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Noting the jubilation in Israel and amongst its friends at the recent assassinations of its enemies, it is natural for the media to obsess over the significance for the Hebrew nation. Is it really the greatest victory since 1967? Will it prove to be Pyrrhic, Cadmean, or something else? Isn’t tragedy after triumph the fate of the Chosen People? Or maybe, at last, will this time be different?
A waggish American once gave a name to this kind of obsession: ‘jewcentricity’. With respect, that is not where the world’s attention should now be. Rather, the questions people should be asking have to do with what Alastair Crooke has called the ‘Karbalisation’ of the Levant.
Namely, how many defeats can a people endure? For how long? Talleyrand had an interesting conversation last year with a young scholar whose specialism is something known as ‘power asymmetry’. He was asked, ‘if you were advising Hamas, what would your advice be for the best way to achieve victory?’ His answer: ‘Die’.
Cunninghame Graham has drawn an image:
She saw her sons grow up, her husband die, and then her children follow him, herself once more alone, and keeping goats upon the hill, only brown, bent and wrinkled, instead of round, upright and rosy, as when she was a child. Still, with the resignation of her race, a resignation as of rocks to rain, she did not murmur, but took it all just as her goats bore all things, yielding their necks, almost, as it were, cheerfully, to her blunt knife, upon the rare occasions when she found herself constrained to kill one for her food.… She rode by heaps of rubbish, on which lay chickens and dead dogs, with scraps of leather, camels’ bones, and all the jetsam of a hundred years, burned by the sun till they became innocuous, but yet sending out odours which are indeed the very perfumes of Araby the blest.
Martyrdom is a more powerful force. It must be better understood.