The return of bombs to the streets of Israel is a traumatic shock for Israelis who were coming to believe, after a month without attacks, that the hawkish repression of the Sharon regime was bringing them the peace that they so desire. He had found the answer, Ariel Sharon had told them. Had he not been telling them for long that all that they needed for absolute safety was to have him in the prime ministerial chair, with the authority to teach the Palestinians the right lesson — the same kind that he had taught them in Lebanon?
So, finding grisly evidence that the Palestinians had refused to be taught, Ariel Sharon’s immediate response is true to form: another leaf from their role model — the Nazis. However, it is doomed to be as ineffective as every other effort he has made to end the bombings. He has announced that the family of every bomber will be deported from Palestine by the Israeli occupation authorities. This new approach is likely to have been ready to be rolled out when the Israelis needed to ratchet up their repression and when Sharon needed to demonstrate that his government still had at least one idea left in its armory.
No one will argue that the killing of civilians in Israel is anything but a terrible crime. Why young men choose to explode themselves is another question. But the concept of deporting the relatives of bombers is as deeply flawed as virtually everything else that Sharon’s government has tried to crush Palestinian resistance. It is deeply unjust and will create international outrage, as has been demonstrated already by the swift condemnation of the scheme by UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan. It is simply plain wrong to punish relatives because it is not possible to punish the bomber himself. Forcibly removing families from their own homes and dumping them in another country copies the wartime behavior of the Nazis.
The unjustness of it apart, will it have the effect of sending potential bombers out of the country? It seems unlikely that there will be many families in which more than one member will decide to make the ultimate and awful sacrifice of blowing himself up. Therefore, removing the family to some foreign country will not remove another bomber. It will however, provide for all the world to see clear evidence of Israeli oppression. These people, guilty of no crime, will have been taken away by force from their homes and sent from their own country to a foreign place. For the Palestinian community, now locked up in its own country, Israeli expulsions will do nothing save fan the already white hot anger that exists. Many will, with justice, suspect that this is merely a cunning stratagem to rid the territories that Zionists want for their Eretz Israel of its Arab population. If Israel is allowed to get away with these expulsions, how long will it be before other pretexts will be found to turn families and then whole communities out of their own homes and then their own country ?
This is a heinous and wicked policy which Israel must not be allowed to implement. It will not stop the bombing. It remains a stark truth that, terrorized and bottled up in their own homes, Palestinians have no legitimate means of protest. To end the violence, Israel needs to return to the negotiating table and quit the occupied territories.
