Diminishings expectations (from Ha-Aretz)

Diminishing expectations
By Doron Rosenblum

How flexible is happiness, how malleable is the level of people's expectations. Just two or three weeks ago, a happy report that has just been received on the radio and television news would have been Warren Buffet's purchase of Iscar, a bull market or a wave of performances in Israel by international artists. Now a happy report is the news that no one was killed although 10 were wounded, two seriously in a rocket salvo on Haifa. And a very encouraging report is that our forces succeeded in extricating a soldier's body.

The war of the speech
Humanity has known vicious wars that were triggered by bizarre causes: from the war of Troy and Greece because of love for Helen, to the assassination of Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which brought aboutWorld War I, to the soccer game that sparked a war between Hondurasand El Salvador. As Groucho Marx told the ambassador who refused to pull a card out of a deck: Of course, you know this means war!? Future researchers may hunt and comb to dig up all the historiosophic and political reasons for the outbreak of the current war with Hezbollah, but at least they will have no trouble finding the trigger. This war, with all its hundreds of casualties and tremendous damage, broke out not because of the abduction of the soldiers, but because of a speech: Hassan Nasrallah's short,bragging speech in which he provoked Israel's new leaders.Was it a clever trap laid by the wily fox, or perhaps one uncalculated moment of catastrophic hubris when, with that defiant smile, the Hezbollah leader told his listeners that Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz are inexperienced and small as compared with Ariel Sharon. And, as though to add fuel to the fire, he emphasized the small with his fingers. It's possible that the war would at least have been postponed if the prime minister or the defense minister had been a woman, or if Hezbollah had made do only with the incident in which soldiers were killed and abducted, without the provocative speech. But with that speech, and with this kind of cast on our side bad-tempered Olmert, egocentric Peretz, arrogant Halutz ? Nasrallah had a better chanceof emerging unscathed if he stood barefoot in a puddle and stuck a nail into an electric outlet. Is there a trigger that can light a fuse and generate testosterone more surely than that mocking smile and small gesture of the fingers? Whose blood wouldn't rush to his head? Who wouldn't be ready to get up and head-butt the man instantly, Zinadine-like? So the war, whatever its price, was unavoidable. Let us therefore not be surprised that it has no well-defined strategic goals. It burst out reflexively, like a blow delivered below the belt. And if anyone is still skeptical about the true motives for the war of the speech (not just Nasrallah's abduction speech, but also his spider-web speech of six years ago), the truth shall be revealed by the remarks of the chief of staff, Dan Halutz, this week: Bint Jbailis the symbol of Hezbollah, he said, against the backdrop of the fierce battles raging there. Nasrallah spoke there. And I would think that in his next speech if there is a next speech he will think carefully about his words. Who said the war's goals aren't clear?

Revenge of gibberish
Who thinks carefully about the words of his next speech around here? Could it be the overweening officers, both those in uniform and those who are retired, who have for years hijacked the national agenda, and whose boasting and patronizing (Benjamin Ben-Eliezer:That little dwarf, Nasrallah?; the commander of the Israel AirForce: The leader of that gang?) are shattered time and again by hitches, blunders, accidents, misses, clumsiness and a lack of creativity? Could it be the chief of staff himself, for whom the horrors of war are a small tremor on the wing of the plane? Or the former GOC Northern Command, Benny Gantz, who for years hurled threats at the enemy to the north, and this week was already philosophizing in the light of the difficulties on the ground about the need not to be militant, and adding: This is not the time to talk about what we said and did not say . Over the years this column has occasionally dealt with the phenomenon of hyper-security gibberish, based on the approach that such utterings are not trivial linguistic matters, but symptoms of a conceptual fogginess that have far-reaching implications. And indeed, it is increasingly clear that what we have here is not just a semantic hazard, but a genuine security danger. Because cliches and vague or untrue words reflect thinking that is automatic, insensitive and inert, casting over everything a pall of illusion, repression, empty pride and general unreliability.This is also the secret of the dark spell that Sheikh Nasrallah for years cast over the Israeli public. With his guile and alertness,the man simply succeeded in occupying the empty niche of the precise, credible comments of someone who means every word he says. This was the main source of his strength over us. On top of this, there was a gradual role reversal: Israel, its leaders and its spokespersons started to wrap themselves in the soft cotton of white and black lies, false promises, empty threats and arrogant fluffs of myth: We will know what to do, The IDF will know what to do, I wouldnot suggest to the enemy, The enemy is well aware of our might, The long arm of the IDF ... Now the gibberish is taking its revenge. Bewilderment, a lack of credibility and damage to morale are growing as the gap widens between the lofty words and the reality on the ground. Renewal of deterrent capability? Before that, we will do well to renew creativity and clarify of thought, which have become rusty underneath the layers of gibberish.

