How Did We Lose the War We Won?

Operation Pillar of Defense has ended predictably enough in a ceasefire and Hamas is clearly the victor. Why else would they be dancing in the streets? We all saw the pictures of them celebrating the bloodshed. Whose blood was actually spilled? Why their own. Israel’s air force made a wasteland of all their military infrastructure. Yet they stand there amid heaps of rubble jubilantly shouting “We won!” 

One Israeli professor wrote that this is a typical product of the Middle Eastern imagination. Even if the Gaza Strip had been totally demolished and its population wiped out the last remaining member of Hamas would be dancing among the ruins proclaiming victory. That’s just the way they are. They even ignore the fact that their great hope the abundant supply of Qassam Grad and Fajr missiles at their disposal disappointed them dismally. They fervently believed that with that much ammunition they would wreak havoc slaughter and terror in the cities of Israel. Baruch Hashem the results fell far short of their hopes. But that really doesn’t matter to them. What does matter is that “Israel surrendered and we won.”

The real question is what makes them think they won? How can they celebrate victory among the ruins? If history repeats itself we can just go back a few decades as the battles of the Yom Kippur War drew to a close. Then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced “Victory is ours.” A foreign journalist questioned him: “The third brigade of your army is surrounded by Israeli forces in Sinai. The Israeli army is 100 kilometers from Cairo your capital. Mr. President exactly what victory are you referring to?”

President Sadat replied “How do I know we won? I listen to the Israeli radio broadcasts and from what they say I conclude that we won.”
The principle here is simple. After being trounced on the battlefield the enemy tunes in to what the Israeli media are saying. They listen to the commentators and the commentary on the commentators and they hear us the people of Israel declaring that we’ve failed we’ve lost we’ve been humiliated we’ve put up a white flag and so on and so forth in the typically masochistic Israeli tradition. Reading the news over the last few days it’s depressing to see the defeatism the determination to see only the negative side of the Prime Minister’s management of the war while the more levelheaded commentators do take note of major achievements that were made for Israel’s security. The general tone however is one of gloom and like Sadat in his day Hamas draws a logical conclusion: if the Israelis feel that they’ve lost that means that we won.