What makes the Israelis imagine that murderous violence against an oppressed people will, in any way, ever be successful? What is the extraordinary blind spot that they have, which makes them believe that they can smash the deeply wronged Palestinians into submission? Can they not understand that when a people are reduced to sending out their young men on suicide missions, they have reached a point of desperate defiance from which nothing will dislodge them?
Thursday’s suicide bombing was a tragedy. It did not have to happen. Yasser Arafat rightly condemned the terrible loss of life. But the reason it occurred was because there was no other way for the Palestinians to hit back at the Israeli attackers. They do not have US-supplied jets, with which they can bomb Israeli police stations and military headquarters. They do not have US-supplied helicopter gunships with which to target senior Israeli figures, in the same sort of assassination campaign that the Israelis have been mounting against Palestinians. They do not have US-supplied intelligence gathered from eavesdropping satellites, which has enveloped the Palestinians like a sinister umbrella.
All they have are their pride and their own bodies. And so hopeless do they feel in the face of Israel’s aggressive intransigence, so frustrated are they at its refusal to talk real peace, that they are prepared to lay down their lives, one by one, in these horrific attacks. Four times more Palestinian civilians have been killed than Israelis in this second intifada. But unlike the first uprising, this time many more ordinary Israelis are suffering. At this moment, they may be furious and howling for revenge. But in time they will come to see that what is being done to them is just a fraction of what their soldiers and politicians have been doing to the defenseless Palestinians in their name
This violence was so unnecessary. It only came about because Ariel Sharon needed bloodshed and instability so that he could force an election and win power. He clambered into office up the pile of dead that resulted from his outrageously provocative visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque. He knew it would ignite the storm of protest from which his political ambitions have benefited so greatly. Brute force is all that he understands. He and those like him who support the Zionist dream of Eretz Israel, a greater Israel, know that they will have to fight to seize every inch of Arab ground. For them, the only reason to sit down and talk about an end to the theft of Palestinian land and the construction of settlements upon them is to allow time for those settlements to be completed and new ones to be begun on yet more stolen land.
What is being fought is a battle between those who have come to colonize a land and those who are dying to defend their hearths. It is a battle that has been fought over and over again in history. On one side is the superior technology and wealth of invaders – in this case, US funds, US weapons and US vetoes, helping a people all of whom came from outside. On the other side are Palestinians, none of whom an outsider. They are fighting with what the land has yielded — the rocks that have been there since creation, and the martyrs whose forefathers had known no other earth, no other sky or no other air.
