On Friday, as an entire nation sat there touched, sad, and frustrated while watching Gilad Shalit ,the International Olympic Committee stunned the world by announcing that Rio de Janeiro, rather than Barack Obama’s Chicago, will be hosting the 2016 Olympic Games. One needs plenty of imagination to link Gaza and Rio, or the Olympic fraternity and Hamas’ horror show, but these unrelated dramas may lead to the same conclusion: In the modern world, weakness sometimes carries incredible strength, while strength may face immense limits.
Knesset Member Israel Hasson, who served as the Shin Bet’s deputy director, said over the weekend that he feels great anger and frustration in the face of the Gilad Shalit videotape .It’s easy to understand him. About 40 miles south of Tel Aviv, a poor soldier has been in captivity for 1,200 days now. Yet all the generals and statesmen and the celebrated security services of the military power known as the State of Israel are powerless and helpless.
A small terror group, which operates right next to us, is able to mess with a powerful state boasting an outstanding army, while proving to us that the weak and small party (and in this case, also cruel and unrestrained) is able to tease the big boys. Perhaps it can’t defeat them in an all-out war, but it can certainly amass tactical achievements that will make them very sad and frustrated.
Many people in the world, and of course here too, have been disparagingly following the world’s strongest leader, Barack Obama, while failing to understand why he’s not yet pulling his sword out of its sheath and showing the small and ugly flea from Tehran, Ahmadinejad, who’s the boss. Why wait? Why hesitate? And while we’re at it, why show restraint vis-à-vis North Korea? And where is George W. Bush, who after September 11th vowed to pull al-Qaeda’s leaders out of their holes, yet neither him nor his replacement have been able to locate bin Laden?
Hope for the poor
Similar questions have been asked in respect to Gilad Shalit in recent years. Many good people recommend, for example, showing less restraint and kidnapping Hamas leaders like Haniyeh and Jabari; we’ll see whether Hamas won’t immediately release Shalit at reasonable terms after that.
Yet it hasn’t happened. In terms of intelligence and operational capabilities it’s possible. Some people say it’s even easy. We’re the strong ones, while they’re the weak ones. So where is the problem here? Yet still, the fact is that Haniyeh and Jabari are sitting at their office. The weak party is laughing all the way to producing the Shalit videotape, while the strong party faces them with all its tanks, and planes, and nuclear weapons it possesses (according to foreign sources) , frustrated and angry.
Meanwhile, residents and senior officials in Chicago were also frustrated and angry over the weekend. The US president enlisted to the cause of presenting them with the 2016 Olympics, what else does one need to do? Yet those who were supposed to bow in front of the most powerful man in the world didn’t blink, and granted the first prize to the underdog – the poor and smiling Rio de Janeiro.
In the old world, mostly in the many movies produced about it, it was usually enough to be strong and muscular in order to win. Even if at times it seemed that the bad or the ugly had the upper hand, the happy end gave victory to the “good guys.” Yet reality is apparently more complex. The power of the fist is no longer enough in and of itself. There’s great strength in weakness, and there is also hope to the poor – whether they are friendly and cheerful like the Brazilians, or despicable animals like members of Hamas.