Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Hamas was quick to declare victory in the latest conflict with
Israel. A closer look at the price it paid in terms of personnel and
equipment shows that its bravado was false. But the fact that Israel
was able to destroy so many installations, weapons teams, smuggling
tunnels, and high-ranking personnel, including Hamasās military chief,
Ahmed Jabari, reveals another, less evident fact: substantial numbers of
people in Gaza have ābetrayed the Palestinian cause,ā in Hamasās terms,
and collaborated with Israel by providing it with intelligence. These
people do not ālove death more than Israelis love life,ā as Hamas would have it. Instead they represent, within Gaza, a slender, complicating affirmation of life.
Israeli intelligence capabilities are estimable, but collecting
precise information about an enemy territory like Gaza poses particular
problems. Israelās intelligence collection starts in space, where
Israeli satellites (like their far more numerous U.S. counterparts) track Iranian weapons
moving by ship to Sudan, Egypt, the Sinai, and the Gaza coast. But
these satellites make their rounds only a few times a day. Compensating
for this limitation, Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles can stay aloft
for hours or even days. During the recent conflict, the skies over Gaza
buzzed constantly with these drones; more than one reporter likened
their sound to that of lawnmowers. Night and day, electro-optical, infrared, and radar sensors allow
the aircraft to see what goes on above ground and, to a limited extent,
even below it, by detecting minute variations in heat or soil
composition. The drones detect and jam electronic communications. They
are the eyes of attack aircraft and artillery and can even attack
targets themselves.
But what Israel accomplished in its bombing campaign required more
information than drones can provide. There were strikes on 1,500 sites,
including 19 command centers, 140 tunnels, and 26 weapons manufacturing
and storage facilities, as well as what an IDF spokesman
laconically called āhundreds of underground rocket launchersā and
ādozens of rocket launchers and launch sites.ā This feat could have
been accomplished only with the much richer information that Israel had:
a vast, three-dimensional map of Gazaās every street, block, building,
and floor, including names of families, their relationships, and their telephone numbers. And movements in and out of this maze were not only mapped but to some extent tracked in real time.
In part, this picture was created by satellite and drone imagery
together with signal intercepts, the meticulous monitoring of telephone,
cell phone, and internet traffic that conveys, to teams of listeners
with powerful computers, who is talking to whom about what. In this
way, civilians can be partially distinguished from āmilitantsāābut only
partially. Israelās vast targeting lists, which involved hitting one
floor of a building rather than another with precision munitions, or
knowing just when an individual was traveling down a particular street
in a single vehicle, required much more. These lists could have been
compiled only through use of human informants.
That is Gazaās secret, the one that allowed the place to survive this
latest round of fighting: It is full of Palestinians working ever so
quietly with Israel against Hamas. Since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, substantial numbers of
Palestinians have been willing to work with it, selling land and
providing information. Many of them, as Hillel Cohen makes clear in his
book Army of Shadows,
have done so for their own reasons, such as personal gain, family
grudges, social divisions, and a kind of ālocal nationalismā that aimed
to preserve their particular lands and possessions. Such motivations
are still at work. Gaza is also directly and indirectly accessible to Israeli handlers
who collect information from hundreds, if not thousands, of
Palestinians. Some of them, Cohen notes, actually view collaboration
with Israel as patriotic, because it pursues a vision of the Palestinian
national projectānot Judeophilic, certainly, but resigned to
Israelāthat is marginally realistic.
Mainstream Palestinian movements are understandably bitter about this
phenomenon: few epithets are more contemptuous than ācollaborator,ā and
the shocking recent spectacle of bodies of murdered collaborators being dragged behind Hamas-driven motorcycles sent a clear message (though, it turned out, at least one of those murdered was not a collaborator but an Islamist rival).
Under this circumstance, the fact that Gazans inform at all is
notable; and in fact the extent of collaboration, though unquantifiable,
is clearly large. It speaks to the failure of Palestinian nationalism,
as opposed to local and family identification, to attract the loyalty
of Palestinians. Villages and clans remain more dependable and
predictable repositories of allegiance than the reliably authoritarian
and kleptocratic Fatah movement. The fact of collaboration also shows the shortcomings of Hamasās
Islamized version of Palestinian nationalism, confounding easy notions
about Hamasās iron control and the radicalization of the populace, as
opposed to the leadership. Hamas leaders indeed love death, but for
other people. They are happy to consign eager young men to suicide and
to contemplate the blood of the children who are sacrificed as human shields when Hamas hides near schools and hospitals to avoid Israeli airstrikes.
The attraction of dying for Islam has limits. The average Gazan,
when he makes a phone call to a particular number to say that a specific
individual is walking down this or that street, is embracing life in a
roundabout way. Gazans, like other Palestinians, have no love for Jews
and Israel and readily celebrate their murder;
but they are not anxious to die themselves. There remains, then, this
spark of humanity, if only the impulse to self-preservation.
Does this realization change the military calculus? It certainly
made possible the most detailed sort of pinpoint bombing campaign. It
also shifts perceptions of the conflict, at least slightly. But it
yields few specific prescriptions. Palestinian collaboration, however
widespread, is hardly a sign of a people who wish to be free, or even
free of Hamas. As America discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan,
militarily defeating fascism, religious or otherwise, means little
unless populations challenge its patriarchal, theocratic, or authoritarian culture. Supplying human intelligence is not the same thing. So, the war continues. Jewish Ideas
