Here’s the question we find ourselves asking on the eve of 11th month of the war that Israel is continuing to wage against the people of Gaza, a war, however, whose declared goal, the Zionist state tells the world, is the destruction of Hamas.
The question is this: Why is it that Israel’s military, armed with the most overwhelming, cutting edge and lethal arsenal of weapons in the world this side of Nato, has been unable to achieve that goal, even after dropping, as of the end of July, 96,000 bombs on the this strip (reportedly well over the combined weight of bombs dropped on London, Dresden and Hamburg during the Second World War), including deadly bunker-buster bombs, cluster bombs and dumb bombs, the latter so-called presumably because they’re too “dumb” to find exact targets, and are thus left free to fall on whoever and whatever they please?
There is a straightforward two-part answer to this question: One, Hamas’s determination to fight and two, the group’s access to a sophisticated labyrinth of underground tunnels, the poor man’s own overwhelming, cutting- edge arsenal.
Gazans are resilient. The very basic human “determination to fight” — evinced in modern history by liberation struggles in places as disparate as Ireland and Algeria, and Vietnam and South Africa — is a phenomenon that has been empathetically explored by the likes of the British philosopher Kar Popper in his celebrated work, The Poverty of Historicism (1957) and the Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl in his equally celebrated work, The will to Meaning (1969).
Their conclusion?
When you attempt to crush the human spirit of a people engaged in a liberation struggle, by definition to calculatedly retard, impede or block their right to search for their own individual and national meaning in the world by herding them, as Israel has herded Gazans, into the confines of what in recent years came to be known universally as “the biggest open air prison in the world”, you bring these people to a point where to choose to live under these conditions is to choose to be less human.
In short, you drive them to a point where they will tell themselves and the world around them, including most importantly their persecutors, that if they are denied the right to choose how they live, they are left, as Popper postulated, with the right to choose how they die.
And why die on your knees when you can die fighting for your people’s freedom, like a fallen patriot, known in Arabic as a shahid? And it is known in the culture that when an ordinary man dies, his life ends, whereas when a shahid dies his life begins.
To fight a determined enemy like that is a formidable task.
Global consciousness
As far as the Palestinian fighters are concerned, they have over the years developed a huge tunnel network. It snakes around the Gaza Strip for roughly 500 miles. It thus runs twice as long as the 248 miles of the New York City subway system and extends in places as deep underground as 230 feet, which is deeper than the deepest subway station in London’s Tube.
And it has served as a hub of weapons-making workshops, storage facilities, power generators, fully equipped clinics, command posts, the free flow of guerrillas and weapons throughout the territory and as shifting focal points from whence fighters were able to pop up and stage hit-and-run style attacks against the enemy and then disappear back underground.
If Israeli soldiers were reluctant to enter this confounding labyrinth, it was because they knew they would be entering an environment alien to them, one their enemy had created and was familiar with, and that fighting there required special skills, special equipment and a special type of courage — which they lacked.
Though Heaven knows they’ve tried and tried and tried some more to destroy the tunnels they had located, long distance, from above, by dropping 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs into them or filling them up with “sponge bombs — a liquid chemical mixture that expands into foam and then hardens into concrete soon after you pour it into a tunnel — they have failed. The tunnel complex has survived, like its denizens.
Here we are, eleven months after the fact of war in Gaza. The spirit of endurance by its people, which during that time has morphed into a universal ideal that countless people around the world have come to embrace, has not been crushed and the people of Palestine have not been cowed into submission.
Their unwavering spirit has become a beacon of hope and a rallying cry for those who believe in the right to resist oppression, solidifying their place in the global consciousness as symbols of unyielding resistance against overwhelming odds.
That’s saying something, isn’t it?
— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile
