Some Fight with Fear and Some Fight with Faith By Mahmood Abdullah

Some Fight with Fear and Some Fight with Faith

By Mahmood Abdullah

Al-Jazeerah, August 29, 2006

YVONNE Ridley's thought (and thank God it is only a thought) in her article "Is IsraeliArmy so Incompetent?" (Daily Muslims, August 21, 2006) needs to be analyzed.

She writes that the Israelis "threw in the towel on purpose", implying that the Israeli army may not have been defeated after all because it has a powerful arsenal and it has at its disposal ruthless measures and tactics of extracting intelligence through bribery and other allurements, which it has already successfully employed on the conventional Arab armies. Therefore, the Israelis may have acted as a defeated party to extort more and more aid from the U.S. for their "war of survival". The Israelis have lived for fifty-five years on the premise that their army is invincible. The U.S. policymakers (and not the uninformed American people) have thrown all their weight behind them because of their own supremacy complex. The political analysts have written extensively that whenever the Israelis face any crisis, the remote control is in the hands of the Zionist lobby in Washington; and more often than not, the U.S. Administration has to succumb to their demands for which they do not have to pretend defeat. On the contrary, they had always pretended victory. Indeed, they are claiming that they have emerged triumphant in confrontation with Hezbollah and have announced that they are already preparing for the second round of fighting. What about the U.N. resolution 1701, one may ask? The answer is: which among the U.N. resolutions have they not breached after acceptance? And which international accord have they ever abided by? After having had to accept resolution 1701 to end the hostilities, they have already breached it seven times since the ceasefire. They will never be able to forget the humiliation they have suffered for the first time in their modern history, and that too at the hand of a militia.

We, Muslims, cannot segregate ourselves from the guidance of the Qur'an and lessons from history. The Qur'an speaks about the arrogance and pride of the oppressors. Pharaoh and Nimrod always acted as if they were triumphant even when they were not. They and those who emulate them resent the mere thought of defeat. Their desperate measures and mass-killings were the beginning of their downfall.

It is not unknown in the life of this Ummah that the believers have fought the mighty forces with faith, such as in the battle of Badr (313 against 1000 strongly armed). In the battles of Badr and Hunayn, the Muslims did not fight with material power, but with strong faith and commitment to the cause. The Qur'an asserts: "How often, by Allah's will, has a small force vanquished a big one? Allah is with those who steadfastly persevere." (Qur'an, 2:249). In light of these tangible facts, it is dangerous to assume that those who are devoted to their faith will have produced individuals who would crack at the first opportunity of getting bribed. Having said this, all the five fingers are not equal. In the cocktail of the Lebanese society, a network of Israeli spies had been working on the ground. This explains that the preparation for the Israeli aggression against Hezbollah was in the offing long time ago. Although the Western media did not give any publicity to the discovery of the espionage network, the Arab media covered it well.

It was not the abduction of the two Israeli soldiers from the disputed Shab'aa farms by Lebanese resistance that was an act of provocation, but it was the terror operation of the Israeli spies in Lebanon, several weeks before that, which was a flagrant act of war, long preceded by Israel's abduction of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children from the streets and their homes and holding them in their dungeons illegally. Even as the aggression against Hezbollah was in progress, the Israeli agents were giving signals to the jet-fighters to bomb specific buildings and mosques in South Lebanon. Indeed, Hezbollah announced that about forty of these spies were traced and handed over to the Lebanese police. All these facts indicate that in the process of their indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets, the Israelis could never have been precise. To claim that the giant technology at their disposal has to be always precise is not feasible. This claim may also lead to unrealistic presumptions that Israel could go on bombing indefinitely to achieve its goal and that all other factors in Israel remained static, which is not true. According to International Amnesty, Israel undertook 9000 aerial bombardments without discriminating between civilian and military targets. Still, Israel faced time constraint and restraint on its human and other resources. It was also sensitive to the casualties in its forces. It did not have time at its disposal and Hezbollah had all the time at its disposal. Each bomb it dropped was very costly to its estranged economy. Each cluster bomb dropped was meant to cause maximum damage to the civilians and fighters. Call it a miracle, if you like, that hundreds of these bombs are scattered all over the South of Lebanon unexploded. If all of them had exploded, they would have resulted in many massacres like Qana. This is the type of inhuman revenge it sought to take and create a rift against Hezbollah in the Lebanese society.

Anybody looking at the carnage and mass-destruction in Lebanon cannot escape to notice that all the buildings that housed administrative and social activities of Hezbollah in the South, were razed to the ground. But this does not mean that the smart bombs have to be smart enough to locate every single hideout of the fighters. There have been programs on al-Jazeera TV on the crimes against humanity the Israelis committed through their war of genocide. This satellite TV channel has also screened interviews showing the mobile strategy that the fighters had adopted, especially in the ground-fighting. There used to be competition between brothers and between father and sons on who among them will get martyred first. Only those who are committed to their cause can put up this type of resistance. On the other hand, most of the Israeli casualties in the ground fighting were through shooting on the back, which indicates that they were trying to run away when faced by Hezbollah fighters. Heavy equipment can never guarantee victory. If it did, the U.S. would not have been defeated in Vietnam. The outcomes of wars have more to do with will and determination of the fighters. The Israeli fighters were not convinced that they were fighting for a just war and therefore, they were more concerned with saving their life in the pitched battle by fleeing when faced by the resistance fighters. Had they been satisfied with the objective of the war, there would never have been calls for Ehud Olmert, his Defence Minister, Perez, and Chief of Staff to resign. But the fact remains that they are facing a barrage of criticism in the Israeli society for the blunders they had committed.

The Arabs of Haifa who were caught up in the cross-fire, and those who lost members of their family, gave testimony on al-Jazeera TV, in which, they did not blame Hezbollah, but blamed the Israeli war of aggression against the Arabs. They said that they have been continuously robbed of their land, and they have been treated as third class citizens, where the Israelis have not even bothered to provide them with shelters and bunkers similar to the ones provided for the Jews. In one of his messages, Nasrallah specifically apologised to the Arabs of Haifa and told them that when their blood flows, we feel as if our blood is spilled. He requested them to vacate Haifa in order to spare themselves further damage, so that the fighters of Hezbollah are not constrained and worried about them.

To assume that the Israelis have to be competent and successful with their smart bombs is equivalent to undermine other political realities. It is tantamount to assume that they faced no pressure from their public to stop the war which is simply not right. As the Israeli economy was incurring a daily loss of $200 million and as the casualty figures started mounting, Tel Aviv faced demonstrations demanding the government to stop the war. Between the international and domestic pressures, the government was trying to achieve its declared objective of annihilating Hezbollah. Then it lowered its expectation, and then it had to confess that the objective was not achievable. One of their army personnel told Sky TV during the war that as the U.S. had failed in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Russia has failed in Chechnya, Israel has also failed in Lebanon. This was an honest confession. One may ask: haven't the U.S. and Russia got the most sophisticated weaponry in the world? Why then are they failing to achieve their objectives? No one is suggesting that they too are pretending defeat in order to extort more and more money from their own public by way of increase in the defence budged. The reality of the matter is that arrogance and pride are diseases, and if the history of religions is of any guide, then they can never achieve a permanent victory. If they had, then the descendants of Pharaoh and Nimrod would still have been in power.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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