Jeffrey Goldberg is a pundit regarded by some highly placed
people in America as being a
serious thinker with a knack for the subject of geopolitics … especially when
it comes to the affairs of the Middle East .
Whatever makes these people think so, they may develop a different view if they
read the article he wrote under the title: Is Hamas trying to get Gazans
Killed?” It was published on July 11, 2014 in Bloomberg View.
Goldberg quotes the President of the Palestinian Authority,
Mahmoud Abbas as asking the Hamas people: What are you trying to achieve by
sending rockets?” and Goldberg takes it upon himself to suggest this answer:
“Hamas is trying to get Israel
to kill as many Palestinians as possible.” And this is the best he could do in
the absence of reports relating to the sort of internal dialogue the
Palestinians may be having among themselves.
He goes on to write the rest of the article based on that
opinion because he sees no other explanation for what is happening in the war
that is unfolding at this time between Hamas and Israel . In his words: “Hamas has no
other plausible strategic goal here.” And this is what should tell us that
Jeffrey Goldberg and others like him are incapable of analyzing a situation,
and seeing the long term goal of each player from the moves that they make.
Pundits like Goldberg can only scrutinize what the political and/or military
leaders say, rehash it and then agree with one side or the other. In other
words, the esteem that these people command is highly inflated, and they are
not worth their salt.
Look what Goldberg does in the absence of reports concerning
the internal debate that the Palestinians may be having. First, he writes this
“The men who run Hamas … wish to bring about the annihilation of the Jewish
state.” Second, he contrasts that canard with this: “The Israeli military has
the operational capability to level the entire Gaza Strip in a day, if it so
chooses.” In other words, he is using stale ideals and meaningless stereotypes
to build a theory that is so childish, it tells you that listening to this sort
of people is what turned America
the superpower into America
the super-joke.
What is wrong with guys like Goldberg? Well, many of these
people are old enough to remember the Cold War, and the strategy that was then
used, and came to be called Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD, adopted by America and NATO on one side, and the Soviet Union together with the Warsaw Pact on the other
side. It was mad because each side had no alternative but to build their forces
up to a level at which they could absorb a first nuclear strike and still be
able to retaliate and destroy the other. Call it what you wish but the world
has gone through that period without a serious incident, and we're all alive
today.
Now think of the hardship that the people of Gaza went through, forcing Ariel Sharon to realize that it
was time to cut Israel 's
losses and withdraw its forces as well as the settlers out of Gaza . And what happened after that? Two major
things happened: one political and one military. On the political side, the
Israelis and their mouthpieces in America and elsewhere exposed and started
debating the Jewish plan to go ahead with the two-state solution based on the
idea that Gaza will be the Palestinian state, and that Israel will annex the
West Bank, thus realize the greater Israel that Jews have been dreaming about
for a century or more.
As to the military side, seeing that Gaza was on the cusp of
becoming another Dubai – a feat that would have made the Palestinians in the
West Bank revolt and demand freedom – Israel used every fake excuse it could
fabricate to do three things: (1) blockade Gaza to prevent it from trading with
the rest of the world; (2) bomb its infrastructure to set it back each time
that it made progress; (3) assassinate its key people under the pretext that
they have bad intentions.
And this is when the military leaders of Hamas gained the
upper hand over the political leaders – almost a duplication of what happened
in Lebanon
where Hezbollah is concerned. They too understood that fighting Israel meant fighting America , something they could not
sustain. And they concluded that the only long term strategy for a viable Palestine to come into
being was to adopt the MAD strategy of the Cold War. It mean build up their
forces in such a way as to make the people of Israel understand that if their
military will interfere with their economic plan, they will pay the price. The
Israelis got that message loud and clear this time.