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Dr. Aaron Lerner is co-founder of , Independent Media Review and Analysis, an Israel-based news organization which provides an extensive digest of media, polls and significant interviews and events relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
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By Dr. Aaron Lerner
June 16, 2006
"I have always maintained that there has to be proportional use of force, and governments have to be careful not to take action in areas where civilians are remotely likely to be put in harm's way."
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan 13 June 2006
Kofi Annan may indeed think it is not nice for the Palestinians to manufacture, store and launch rockets from within the Palestinian civilian population, but he rewards such behavior by arguing that Israel must respect the human shields -- even if this means sacrificing Israeli civilian lives.
The Palestinians argue that they have the right to murder the residents of Sderot as part of their "right to resist the occupation". But Yasser Arafat's September 9, 1993 letter to Yitzhak Rabin committing on behalf of the Palestinian People to "a peaceful resolution of the conflict. . . resolved through negotiations" forfeited whatever "right" to violent "resistance" the Palestinians could have conceivably had prior to Oslo.
That's not to say that Arafat's letter and the agreements that followed it stripped the Palestinians of the ability to struggle for their interests. It just limited them to pursuing them via non-violent means -- both on the domestic and the international front.
In an ideal world Israeli technology would zap the rockets out of the sky, thus avoiding Annan's criticism. But there simply isn't such equipment available tonight to protect the residents of Sderot from the next barrage.
By the same token, while Israel has made strides in its ability to identify and target rocket teams as they deploy to launch, a considerable number of launches are carried out before the teams can be taken out.
As a result, Israel finds itself constantly having to choose between exposing Israeli civilians to the risk of being murdered by Palestinian rockets or taking action against the rocket teams and the infrastructure supporting the teams where Palestinian "civilians are remotely likely to be put in harm's way."
Right now Defense Minister Amir Peretz is opting to prefer the safety of Palestinian human shields over that of his neighbors in Sderot.
This may play well among radical Left circles and the Kofi Annans of the world but it remains nothing more than a grotesque perversion of morality.
Ironically, when one compares IDF operations in the West Bank, where crack ground teams are constantly operating in urban areas with most "civilian" casualties limited to people who actively decided to remain at the scene of an operation, to the almost exclusively airborne operations Israel carries out in the evacuated Gaza Strip, one could readily conclude that the best way to reduce the loss of "innocent" Palestinian lives is for Israel to retake the Gaza Strip.
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