No apology needed for surviving

Remember that scene from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' where Indiana Jones faces off against a sword-wielding assassin?  There is a moment of silent tension as the assassin masterfully spins his scimitar from hand to hand, and Indy's situation seems dire.  And then suddenly Indy pulls out his pistol and shoots the assassin.

I remember when I saw this scene in the theater that it seemed perfectly natural that the audience would spontaneously erupt into cheers and enthusiastic applause.  After all, this wasn't just the triumph of modern weaponry over crude, outdated technology... it was also the triumph of the film's hero over a nameless, random bad guy. 

But as my focus has shifted from silver screen conflicts to those in the real world, I have become increasingly alarmed that not only does the world seem mixed up about whether, metaphorically speaking, bullets should be allowed to triumph over swords, but also about who exactly are the good guys in our region.

The best example of this apparent confusion was revealed in one of the more heated semantical arguments that raged during the second Lebanon war over Israeli spokes-people's tendency to use the words 'rocket' and 'missile' interchangeably when describing the ketyushas and other flying ordnance being fired into Israel by Hezbollah.

Whenever the word 'missile' was used, the talking heads on Sky News, BBC and CNN would quickly interrupt the speaker to patiently point out that Hezbollah's weapons were 'rockets', not 'missiles' since they lacked a guidance package (as if this semantic distinction somehow made them less offensive... or for that matter, lethal). 

But in retrospect, not only is that overly-pedantic distinction not correct*, but it revealed a deliberate attempt on the part of the Main Stream Media (MSM) to sway the viewer/listener from what I had assumed was the natural tendency we'd all experienced while watching 'Raiders'... specifically, to scream at the screen,  "How stupid do you have to be to start a fight with a sword when the other guy has a gun!".

However, the more I followed the news, the more obvious the reason seemed to be for these continuing pedantic arguments over the imbalance of armament available to the Arabs and Israelis.  You see, in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', everyone in the theater was rooting for Indiana Jones.  For that brief instant when we'd all forgotten that Indy had a gun and it appeared that he was going to have to face off against the evil assassin's sword with nothing more than his trusty whip, we were stunned silent with moral outrage at the unfairness of the duel.

Now, I'm no student of cinema... but I think that just might have been Steven Spielberg's intent.   

But what if the roles had been reversed and we'd remembered about the gun from the beginning of the scene?  Given the same disadvantage, would the swordsman have enjoyed - even briefly - the same moral backing from the audience that we gave to Indiana Jones?  The answer is no... it simply wouldn't have worked because at the root of the cinematic magic of that scene was our unswerving loyalty to Indy.

It is my humble opinion that at the root of the MSM's obsession with pointing out the technological mismatch in the region is their essential loyalty to Israel's enemies.  What I had failed to realize before was that the MSM (and their core audience) view the Arabs as Indiana Jones, and are therefore understandably outraged at the prospect of their hero facing off against the bad guy armed only with a whip... regardless of who started the fight.

Consider the following:

Stone Throwing:  The MSM constantly claims that Palestinian stone-throwing at Israeli motorists does not warrant a lethal response.  Not only does this posit that stones are not potentially-lethal weapons, but it is in direct conflict with their frequent 'David & Goliath' imagery used to portray the Palestinians as the little underdog.  If memory serves, Goliath didn't make it home with just a cracked windshield... he was killed.

Molotov Cocktails:  Again, there seems to be the assumption among journalists (and by extension, their audience) that since these home-made weapons are cheap and hand-delivered to their targets, that they do not warrant the use of deadly force in response.  A trip to an Israeli hospital's burn ward might go a long way towards dispelling this wrong-headed assumption.

Kassams/Ketyushahs:  Aside from their range and payload, the MSM doesn't really differentiate between these weapons when it comes to their opinion of how Israel should be allowed to respond.  As with rocks and Molotov Cocktails, the conventional wisdom is that it would be unchivalrous for Israel to respond to a relatively crude mode of attack with advanced weaponry.

Simply put; Israel's problems with the world audience don't stem from bad PR.  They are rooted in the fact that the MSM and the world audience view Israel as that sword-wielding assassin, a small plot complication that must be resolved as quickly as possible for the regional story to reach a satisfactory dénouement.

IMHO it is the height of silliness for Israel to place too much hope in positive 'Hasbara' (PR/propaganda).  No amount of positive PR would have made an Indiana Jones fan care a wit about the fate of the assassin with the sword.  He was a two-dimensional, un-named villain with no back-story and no possible reason for redemption.  We never stopped to consider whether he might have had a family that depended on him for sustenance or perhaps if it was a crushing mortgage that had driven him to a life of crime.  We simply wanted him dead so that our hero could advance to meet the next challenge.

Israel would do well to forget about trying to reclaim the hero status it enjoyed in the early days of its existence. 

Those days are gone. 

What remains is the challenge of simply meeting each threat with the only thing we have going for us; superior weaponry.  They pull a whip we pull a sword.  They pull a sword, we pull a gun.  They pull a gun, we pull a cruise missile.

This isn't a movie set... and Israel needn't apologize for surviving.  It may be that the rest of the world is rooting for our enemies to prevail and ride happily into the sunset, but that doesn't mean that we have to lay down and act like some pesky plot complication. 

As an actor on the world stage, Israel has a rich back-story and is worthy of survival.

* Most dictionaries define a missile as "an object or weapon that is fired, thrown, dropped, or otherwise projected at a target; a projectile.".  The few definitions that dealt exclusively with modern weaponry (e.g. "Missile: a rocket carrying a warhead of conventional or nuclear explosives; may be ballistic or directed by remote control"), specifically point out that the presence or lack of a guidance package is irrelevant.