Israel is continuing its battle against “terrorists”. The latest scalps it collected, yesterday, were of Mu’in Abu Lawyeh, Muhammad Abu Arrar, and three others.
Abu Lawyeh was shot dead by Israeli soldiers while returning to his village with the stationery and school books he had bought for his children in Nablus — clearly an act of terrorism, the kind of which US President George W. Bush has been repeatedly asking Yasser Arafat to put an end to. Abu Arrar’s crime was not less reprehensible. The 14-year old had been throwing stones at soldiers. Faced with the prospect of being annihilated by the overwhelmingly superior weapons in the hands of the boy, the army acted in self-defense and killed him.
Some of us may not understand the logic of it. Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims may call it, as Yasser Abed Rabbo did, “murder in cold blood”. Europe and the rest of the world also may not understand the logic, though they may not say so, not in those words anyway. Haven’t we been hearing, in these past few days, about the new wisdom that has dawned on some of the most venerable names in the European media, like the BBC and Reuters, on the need to put in “proper perspective” any news on Israel’s fascism? Did we not read in this paper, on Saturday, a special report by Robert Fisk on how these standard bearers of news credibility are not sure if, when Israeli gunships and missiles come into Palestinian areas and murder civilians, they are assassinations? The furthest they will go to, Fisk reports, is to tell us that they were “what Palestinians regard as assassinations”. So, we may hear of the dead bodies of Abu Lawyeh and Muhammad Abu Arrar as the result of actions which “the Palestinians “regarded as the killings of two beings which they regarded as humans”.
Nevertheless, the doublespeak of a section of its media notwithstanding, Europe, non-US West and the rest of humanity are finding it difficult to “understand” the killings of Palestinians as the valiant fight of the “only democracy in the region to uphold Western values”. They can’t understand how a government can take pride in actions that are universally condemned as vile when practiced by a Milosevic, a Saddam or a Pinochet? Why is not the killing of a father, for the crime of wanting his child to have school stationery, a criminal act when committed by Israel?
We may not understand it. But there are those who do. Bush does. He understands it as the terrorism of Arafat and wants him to control it. So does Dick Cheney, the man “a breath away” from the presidency. A man who could understand the massive assassinations of Palestine civilians a few weeks ago as a mark of Israel’s desire for peace can understand anything.
So Cheney, if no one else, will understand Israel’s Deputy Police Minister Gideon Esra. He has now emerged with brilliant ideas — not one, but two — about how to fight terrorism. One, “liquidate” the fathers of Palestinian suicide bombers. That is the second idea, because it will take some time to find the identity of the boys and then to trace the fathers. The first idea is to bury the bombers in pigskin or blood.
Most of those who know anything about Western values may not understand what makes Esra tick. That only shows that they are not in “the land of the just and free”.