The knee-jerk dancers
Never mind the deja-vu of the feelings of tension and the pit in the stomach or, alternatively, the outbursts of revenge, which provide a moment's pleasure that accompany the flare-up of every new round of war here. All this is already part of our world and of the mental makeup of everyone who grows up in this country. The really oppressive thing, which is harder and harder to get used to with each new round, is the automatic reaction that accompanies it, like a boring ritual. After all, without any connection to the geopolitical or other circumstances of the war, we can predict the joy of the right wing's We told you so, which attributes everything to Oslo and demands that the IDF be allowed (once again?) to win, if only for the sake of the bashing itself (Netanyahu: Make mincemeat out of them!).Furthermore, we can also guess in advance the reflexive reaction of the peace camp, which in the inertia of its opposition each time to the use of force by Israel, no longer differentiates between declamations of occupation and the legitimate need to rid ourselves of subjugation to the threats and caprices of a Khomeini-ist bridgehead, which has leeched on to our carotid artery and challenges our very existence. In fact, those who advocate withdrawal to the last centimeter of the Green Line should be the first to leap, lion-like, to the defense of the sanctity of Israeli sovereignty; and not only vis-a-vis Hezbollah and Hamas, but also their patrons and inciters, the Syrians and the Iranians. But is it possible to imagine any military operation even one that is meant to underscore the Green Line without the automatic blessing of the settlers and the left's End the Occupation demonstration? People like to quote Henry Kissinger's remark that Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic policy. But Kissinger was wrong. We don't have a domestic policy, either only reflexes and old habits.

The true spider-wed
How powerful is the rhetoric of Nasrallah, Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Each of their metaphors ?(We will turn Israelinto a dry branch) is engraved in our consciousness more than 100 neo-Churchillean speeches of our prime minister, which were written by a committee of advisors, ad-men and spinners. Or may be it isn't so much their rhetorical power as it is our traumas. A case in point is Nasrallah's spider-web speech, which gives us no rest. And because each of Israel's wars is intended to heal thetraumas of the one before, and based on our mystical belief inwords especially those of our enemies it is no wonder that the military operation has been referred to as Webs of Steel. But Nasrallah and Saddam were right. No, not about the staying power and resilience of the national home about the staying power and resilience of the physical home. In other words, with respect to the quality of construction in Israel. It is here, in the contracting and planning shoddiness, that the true spider-webs of the home front exist, exposed anew in every war: thin walls, which if not for theair conditioner stuck in them from the outside to act as a counterweight to the plasma screen hanging on them from the inside, would turn into a heap of cinder blocks at the very sound of an air-raid siren; neighborhoods consisting of houses of cards which, wereit not for the security rooms on which they are grounded, would collapse by themselves; and ceilings that peel and flake even at the sound of fireworks and thunder. We don't need the IDF to prove that we are not teetering or temporary we need a good contractor.

Four words
The gist of Israel's foreign and defense policy in four words (while pedaling on a bike with training wheels): Look, Condy: nohands!