Op-Ed: 'The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves!'

It is a movie classic -- someone gets hysterical, so the hero slaps them across the face and tells them to get a grip on themselves. In the movies, this tactic works. Unfortunately, real life is not like that. This is a lesson for Israel.

There is a scene in the movie "The Producers," where Leo Bloom goes into hysterics and Max Bialystock tries to help him pull himself together by throwing a glass of water in his face. When that doesn’t work he slaps him in the standard, Hollywood approved manner. This only makes matters worse, and Leo wails “I am in pain, I am wet, and I am still hysterical!” I was reminded of this scene by the current crisis in Gaza. After four decades of Israeli captivity the Palestinians are angry and perhaps a bit hysterical. So how does Israel chose to calm them? By bombing them and driving tanks through their neighborhoods. This is not the first time that Israel has tried such tactics; in fact they have been trying this sort of thing since the founding of Israel over half a century ago. So far the tactic has never worked even once and yet the Israelis keep hoping that this time will be different. Doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is usually considered a sign of madness. The way to deal with angry or hysterical people is not to challenge them, push them or try to hurt them in the hopes that they will “snap out if it.” That only makes them angrier and more hysterical. The thing you must do is to stay calm yourself, do not challenge or push the other party and give them a chance to vent and calm down on their own. Listen to everything they say and look for common ground from which you can start to build an agreement. Above all, one must be proportional. If a child throws a rock through your window you, as an adult, do not have the option of picking up a gun and killing that child. Israelis often cite the fact that in recent years terrorists based in Gaza have fired over six thousand rockets into Israel. However they get very impatient, and perhaps a bit defensive, when you ask them exactly how many causalities those rockets have caused in all that time and how many they have caused in this last year. The answers are nine and zero. That being the case it is very difficult for them to make the case that killing almost a thousand people, at least half of whom are civilians, many of those being children, is a “proportional” response to the rockets. Even that would not be a problem, however, if they could at least had something tangible to show for all that blood and misery. But they don’t. This operation will end like all the ones before it, in failure. When the smoke clears and the dead are buried the Israelis will find, much to their surprise, that the Palestinians have not suddenly developed a positive attitude towards Israel, nor are they willing to negotiate. They will no doubt put this down to some character flaw in the “Arab psyche,” but if they were honest with themselves they would admit that under similar circumstances they would refuse to negotiate either. Then what is to be done? Well, the first law of holes is that when you find yourself in one--stop digging! If what you have always done in the past has always failed it is time to try something else. Israel never really tried to negotiate with Hamas. From the day that they were elected Israel declared them a “terrorist organization” and refused to deal with them. This was a mistake. They forget that their own founders were also terrorists but that the pressures of running a state made them become statesmen. No organization is homogeneous. There are factions in any group, even “terrorist” ones. Hamas was once funded by Israel because, aside from their military wing, the cornerstone of the party’s success is the Da’wah, a social, religious, educational and cultural organization that worked to help the Palestinian people. By refusing to recognize Hamas’ win in the election Israel marginalized the moderates and saw to it that the militants achieved more power. The more pain the Israelis inflict on the Palestinian people the more they are driven to side with the militants and the less they are disposed to talk. What Israel seems to have forgotten is that one does not negotiate peace with one’s friends; one must negotiate with the enemy, even if that enemy hates you. One approach to such negotiations is that you can beat the other side to their knees and dictate the peace terms to them while they are in that position. That is the approach advocated by such people as Moshe Yaalon the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002 who has said that:

‘the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

That is exactly what the allied powers did to a defeated Germany after WWI and we all know how well that worked out. But if Israel thinks that they are dealing with a “defeated people” then they are in for a rude awakening. One of the things about having nothing to lose is that one is not as afraid to lose it and a person in such a frame of mind will quite often be willing to die so long as they can take their enemy with them. On the other hand, one can give one’s enemy a reason to live, and to let you live as well. That is what the allied powers did to a defeated Germany after WWII and we all know how well that worked out. Time is running out for Israel. The world grows weary of their constant whining that they are the “victims” while they bomb a helpless people into the rubble. The time is not far off when the world’s patience will suddenly run out and then Apartheid Israel will find itself in the same fix as Apartheid South Africa. But it does not have to end like that. The Israelis have the option of giving the Palestinians something to live for instead of a cause that they are willing to die for. The choice is theirs.