Doing Exactly What Your Enemy Wants

Usually Doesn’t End Well...

This week, events in the Middle East have me revisiting memories from more than a half century ago.

When I was a naive and idealistic 19-year- old, I became a convinced pacifist, and volunteered with the Quakers to do summer recreation work with poor Catholic kids in war-torn Belfast.

The second week I was there, the IRA ambushed and killed a British soldier. The next day, British Army units swarmed through our neighborhood several times, arresting dozens of young men, and beating up scores more.

More than once that day, I was stopped and ordered to lean spread-eagled against a wall, while army squad took turns interrogating us. (You had to be sure to keep your arms and legs spread as wide as possible the whole time, or you risked a rifle butt hard up your crotch.) Talking back was ill-advised, what with the paratroopers expressing a fervent desire to: “Teach you bastards a lesson you’ll never forget.”

I remember asking Jimmy McVickers, one of the local Catholic volunteers, why the IRA would do something so guaranteed to cause hardship for all the men in the community. “It’s not as though killing one British soldier is going to hasten the arrival of a free Ireland,” I observed.

“Recruitment,” was Jimmy’s response. Whenever the IRA was short of volunteers, they would kill a British soldier, knowing if they did so the British Army would so brutally terrorize the community that the IRA would get a bunch of new recruits, and a big influx of donations, in the days that followed.

A few weeks later, I was taking a group of children to the local park. As we reached the top of a small hill, an IRA sniper crouched just below and behind us opened fire on an army post directly in front of us.

Afterwards, I remember talking about it with Jimmy, angry the sniper had so callously used me and the children as human shields: “He was taking a big chance the army sentry wouldn’t shoot back and kill one of the neighborhood children.”

“If the army had shot back and killed a child, the IRA would get three month’s worth of donations and new recruits overnight,” replied Jimmy: “For the IRA, that would be like winning the lottery.”

To their credit, the British Army eventually figured out what the game was. They stopped going on brutal rampages every time a soldier was killed or wounded. Which, over time, starved the IRA for money and new recruits. That opened the way for the women’s peace movement to build bridges between the Protestant and Catholic communities, which, in turn, laid the groundwork for the Peace Accords.

Why am I remembering those events now? Well, it’s pretty clear to me that Hamas went out of their way to be as brutal as possible in murdering young people and children during their recent incursion into Israel. Though Western media wants them to have done this only because “they are monsters”, I strongly suspect Hamas’ actions were quite deliberately and consciously designed to provoke a murderous lust for vengeance in the Israeli leadership.

Hamas wanted the Israelis to do exactly what the Israelis are now doing. Cutting off food, electricity and water to the Gaza Strip, bombing hundreds of high-rise buildings into rubble, indiscriminately killing women, children and the elderly: these are all war crimes, every bit as much as the slaughter of innocents by Hamas was a war crime.

In North America and Europe, our airwaves are still saturated by horror stories of young Israeli revellers being gunned down in the dessert.

The rest of the world moved on from that story days ago. They’ve been watching dead Palestinian children being pulled from the rubble of shattered apartment blocks. Every day, they’re hearing about Palestinians without food or water, shivering in the dark, waiting for the next bomb to fall. When the war is finally over, those are the memories that will live on in the non-Western world.

By manipulating Israel into an enraged orgy of vengeance, Hamas has succeeded in destroying every bridge Israel has built with Arab nations in recent years.

Palestine, and the liberation of Palestine, will once again be a cause celebre in the Arab World. Jihadi armies the world over will be swimming in new recruits. Israelis will be afraid to leave Israel - probably for good reason.

If Israel were to step back from sending it’s army into the Gaza Strip, I think there’s still some chance Hisbollah, Syria and the West Bank would restrict themselves to small, symbolic attacks.

If Israel follows through on its stated plans to send 300,000 soldiers into Gaza, I think it’s pretty much a given that Hisbollah in Lebanon will unleash thousands of rockets and drones on Israel. The West Bank will also enter the conflict. Perhaps Syria as well.

War will ruin an already shaky Israeli economy. Depending on how far the war spreads, Israel will end up somewhere between badly damaged and devastated.

If Hamas wins their equivalent of the lottery, Israel will attack Iran. If that happens, I’m pretty sure the number of Israeli dead will number in the tens of thousands.

If I were the Chinese Government, I would have traded a hundred Chinese hypersonic anti-ship cruise missiles for a supertanker full of Iranian oil several months ago. I’d now have my fingers crossed that the US Government is stampeded into taking part in Israeli air strikes against Iran.

Afterwards, I’m sure the Chinese Government will publicly express profound regret that Chinese missiles had sent so many US warships to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

Privately, of course, there will be much jubilation in Beijing. The US is not the only nation that can weaken its enemies with proxy wars, after all.

Will anyone in the Israeli or American Governments stop long enough to question the wisdom of doing exactly what their enemies want them to do? It’s possible, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Feelings are running so high on this issue, I am sure that some readers will see me as strongly anti-Palestinian. Others will undoubtedly see me as stridently anti-Israeli. I am neither. I am strongly anti-massive-and-senseless-carnage. And I am very stridently anti-World-War-Three.

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PS: Here’s me as a gawky 19-year-old, with some of my favourite kids in Ballymurphy, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

And, yes, those holes you can see in the wall behind us are bullet holes…