Five Palestinian school boys have died. There is much debate about how they died. Was it an unexploded Israeli tank shell with which the children had been playing on their way to school? Or was it a booby trap left deliberately?
Such speculation is however absurd and useless. The tragic fact is that these children have been blown apart and the unacceptable truth is that this monstrous and unnecessary waste must be laid entirely at the door of the Israelis. Israel’s claims to be a civilized society dissolve in the face of such wicked violence.
The world has seen many other examples of Israeli brutality targeting children. One of the most touching was when we watched on our television screens as another little boy, Muhammad Durra, cowering behind his helpless father, was cut down deliberately by an Israeli bullet.
The intifada is a war against Israeli aggression which has, over 50 years, driven Palestinians from their land and homes into squalid, cramped refugee camps. The intifada is the last desperate act of a people who have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do except protest and fight back as best they can. Young men take to the streets with sticks and stones against the toughened steel of Israeli tanks. Unprotected themselves, they rush forward and hurl stones against trained soldiers wearing helmets and protective body armor. They at least recognize the terrible risks that they are running and know that all too often the price of their bravery will be serious injury or death.
But no civilized society should ever make young children the target of its war machine. There is no war in the world which could ever consider little Muhammad Durra or the five slain school boys as the enemy. The hypocrisy of the Israeli government in pretending that these kids are somehow inevitable and excusable victims of their war against the Palestinian people is sickening. Yet these young lives will not have been lost in vain.
Their innocent blood deepens the stain on the reputation of Israel, as it seeks to represent itself to the world as a civilized and reasonable society, reaching for a peaceful solution to what they still like to call "the Palestinian problem". As the international pressure mounts for a settlement based on the Oslo Accord and the Mitchell principles, the Israelis will be hard-pressed to defend their continued intransigence, because the consequence of that obstinacy is the death of ever more children.
Among ordinary Israelis there may be a growing recognition that what their government is doing in their name is sheer savagery. If it is allowed to continue, this will not only strip the last vestige of justification from the case that Israel is laying before the world, but will also further rot the moral fabric of Israeli society. Thus, if any more Palestinian school children are slain, let us not hear any more debate about how they died: whether they detonated an unexploded shell accidentally or whether it was a booby trap.
The stark truth is that they should never have died in the first place.
