By Omar Ahmad "My son is gone, my son is gone," wailed Said Masri, a 57-year-old shopkeeper, as he sat in the middle of a Gaza City street, slapping his face and covering his head with dust from a bombed-out security compound nearby. For many years, the last two most conspicuously, Gaza has been one gigantic prison. Despite a mutual cease-fire brokered in Egypt, Israel has subjugated over a million people to unfathomably deplorable living conditions. Mind you, the exposition of these injustices is coming from human rights watch groups within Israel. It’s hard to fathom what life would be like if a military decision whimsically turns off your water and power and limits food shipments to the local stores so you starve every odd week. Imagine your son or daughter comes down with a normally easily-treatable infection, but there are no antibiotics in the clinics. I cannot comment on the alleged "rocket" attacks from a small subset of the governing body in Gaza; suffice it to say, the Israeli public relations machine is adept at one thing only: lies. One cannot take anything they say seriously, and I won’t. The savage brutality of the Israeli war machine (not the entirety of the Israeli population, certainly there are peace-loving human beings there) is mind-boggling. Israel often claims it has one of the world's best and most "skilled" armies and air force. This propagandistic nonsense has been disproved most recently when Hezbollah humiliated their forces out of the South of Lebanon (with no air force and a fraction of the modern technology Israel enjoys). It is a fundamental derangement of the Israeli mind that it relies on bombing unarmed, defenseless civilians to establish its military might and any sort of credibility in any "fight" it may have. Though herein is their biggest error, and what I hypothesize will cause a stinging military defeat of the "mighty" IDF by these unarmed civilians. Namely, they have violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the "Art of War" by Sun Tzu: "When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard." The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, is still required reading in military academies. It is timeless. The above principle carries truth for if you completely surround an army, or a people, where they truly feel there is no way out, they will fight stronger, and harder, and to the death. It is in these situations that vastly smaller, or large but poorly equipped, armies can inflict incomprehensible damage on a foe. Many times, they can completely defeat that foe. Israel is violating one of Sun Tzu's most fundamental tenets, you never surround a people, subjugate them, and leave no outlet. At some point, this entire population in Gaza will be willing to give their lives. And all they have to do is walk. - Omar Ahmad contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
