News Real Israel
Last night, the reports by the major networks on the bombing of Qana made it apparent that Israel is losing this war. On NBC, for example, about five solid minutes was filled with graphic images of dead babies, their burned toys, their weeping mothers, their blood, and the scale of the destruction. At the end of the report, it was very quickly noted that, though the Israeli army regretted the deaths of the civilians, they had proof that Hezbollah was launching missiles from that site, and in so doing deliberately made the children a target of Israel’s powerful weapons. This is probably true, but, still, what Hezbollah has, and what Israel severely lacks, is a sense of the battle being fought on the level of the media—the news, the internet, the radio. Israel can rationalize the situation, show, as they did last night, that rockets were being launched from that site, but it is too late—nothing can beat the image of dead babies. No amount of reasoning can diminish the power of that image, and Hezbollah is aware of that. Rational Israel is fighting a real war; emotional Hezbollah is fighting a virtual war. And in our world, our global society of the spectacle, the army that locates the most important front to be the one in TV land, is the army that is on the path to victory.
Hezbollah seems to purposely sacrifice civilian life to gain the world's sympathy. It does seem to be a long-term war strategy. Is this systemic sociopathy to put children in harm's way so that their televised burned bodies illicit sympathy from those of us who still value and protect civilian life? Or have we, the US and Israel, ruined the future for Muslims so much so that their young are worth more dead than alive?