Israel lost the war, and other busted myths
I’m nuts for a science show on the Discovery channel called MythBusters. The show features two Hollywood special effects experts — sort of the Click and Clack of Blowing Things Up — who test urban myths in a laboratory setting. Can a penny falling from the top of a skyscraper kill a person down below? Can using a cell phone while pumping gas cause an explosion?
The experiments are both clever and ridiculous, like the myths themselves. Hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman provide clear explanations of the science involved, and have at their disposal hundreds of neat tools and devices that measure everything from wind speed and muzzle velocity to the amount of flatulence in a cubic meter of air (don’t ask). The show is like the best high school science fair you can imagine.
Of course, MythBusters is limited to the hard sciences (they won’t touch paranormal phenomena, like ghosts or aliens). But wouldn’t it be great if there were a similar show for political or social science?
Here are a couple of myths I’d like to see busted:
Myth: Israel lost the war on Hizbullah.
The conventional wisdom is that Hizbullah won the war by simply not losing, that Israel set an impossibly high goal of wiping out the terrorist group, that Israel’s bombing campaign was a recruiting tool for Nasrallah, and that the Muslim world is united around the Shiite militia’s cause.
Not so fast, says Emanuele Ottolenghi, executive director of the Transatlantic Institute, a Brussels-based arm of the American Jewish Committee. Ottolenghi argues that if you just go by Hizbullah’s stated aims at the outset of the war — for example, regaining control of the Shebaa Farms territory or linking up with Hamas in a two-front struggle against Israel — the war can hardly be called a success.
Iran and Syria were also said to have “won” the war waged by their puppets in southern Lebanon. But Ottolenghi suggests that Iran emerged weaker in its negotiations with the West over its nuclear ambitions and that the United States and United Nations are less inclined to compromise with a nation that just sponsored a dirty little war in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Syria may be happy to fight the Mideast war to the last Lebanese, but Assad could not have witnessed the destruction of Lebanon without thinking what it would mean for him were Israel to aim those same bombs just slightly to the east.
Ottolenghi also busts the myth that the war made Hizbullah a player in Lebanese politics — Nasrallah had that role before he authorized the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers. With the prospect of international peacekeepers and the world’s scrutiny, however, Nasrallah may rue the high profile he has “won.” “[I]f anything,” writes Ottolenghi, “this war, and the international intervention that will follow, may pose the kind of challenge to Hezbollah that Lebanon’s weak civil society failed to mount.”
Finally, Ottolenghi addresses the notion that the war was somehow unprecedented in the way that it punctured Israel’s national myth of invincibility.
From the Yom Kippur War to the failures of the first Lebanon War, Israel has faced disillusioning performances by its military. But Israel has not succumbed to despair. “Each war brings Israel a new challenge,” writes Ottolenghi. “Each time, it takes Israel time to absorb the blow, understand its nature and mechanisms, and then make elaborate corrections and improvements to its combat doctrine.”
Myth: Israel lost the media war.
The pictures weren’t good. But where’s the evidence of this “defeat”? Has Congress or the Bush administration, the most important allies any country could desire, turned their backs on Israel? Is there a rebellion among American voters about United States support for Israel? Has the divestment drive picked up new momentum?
Even the notion that the U.S. media were biased against Israel doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. The Anti-Defamation League surveyed 33 of the nation’s largest circulation newspapers at the height of the conflict, and found that “an overwhelming majority of the papers supported Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s unprovoked attacks and clearly labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization.” Even most U.S. political cartoonists took Israel’s side and depicted Hezbollah as the “unrepentant terrorists” that they are, says the ADL.
No doubt all the majors ran stories that angered CAMERA and conveyed Lebanese suffering more dramatically than Israel’s. But the effects of such perceived imbalance seem negligible, in the short and long term.
Myth: The resurgence of Islam — especially radical Islam — has bypassed the United States.
Compared to their coreligionists in Europe, for example, American Muslims tend to be well-educated, secular, and Americanized. But according to the author of a new book on American Muslims, “the real story of American Muslims is one of accelerating alienation from the mainstream of U.S. life, with Muslims in this country choosing their Islamic identity over their American one.”
Geneive Abdo, writing in The Washington Post, says young American Muslims are adopting outward symbols of the Muslim faith — headscarves for women, skull caps for men — and mosques are increasingly becoming a center for “socializing and for learning Arabic and Urdu as well as the Koran.” The trend is a matter of youthful rebellion, an embrace of tradition, and a backlash to the scrutiny Muslims feel in the aftermath of 9/11, she writes.
The good news, writes Abdo, “is that I found few signs of London-style radicalism among Muslims in the United States.” But the reader can’t help but feel troubled over what she calls a “growing alienation of American Muslims.” This is one myth we’d rather not bust.
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