Hamas flag
צילום: איי אף פי
Capture the flag
Once-banned PLO flag now present at official dinners; will same happen with Hamas?
According to media reports, the police conditioned the handing over the Jerusalem terrorist’s body to his family on the removal of Hamas flags from the mourning tent. It was also reported that two of his relatives were detained on suspicion of hanging Hamas flags in the Abu-Dis neighborhood.
History is repeating itself. In the 1980s, chasing after PLO flag-hanging Palestinian children constituted a regular security routine for our troops. The soldiers sent to defend the homeland were running around Palestinian towns, where they nabbed boys and girls and unequivocally demanded that they remove the PLO flag abomination or face arrest.
As is customary around here, Yitzhak Rabin’s weak government folded a moment before we defeated them in this flag battle. Not only did the government engage in negotiations with the same murderous PLO, it even signed the Oslo agreement with it. Rabin at least displayed marked tartness in his dealings with PLO leader Yassar Arafat. Rabin’s replacement, Benjamin Netanyahu, characterized Arafat as a friend. Indeed, it started out with a flag war and ended up being a close friendship.
Today, when Olmert meets Palestinian leader Abbas at the prime minister’s official residence in holy Jerusalem, the PLO flag is right there next to the Israeli flag. How embarrassing.
This means that Hamas should be rather careful about this flag business. Based on the pace of progress in the Middle East, if we are chasing down flag bearers now, in 10 years we will see the Hamas flag prominently displayed at dinner at the home of the Israeli prime minister.
No need for more captives
As history tends to repeat itself, there is a rather good chance that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Mashaal of Hamas will be having dinner in Jerusalem with the flags of Israel and Hamas on the table. We can assume that Mashaal will be condemning the razing of homes by Israel while issuing a somewhat lukewarm condemnation of Islamic Jihad terrorism.
For the Israeli government, chasing down flags is a very useful act. As we saw, it almost managed to destroy the PLO 20 years ago that way. Moreover, the number of casualties in the game of “capture the flag” is much lower than in the game known as “explosions.”
Those familiar with “capture the flag,” which is prevalent among Scouts groups, knows that in addition to capturing the flag, the game is also about capturing captives. So now they have one Gilad Shalit, and we have about 5,000 of their people. That is, we don’t really need to capture more people in order to win.
In short, it is a good thing that the Israeli government does not listen to the advice of historians who claim that history repeats itself only as a farce - because around here, history repeats itself with great somberness. And as noted, this game is more pleasant than the bombing game we got used to. The only mystery is what does the Islamic Jihad flag look like?
