By P. David Hornik
August 1, 2004
Last week was a quiet one on the Israeli-Palestinian front, right? Apart from the internecine strife in Gaza, you didn't hear about any mass bombings, or people dancing with body parts, so life in Israel is getting back to normal, right?
Not exactly. Without the "occupation of the territories" and, in one case, a lot of luck, things would have been far from quiet.
Last Thursday soldiers manning a roadblock near Nablus in the West Bank caught two would-be suicide bombers who were on their way to Haifa in a taxi carrying a 20-kilogram bomb. "A security official told the [Jerusalem] Post that there has been an increase in threats from the Nablus area, and 57 warnings of plans of terrorist attacks were registered by the security establishment on Thursday..."
Nablus, which is associated with the biblical town of Shechem, is a place that Israelis have never tried to settle and that no Israeli wants to administer in particular. At most, some Israelis have wanted to pray at a Jewish shrine that's located in Nablus/Shechem, Joseph's Tomb, where the bones of Joseph are believed to be buried. But since the shrine was burned and badly damaged by Yasser Arafat's hordes back in October 2000, that's become hard to do.
But in the eyes of the UN, the EU, and just about all of our "enlightened" world ca. 2004, the soldiers at that roadblock were committing the sin of "occupation." The only morally decent thing to do would have been to let the bombers, unhampered by roadblocks, a fence, or any other impediment, make their way to Haifa and slaughter ten or twenty or thirty people. No World Court cases for that, no General Assembly votes. The UN Human Rights Commission would have yawned, if it noticed at all.
The next day, Friday, another Palestinian attempt at slaughtering Israelis was thwarted in quite a different way. "PA Teen Killed by Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades," announced Israel's left-wing daily Haaretz.
"An Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades cell killed a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in Beit Hanun [in Gaza] on Friday after a row in which his family opposed the cell's attempt to launch Kassam rockets from their yard.... According to a report obtained from Palestinian sources, the cell, comprised of six men, arrived in a van at the Za'anun family's Beit Hanun home on Friday morning. The militants then placed a Kassam rocket launcher adjacent to the family home.... Members of the Za'anun family came out of their house holding sticks and rocks, and tried to drive the Al-Aqsa militants from their yard.... During the clash, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades members opened fire, killing Hassan Za'anun and wounding three other family members. The cell left the area following the incident, without firing the Kassam rockets."
This time the prevention of the "militants'" attack cost Israel nothing, but it cost the Za'anun family dearly. Don't hold your breath waiting for Hassan Za'anun to become a cause celebre.
Two days earlier, on Wednesday, another attempt at firing a Kassam succeeded - operationally, though by dint of a miracle it didn't achieve its goal. On Wednesday morning, a woman in Kibbutz Sa'ad in the Western Negev was sleeping in her room with her three young children; the father of the family was sleeping upstairs. "At 5:50 I heard a tremendous boom," the father told the Israeli online news service Ynet, "and the entire house shook." This time a Kassam, fired from Jebalya in Gaza five miles to the west, blasted right through the roof and landed in the bed where the woman was sleeping; incredibly, she and one of the children were only lightly injured. The Israeli media carried pictures of the big, rust-colored, cylindrical Kassam sitting in the bed beside the shards and plaster.
Since the Western Negev is "unoccupied," "pre-1967" Israel, and since the UN has announced that even Israel's building of a fence in "occupied" territory is a crime, presumably the act of firing a rocket from Gaza into the Negev - with the express intent of killing people, not just inconveniencing people as a side effect - would be an even worse crime. But when the UN voted 150-6 this week to condemn Israel's fence, I guess someone forgot to put those Kassam rockets on the agenda. Wonderful, isn't it, the moral evolution of the human race?
But if it's miracles you're after, possibly an even bigger one happened on Friday to cap off Israel's "quiet week." Meeting in Tel Aviv with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres - godfather and unflappable devotee of the "Oslo process," who last September professed the opinion that "it was right to give [Arafat] the Nobel Peace Prize" - told Solana, as Haaretz reported, that "the EU must sever all ties with the Palestinians unless changes were made in the Palestinian Authority. ... The Labor leader requested that the EU pressure ... Arafat to unify the PA's security bodies, to hand control of them to the PA's prime minister, and to fight terrorism and bring about its cessation."
Peres also said the World Court's vote on the security fence was "not needed" and the matter should have been left to Israel's Supreme Court, and told reporters after talking with Solana, "I think that a country that has not experienced terror cannot judge a country that did experience it."
But miracles can only go so far; the EU envoy was unimpressed by this voice of "enlightened" Israel and said the EU "is a very important power and is going to play a role here, whether [Israel] likes it or not." Now, when was the last time he used the bullying tone with the Palestinians?
Peres could, of course, have used much stronger language with Solana. He could have said: "The Palestinian Authority is a monstrosity that starts brainwashing children in violent racist hatred from the time they're out of diapers and attempts dozens of mass murders every week that you don't hear about only because 'occupying' Israeli soldiers thwart them. When you aid the PA in any way - financial, diplomatic, political - and grant it legitimacy and even centrality as the world's leading 'victim,' you directly aid and abet a diseased genocidal culture and the attempted or actual mass murder of men, women, and children." I guess that will have to wait till their next meeting.
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