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P. David Hornik P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem whose work has appeared in many Israeli, Jewish, and political publications. Reach him at:
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By P. David Hornik
September 15, 2004
You may not have heard that on Monday afternoon the Israel Defense Forces killed terrorist commander Mahmud Abu Khalifa and two of his deputies with a precision hit on their car in Jenin. As they were driving in the center of the West Bank city, an air force helicopter fired a missile at them that was on target. There was no collateral damage or civilian casualties.
Just half a year ago, when the IDF similarly knocked out Hamas chief Ahmed Yassin with a missile strike in Gaza (followed, a few weeks later, by the same treatment for his briefly-serving successor Abdul Rantisi), the world was up in arms. The EU was hopping mad, Turkish prime minister Erdogan called it a "terrorist act" and put Turkish-Israeli relations on ice for a while. The State Department was "deeply troubled."
One wonders, then, why the elimination of a smaller fry like Khalifa didn't evoke a reaction. Is it that being a larger-scale murderer like Yassin gives you a "political" status that makes you sacrosanct? By that logic Claus von Stauffenberg, the German general who tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, was committing a huge crime. Or that, Khalifa being only the latest in a string of Israeli assassinations of terror masters, it's become old hat, just not newsworthy anymore? Or -- the most optimistic interpretation -- that in the wake of events like Beslan, "the world" is less and less in the mood to stick up for terrorists?
Whatever the reason, Mahmud Abu Khalifa wasn't a killer on the order of Yassin or Rantisi, but nothing to shrug off either. Jenin commander of the Al Aksa Brigades, the outfit directly subordinate to Yasser Arafat's Fatah, he was responsible for an August 11 bomb attack at the Kalandia checkpoint north of Jerusalem in which two Palestinian civilians were killed and six Israeli Border policemen wounded. Last March, security forces thwarted an attack in which Khalifa planned to rig a truck with explosives and blow it up next to an Israeli bus transporting schoolchildren or soldiers in Samaria. Throughout 2004, six suicide bombers dispatched by Khalifa were caught and arrested -- and the resume goes on.
Life is getting difficult for West Bank and Gaza terror masters. Israeli media reported that Khalifa and his two aides were meeting to discuss operational plans when they were hit, and that these planners of death now often hold parleys in moving vehicles in hopes of escaping detection.
With the Jewish New Year upon us, it's good to see that Israel, which for a while in the 1990s became a negative model, has returned to fighting terror in ways that are worth emulating. Though the recent sharp (albeit not total) drop in successful terror attacks is often attributed to the separation fence, in fact only about one-fourth of the fence is complete, and more significant is the unremitting tactical war on terror that Israel has been waging since it voted the Labor peaceniks out of its government in 2003 and since George W. Bush became more permissive about its need to defend itself.
Every remaining terror master in the Palestinian Authority --every last one -- now fears for his life and can only function furtively and under heavy stress. This New Year as always, we're awash with articles about how we can draw our lessons and live better in the coming year. That's fine. But before we philosophize about how we should live, let's make sure that we -- and our children -- will live at all. "Want to be a terror master? You're dead" is a good motto for Israel to adopt and to export to as much of the world as possible.
Since at least the 1930s, much of the history of that world has been, unfortunately, a history of the slaughter of innocent people. Though the culprits, no doubt, were the Nazis, Communists, Islamists, and other terrorists, the Western, democratic, relatively civilized world has been at least a passive accomplice because of its strong penchant to excuse the killers, seek to understand them, make deals with them, award them land and power and prestige. Today, if it wants to keep surviving in any meaningful sense, the world must learn to make a basic distinction between children and child-murderers. It will have to say the right of the former to life is absolute, and the right of the latter to life is nonexistent.
Only when every terror master in the world feels as hunted and threatened as the PA terror masters now feel, will children start to be safe and the "civilized" world become truly civilized.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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