Those in whose minds a debate still lingers about who is winning the war for hearts and minds should turn on the television. To be sure, those plumes of smoke that rise out of Gaza are not sending young Muslim boys scrambling for the remote to switch the channel to MTV. If there's any scrambling among young Muslim boys, it is more likely for their shoes. In London, Lisbon, Mumbai, Madrid, Johannesburg, Jakarta, Kansas and Karachi, thousands of young Muslims are headed to the neighbourhood terrorist recruiter. How will they know where to look? They won't. But the recruiters will.
Rightwing nut jobs on Fox News can hyperventilate all they'd like. And self-contradicting liberal neo-cons (of whom there are several in the Obama Administration, and around Washington DC) can continue to stutter in fear of a citation from the Anti-Defamation League. Nothing changes the simple political reality that right now, Osama Bin Laden's chief strategist is not a crazed Salafist Arab, or self-appointed, ex-military, Pakistani saviour of the ummah. Instead, Bin Laden is having all his hard work done for him by the post-modern, Israeli political version of the Three Stooges named Livni, Barak and Olmert.
Much like the Three Stooges show, the offensive into Gaza has stupid written all over it. The notion that this is a military adventure that will make Israel more secure is laughable, surely even to the most gullible of observers. If all 508 (as of January 5) dead Palestinians have even only one male survivor each, that is 508 potential suicide bombers that Hamas has just recruited without printing out a single leaflet.
The depressing reality is that the real motivation for the assault on Gaza is not Israel's national security, but something much more mundane. Each of the three powerbrokers in Israel have their own myopic reasons for sustaining this new battle in the never-ending war.
Caretaker prime minister Ehud Olmert would like to be remembered for something other than his record of sleaze and corruption. Having already been indicted on corruption charges and been interviewed by police for the twelfth time in December of 2008, Olmert probably feels a large, juicy body count in Gaza would be an effective way to shift the attention of his future biographers away from the corruption scandals.
Defence minister and Labour Party head Ehud Barak is on a mission of redemption, having once been prime minister. His bloodlust is an effective instrument to give proof of his contrition for being a dove back at the turn of the century (he served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001). Back then, Barak made the Israeli rightwing extremely angry by conceding the possibility of a divided Jerusalem to Bill Clinton at Camp David.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has not only inherited Olmert's mantle as head of the Kadima Party, but also the baggage of the 2006 war on Lebanon. Long on administrative integrity but short on the kind of body count that has become a prerequisite for office in Israel, Livni's incentives in going into Gaza are purely political. While she was among the first heavyweight Israeli politicians to distinguish between legitimate Palestinian freedom-fighters (that target only soldiers), and terrorists (who target innocent civilians), Livni has no hope of winning the Feb 10 election without demonstrating that her desire to resolve the long-running conflict does not make her a wimp. The longer the conflict rages, and the more photo-ops she has in which to flex her hawk muscles, the better she is able to showcase her national security chutzpah. In short, things are so bad in Israel that Kadima and Labour are now fighting over who is more similar to post-modern Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu's once-fringe approach to the Palestinians.
While the body count in Gaza may be racking up votes in Tel Aviv, it is also making the future security of those voters and their children more untenable. One of Olmert's ostensible goals for the incursion into Gaza is the end of the extremist Hamas, so that Israel can deal directly with the moderate PLO. Ah, how the times have changed.
It was not long ago that dealing with the extremist PLO was off-limits, and Israeli politicians had their lanterns out in search of Hashemite "Arabim" moderates. The PLO was the extremist party, and a make-believe group of abstract Palestinians were Israel's preferred partners in peace. Edward Said saw all of this all too clearly, all too long ago. In a New York Times op-ed on Jan 8, 1988 Said wrote: "Until the coherence and integrity of the Palestinian narrative are understood and acknowledged … until there is a willingness to hear the truth unadorned … minus all the mendacious pieties about … 'moderate' Palestinians, the insurrections will continue."
Today, Israel continues in its quest for a moderate, singular Palestinian voice, having dragged Yasser Arafat, and a PLO that used to have that kind of broad legitimacy, through the mud for decades. Having delegitimised the PLO itself, and having aided and abetted the emergence of the much less conciliatory Hamas, Israel now yearns for the moderate PLO.
If there were not so many dead people involved, the drama would be comical. It is tragic not only because of the thousands of dead Palestinian bodies that will be piled up in Gaza by the time this assault comes to its end. Tragic not only because of the unending fear in which Palestinians live. Tragic not only because of the continuance of Israeli insecurity, despite having achieved the dream of an Israeli state. Tragic also because all around the world, Bin Laden and the terrorist narrative continue to pummel the daylights out of the self-conscious, timid and pretentious narrative that is being produced by so-called moderates in the Muslim world. So-called not because there is no such thing as a moderate, but because in the Muslim world no issue bridges the distance between mullah and moderate, between rightwing and no-wing, between religious and secular, as quickly and seamlessly as does the Israel-Palestine conflict. When Israel pounds the living bejeezus out of Palestine, then, in effect, there is no such thing as a moderate.
Should Jews be able to practise their faith without fear of persecution and live a terror-free life? Of course they should. Is it important for Muslims to introspect as to why, concurrent to the Israeli assault on Gaza, suicide bombs were killing Pakistani policemen in the NWFP and Iraqi Shias in Basra? Of course it is.
But rationalising Israeli statehood, and introspecting intellectual sloth and spiritual rot in the Muslim world doesn't change the fundamental truths about what is happening in Gaza, and what has been happening in Palestine since 1948. The gross injustice that the Palestinian people have been subjected to for over half a century is primarily attributable to an Israeli state that is simply unmatched in modern times, in terms of impunity and lack of accountability.
It is this injustice, rather than the fantasy of a demonised Islam as an inherently violent belief system, that fuels victory after victory for the architects and articulators of the terrorists' narrative. Their narrative is compelling not because of the innate bloodlust of Muslims, but because the unedited pictures and videos out of Gaza are demonstrative of the brazenness of the IDF's adopted bloodlust.
The terrorists are winning hearts and minds because Livni, Barak, and Olmert are busy trying to win the hearts and minds of Benjamin Netanyahu's voters. The only effective counter-terrorism strategy in the face of what is happening to Gaza is an end to the mavet, and the madness in Israeli politics.
