Ariel Sharon’s apologists say that the killing of Abdelaziz Al-Rantissi was designed as a blow against Hamas terrorists. That is a twisted lie. The murder of Rantissi was itself an act of terrorism — cold and calculated. Israel wants to encourage more violence and drive the Middle East ever further into chaos. This, it believes, will be to its benefit.
Israel pretends it is exacting targeted, surgical revenge for suicide bombings. It knows perfectly well that nothing could be better calculated to bring on further bloody attacks. Walled in, crushed, impoverished, patrolled and spied on, the humiliated Palestinians have no Apache helicopters, no mammoth tanks, no laser-guided missiles with which to defend themselves. All they have are their lives; and these they are prepared to destroy along with those of any Israelis nearby when they detonate their bombs. With every new humiliation the Israelis heap on the Palestinians, radical organizations find new and eager recruits. The radicals seem to many the only way that a crushed and violated people can strike back at their mighty oppressor.
How would it be if the Palestinians too pursued a policy of targeted killings? If yesterday’s funeral had been that of one of Sharon’s more bloodthirsty ministers or generals, murdered by a Hamas killer? The howls of anguish from around the world would have been deafening. The White House would have thundered outrage. Solemn promises would be made to identify and arrest or destroy the murderers.
But there are two laws in the Middle East. One for the Israelis, where murder, whether of Sheikh Yassin or Rantissi, is justifiable revenge; and one for the Palestinians, where revenge is always unjustifiable. As long as much of the world, with the US at the helm, embraces this double standard, no progress can be made in the Middle East. Positions will become more deeply entrenched — the Palestinians’ because they see themselves treated like cattle, bullied and brutalized without redress; and the Israelis because they realize they can get away with anything.
Every Israeli outrage, and every reaction to it, seem to both sides to bear out what they have always believed. Both sides become ever more firmly convinced that violence is the only language the other side understands.
What makes Rantissi’s murder particularly depressing, coming as it does so hard on the heels of Washington’s ringing endorsement of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, is that Israel appears to believe that it now has a rubber stamp to do whatever it pleases to the Palestinians. And perhaps it does. Successive Israeli attacks have seemed in part designed to test the limits of US tolerance, and attack after attack has shown that tolerance to be limitless. The Middle East would be a vastly different place if only once in more than five decades a single US administration had joined millions around the world and said “Enough”.
