Saturday, July 19, 2014

Imagine being in Charge of defending Gaza

The Israelis and their mouthpieces in America keep saying that the leaders of Hamas are deliberately putting their civilians in harm's way to score propaganda points. There are two reasons why these people say such things: one strategic and one historic.

Let's begin with the strategic reason before we go into the historic, and ultimately discuss why the Jews have once again chosen to accuse someone else of what they see in themselves. What follows is the use of numbers to make my point, but I must warn that some of the numbers have been rounded up to simplify the math.

Suppose you are a military strategist in charge of defending 1.8 million people living in a rectangular piece of real estate that is about 36 kilometers long, and that averages 10 kilometers in width (22.5 miles x 6.25 miles). All that you have are 12,000 rockets which you can use to deter a savage neighbor whose backer is a superpower that fancies itself as the policeman of the world. The consequence is that the relationship between these two has given the neighbor access to unlimited amounts of weapons with massive powers of destruction.

As a military strategist, how would you distribute your people and how would you deploy your rockets? Well, the best way to protect them both is to disperse them as far apart as you can because the more they are concentrated in small places, the more vulnerable they become to attacks from the air, especially that the neighbor has a modern lethal air force.

To find out the best way to do that, you use simple mathematics. You divide the entire piece of real estate into 36,000 squares measuring 100 meters x 100 meters each. The squares will line-up 360 of them length-wise, and 100 of them width-wise. There will be an average of 50 people in each square, and one rocket for every three squares that will have to be placed among 150 people. Note that a meter is approximately a yard in length, a little more than 3 feet.

These numbers mean that there will be an average of 14 meters x 14 meters of space for every Gazan in which to live, work, play, go shopping and do all the activities that human beings normally do. It also means there will be an average of 173 meters x 173 meters of space in which to place a rocket. To imagine a mathematically ideal situation for housing these people and the means to defend them, there will be an apartment building that is 7 floors high containing 7 apartments on each floor to house approximately 150 people and one rocket. But of course, people live in different size buildings and in houses too, thus things look differently on the ground.

There is no way to make the configuration any safer because this is the only one that will compel the savage neighbor to use a maximum number of successful sorties – 12,000 of them to wipe out your entire defense system. The strategy will also minimize, as much as possible, the collateral damage that the neighbor always claims happened inadvertently even when he bombs small boys playing soccer on the beach near a hotel where there is not rockets but foreign journalists; some playing soccer with the kids.

This being the best configuration to protect the people of Gaza, any other will weaken your situation, endanger the lives of your people, and diminish the deterrent effect of your rockets. In real life, these are the realities that the Hamas people must take into their calculation when they do their planning. These are also the realities known to the Jews who spin them differently to badmouth the Palestinians and to hide the fact that they are what they accuse the Palestinians of being.

And this brings us to the historical reason why the Jewish propaganda machine accuses Hamas of using their people to shield their weapons. Unlike the Palestinians who are at home anywhere they go in Gaza and have nowhere else to go, the Jews have been foreign settlers in every inch of land they stole from the Palestinians. The last piece they stole has always represented the new frontier. Up to 1967, their frontier people lived in what they called kibbutz. After that, they called them settlers – usually specifying settlers in the West Bank.

Unlike the Palestinians who have no choice, the Jews choose to live in the kibbutzes as pioneers or in the West Bank as settlers. Their aim before 1967 was to steal the sources of water from the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Lebanese and the Jordanians; their aim now is to steal what they call Judea and Samaria from the Palestinians. Then as now, they put their own children in harm's way, and they invited the children of foreigners, mostly Americans, to live in the kibbutzes and the West Bank in violation of international law, to use the kids as shield.

And they always make sure they have the cameras there to show the world the discomfort that the children experience when they force the Palestinians to take action defending themselves. It can only be said that these people are monsters by choice; the Palestinians have no choice but to endure their monstrosities.

It was necessary for the readers to know all that to understand the dirty game that the Jewish propaganda machine is playing. But the Jews have now demolished their own saying: “We use missiles to shield our people; they use people to shield their missiles.” They did so by dropping the mask on the big hoax that is their so-called Iron Dome.

The truth is that they have no shield to protect their people; they only have lethal American weapons, a big mouth and an army of running dogs constantly barking their refrain for them.