Why do Palestinians continue to support Hamas despite such devastating losses? | +972 Magazine
For
Palestinians, the Gaza war has always been about ending the siege,
while Israelis refuse to understand that this is part of their war of
independence.
The latest by Noam Sheizaf.
In The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ excellent documentary,
former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara speaks about a certain
inability to understand the enemy – one that stems from a lack of
empathy.
In the film, McNamara, a brilliant systems analyst, who is today
associated more than anything with the Vietnam War, says that part of
President Kennedy’s successful management of the Cuban Missile Crisis
was his administration’s ability to put itself in the shoes of the
Soviets and understand their point of view. “In the case of Vietnam,” he
says, “we didn’t know them well enough to empathize.” As a result, each
side had a completely different understanding of what the war was
about.
This understanding came to McNamara only in 1991, when he visited
Vietnam and met with the country’s foreign minister. McNamara asked the
foreign minister whether he thought it was possible to reach the same
results of the war (independence and uniting the south with the north)
without the heavy losses. Between one and three million people died in
the war, most of them Vietnamese civilians. This does not include the
hundreds of thousands of casualties in the war against the French, which
took place shortly before. Approximately 58,000 American soldiers were
also killed in the Vietnam War.
“You were fighting to enslave us,” yelled the foreign minister at
McNamara, who in turn replied that that is an absurd notion. The two
nearly came to blows. But as time passed McNamara understood. “We saw
Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says, whereas what the
foreign minister was trying to tell him was that for the Vietnamese it
was a war of independence. Communism was not the heart of the matter for
the Vietnamese. They were willing to make the worst sacrifices because
they were fighting for their freedom – not for Marx or Brezhnev.
A
Palestinian crying near rubbles of his home after the latest round of
Israeli attacks against Al Shaja’ia, Gaza City, July 20, 2014. (Anne
Paq/Activestills.org)
