There’s an old saying about how easy it is to shoot fish in a barrel. I wonder if anyone’s ever taken the perspective of the fish in that metaphor, which have nowhere to hide? I’d like to discuss it in the context of what’s happening in the Middle East.

What Hamas terrorists did to start things off was criminal. It’s a hallmark of human nature to act (and to react) out of revenge. And when you possess, as Irael does, overwhelming conventional military superiority, well, you’re going to use it. To borrow another adage: If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything begins to look like a nail. And hammering Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip is exactly what the Israeli Defense Forces have been doing.

The problem is that Hamas fighters aren’t the only people living there. The Gaza Strip is called a strip for a reason, and there are over two million Palestinians hemmed in along with Hamas terrorists. Gaza amounts to a city, with a population density of 2.23 million concentrated in 140 square miles. That’s smaller than Chicago. Some may believe that Hamas could not have operated without at least the tacit support of this civilian population. It may be true that even an oppressed population cannot be ruled without the consent of the oppressed. Yet it’s hard to blame women and children.

People are starving there. Disease is rampant. At the time of this writing, over 24,000 have died. That amounts to 20 times the number of Israeli citizens that were killed in the initial Hamas atrocity. If the Israeli government disputes that figure because it comes from Hamas, let’s keep in mind two facts. First, much of the reporting about the death and destruction in Gaza comes from the U.N. and from Non-Governmental Organizations. Second, I recall growing up in a German neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago and hearing German emigres disputing the number who died in the Holocaust as an exaggeration. That’s unforgiveable. Although 24,000 doesn’t compare with six million, let’s not use the same tactic of trivializing human life by trivializing human life, whether those lives happen to be Jewish or Palestinian.

Before the organized army of antisemitism accusers labels me as an enemy of the Jewish people, let’s get two more facts straight: First, antisemitism is real. And second, no one should be able to hurl the accusation of antisemitism to defend horrific acts.  And what’s happening in Gaza is, by any definition, a horror.

Some more facts that are beyond dispute. When the IDF instructed Palestinians in Gaza to go the south or be bombed, most did. Then they were bombed in the south of the Gaz Strip. Many of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed (about half), along with 60% of the infrastructure that comes with relentless bombing. 80% of Gazans have been internally displaced. This has made life there unbearable.

Yet life in Gaza has been difficult for a long time, because the people there are, for the most part, not allowed to leave except under tightly controlled conditions. They are kept in by walls and fences and border crossings, and by the sea. So when the IDF chose to destroy Hamas through massive waves of bombing, the people there had nowhere to go. Can you imagine the United States military confining Indigenous peoples to reservations (which we did), and then bombing them there with weapons of modern warfare? Telling them to go to one part of the reservation so they’d be safe, and then killing them there anyway? Hence the metaphor: shooting fish in a barrel.

What the Israeli Defense Forces are suffering from is strategic paralysis. It’s having one kind of weaponry – the kind meant to inflict massive retaliation on a conventional foe – but using it in urban combat when the tactics are more suited for a guerilla campaign. But, to reinvoke my other metaphor: when the only tool you have is a hammer…

I write this in part because the war is spreading, and here, we must hold ourselves accountable for this Middle East metastasis here in America. We’re supplying much of the weaponry, often in secret. We’re providing diplomatic cover at the U.N. And we’re widening the war by attacking Houthi forces in Yemen. Lurching from attack to attack. Blundering from one tragic error to the next.

What humanity in general and empires more specifically have failed to evolve is a certain belief and practice, and it is this: that nonreaction trumps reaction. In football, the player flagged for a personal foul and ejected for throwing the punch isn’t the one who started the brawl. He’s the one who retaliates. The IDF is now being credibly accused of war crimes.

A force acting against another force simply concedes energy to the force against which it acts. This is why wars end up being so horribly destructive. It’s also why passive resistance does work. Just ask India. Gandhi got the British out of the country with minimal loss of life.

A force concedes energy to the force against which it acts. That’s why the U.S. is doing exactly what the Houthis and the Iraqi militias which we’re attacking want us to do. Just as we did Osama bin Laden’s and al Qaeda’s bidding in Afghanistan. They want to draw us in, weaken us, stand up to a superpower and survive.

Hamas wins the war in the same way: by surviving politically, diplomatically, and internationally. They take the moral high ground when the IDF kills 20 times the number of Israeli dead. The U.S. and Israel become isolated, at first diplomatically, and then politically and economically. We win the short, hot war, but they (the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran) play the long game and win that. They sap Israeli and American economic strength by forcing expenditures on wars that, even if they’re won militarily, are lost on all other fronts. 

In the meantime, World War III burns slowly at the periphery of the Eurasian landmass. While a distracted West gets sucked down into the vortex of the Middle East, perhaps China takes advantage of our distraction by blockading Taiwan and further cementing its stranglehold over the South China Sea. And maybe North Korea finally carries through on its threats against the South.

On a grand scale, America (and to an extent, our allies) is falling into the same trap of strategic paralysis as Israel. We have this great hammer called the U.S. Navy, so we might as well use it. Maybe next against Hezbollah. Maybe then directly against Iran. All it will take is one Houthi missile getting through to the hull of a destroyer or maybe even an aircraft carrier. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. That’s a quote attributed to the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. No one was particularly interested in World War I, yet it happened anyway, signaling the first blow to the death of European empire. This war may herald the death of the West.

So we can see that not only are we backing what’s become an unjust war, but an incredibly idiotic one as well. We shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves. Most wars are started and prosecuted by imbeciles with big, dangerous toys. Yet they are, ultimately, chosen.

The choice is ours.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just