Hama Rules in Gaza

Things are about to get silly in the Levant again. This time some infatistas raided an IDF Merkava tank and managed to kidnap an Israeli soldier. They're treating him well enough, the only issue is that they're demanded all women and children under 18 be released from Israeli jails. Sounds almost reasonable... almost. "Hostages" for hostages. I have no doubt Israeli jails are filled with innocents with the wrong friends or people in the wrong place at the wrong time... but I'm not convinced Palestinian women and teens could never have taken part in violence against Israeli citizens.

Sounds like a situation adults could talk there way through, though, right? Hamas's new leadership has asked that the prisoner be treated well but that the kidnapping itself is a natural reaction against Israeli aggressions. Maybe.

Well. The situation spirals out of control now as Olmert, the new Israeli prime-minister replacing the all-but-dead Sharon, is promising a broad offensive to search for the first Israeli soldier kidnapped in a decade. Great. They also want to target Hamas leaders. So much for the idea of democracic Arab institutions living long enough to see a peaceful transfer of power.

This is Hama Rules, pure and simple. Hamas Rules are guidelines Thomas Friedman observed while he was stationed in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. It basically states that every enemy action will be responded to with the most amount of violence possible. You blow up a car bomb on my street, I shell your neighborhood for twelve hours. You kill my brother, I dedicate my life to killing everybody in your nation. It's basic foreign and domestic policy in the Middle East. Friedman coined the term after Bashir al-Assad in Syria leveled the town of Hama when the Islamic Brotherhood was acting up and hatching assassination plots. Just leveled the entire damn city. (It's interesting to note that Assad and Saddam Hussein were both Ba'athists, secular Arab nationalists, and that the Islamic Brotherhood was the intellectual foundation for al Qaida.)

Things have been calm in the Levant since Sharon started seeing the light and realizing the endless cycle of Hama Rules. I doubt this will rekindle the Intifada but this reeks of "business as usual" before the cease-fire. It wouldn't hurt Israel to respond by saying it would look into releasing the falsely assumed, and it certainly wouldn't Hamas to say it wants an eventual peace with Israel and work to facilitate the release of the soldier as a sign of good faith. We're not going to see that anytime soon. Kaboooooom for tat.