A strategy of outrageous behavior
On October 7 Hamas carried out an act of conspicuous terror. It had shock value.
It was a body-language message.
Climate activists used body language at the Metropolitan Opera last week. No one was killed, and it was a nuisance, not mass murder, but there is a point of commonality: We have a cause and we will do outrageous things to make our point.
Climate activists from the group Extinction Rebellion, NYC stood up and screamed during an opening night performance of Tannhäuser on Thursday. Protesters shouted that the audience should "wake up" to the climate emergency.
The stream is polluted! The stream is tainted! The stream is poison! This is a climate emergency! This is a climate emergency! There will be no opera on a dead planet!
The best summary of the Metropolitan Opera outrage was sent to me by a college classmate in an email titled: "How to sabotage your efforts at climate change." I agree. The action was counter-productive. It defines climate activists as unreasonable whack-job vandals, not as protectors of the earth. The immediacy of the protest in the middle of an opera performance is disconnected from the cause of pollution and CO2 levels. Green solutions require more social order, not less. The polarity of the message is backwards.
Hamas' goal was not to protect Gaza's citizens from Israel. The placement of military facilities amidst citizen targets is astonishingly cynical and cruel. Hamas's own leader says he welcomes the death and injury to Palestinians.
The blood of the women, children and elderly […] we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens with us resolve."
It is a shocking admission.
The strategy is disgusting and cynical -- but it is not stupid. Indeed, it is likely working about as they hoped, in the short run. They put Israel into a dilemma. Israel asserts that Palestinian victims are incidental and unintentional. In recent years Israel under Netanyahu lost some of its presumption of innocence and legitimacy as a state seeking long-term peace and co-existence. Israel's policy on settlements in the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza has consequences.
Israel will continue to create sympathetic victims in their effort to remove Hamas. Perhaps, in time, the people of Gaza will do what needs to be done, a civic uprising to replace their leaders. The message of Hamas' cynical cruelty in the placement of military targets is not a secret to the Palestinians. People tire of bad government and eventually revolt. In the long run, like the protesters at the Opera, Hamas has the polarity backwards.