbollah.

Given all these reasons, of course Israel doesn’t care what others think-lah!

And so Hezbollah is MOSTLY, if not SOLELY responsible for the destruction of Lebanon, for escalating every act of violence happening today in the war. The blame IS theirs. Stupid, brilliant, crazy, heartless Hezbollah.

If you want to point fingers, point them at Hezbollah.

Imagine if some military organisation in Brunei, hostile to Malaysia for years, kidnapped Malaysian soldiers. You’d be incensed and expect Malaysia to get them back, right? If the Bruneian army was useless and the organisation didn’t listen to anyone, the Malaysian government would then have a moral burden to get the soldiers back, by hook or by crook. Even if it meant decimating West Brunei, where this hypothetical organisation has its base, to make sure such attacks do not continue.

What went right for Hezbollah? Almost everything.

Before the attacks, the Lebanese people were demanding the disarmament of Hezbollah and piling up pressure on it. A 2004 study found most Christians (71 percent) were in favour of disarming Hizbullah, while generally Muslims (74 percent) were against it.

But because Israel foolishly played into the hands of Hezbollah by implementing collective punishment against Lebanon as a whole, the Lebanese people are now fully behind Hezbollah.

According to a current poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, fully 87 percent of the Lebanese people support Hezbollah, a 29 percent rise from February’s numbers.

Now 80 percent of Christians support Hezbollah, along with 90 percent of Muslims. Fantastic news for Hezbollah because Israel managed to do something the organisation could never have done independently: unite Lebanon behind it! Yay!

Hezbollah is also gaining international credibility as the only Muslim organisation to have ever bloodied Israel’s nose. Before this, all the Arabs had done was lose. Pan-Islamic support, especially from Sunnis in American brown-nosing countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, has been growing exponentially for Hezbollah. Some have even hailed Nasrallah as the new Gamel Abdel Nasser (former president of Egypt and famed Arab nationalist).

Popular support is turning against inactive, Malaysian-style all-talk-and-no-do governments and towards riding the Islamist hype of hard-hitting, Israel-humiliating Hezbollah. I believe that if the conflict goes on, you’ll see these people going to Lebanon to fight some more as jihadists, as some Indonesians have done.

Brilliant, brilliant Hezbollah.

World peace. *waves hand like the Queen*
-
ANDREW LOH is a staff writer for theCICAK.

He is a monstrously biased, rebellious 19-year-old who thinks that young people should be elected to Parliament instead of some incompetent, blundering, racist old fogey, and that Malaysian subtitlists should go for listening and language lessons. He is currently Undecided (yes, that’s possible) at Swarthmore College. Visit his site.