Alien Thought Process

When I started writing this post, I had planned to make the point that the thought processes of Hamas and Hezbollah were utterly alien to us by showing how they were allowing their countries to fall into ruin while they spent their energies pointlessly attacking Israel.

For example, here is the Google Earth image of the only port in the Gaza strip in the town of Gaza.


The port is crude with no facilities to load freighters and virtually no roads leading to it. It is useless for anything more than small fishing boats.

The per capita income in Gaza is about $600. A comparable country is Yemen, whose per capita income is $900. Here's the port at Aden.


Aden, in contrast to Gaza, has paved roads and significant port facilities. I was also going to point out the state of the airport in Gaza.


Check out the unrepaired bomb damage that has made the runways useless. The point I planned to make was that Gaza, where there is a practically endless supply of cheap labor, was using their labor to dig tunnels under Israel's wall to capture Israeli soldiers by the ones and twos instead of repairing their airport and improving their port.

The analogy I wanted to pose was this. If you lived in a house that looked like this


would you work with whatever was at hand to repair it or would you tunnel under your neighbor's fence and kidnap his dog? The Palestinians (and by analagous, associative action, Hezbollah with its rocket attacks) chose tunneling.

That's a thought process that might as well come from Pluto for most of us. It represents a value system totally incompatible with our own, to the point where negotiation is impossible because we are negotiating to achieve orthogonal ends.

I was disappointed with the images of condemned houses I found and I began to search for images of homes in Gaza when I came across this site from David Sauveur.

This image from Gaza made me start thinking of the problem in terms of a mental disorder.

(Translated from French by Babelfish) In the district El Brazil, thus named because it was built thanks to assistances of the Brazilian government, a man makes his nap in what remains of its living room. The house with half destroyed at the time of an Israeli raid does not have any more a frontage.
I began to see the Gaza Strip with the Israeli wall as a sort of gigantic mental institution. The difference between that image and this one from Skid Row in Los Angeles seemed to be immaterial.


As I surfed through David Sauveur's photos, a totally different thought occurred to me. If you translate Mr. Sauveur's text it reads as if the Palestinians are victims of a heavily armed Israeli gang that just won't let them alone. My first thought after reading the translation above was that it lacked the context of the Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel. After all, the Lebanese border with Israel was quiet for years until Hezbollah decided to attack. Mr. Sauveur's photos and text cried out for sympathy for the Palestinians, but all I could think of was "What did you think it was going to be like? That's what war zones look like."

Then it finally hit me. It is a war zone. The reason it still goes on is that the Palestinians don't realize that they've lost. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, but the Germans fought on. If you read first hand accounts from German soldiers, they all knew the war was lost so when the Nazi government surrendered, the soldiers laid down their arms. Compare photos of Gaza with this.

Gaza, today.
Germany, 1945.
The difference is that Hamas and Hezbollah don't think they've lost.

During the Civil War, General Sherman said this. "This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war." There is a better quote of his that I cannot find right now where he states that because they are fighting an idea rather than a government, victory will only be had when everyone who holds that idea dear knows, deep in their hearts, that they are beaten.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what we face today.

Blue Crab Boulevard suggests that the people of Gaza may be getting a clue.

Update: Thanks for the links and welcome to readers of The Real Ugly American, Woman Honor Thyself and The Random Yak!