Thursday, July 25, 2002

The Rittenhouse Review asks an important and relevant question
[C]ouldnt the Mossad have taken Shehadeh out with a single bullet at close range? This would have reduced the risk of collateral damage to roughly zero."
This is something I had been wondering myself... bombing buildings is not and has not been SOP for the Israelis for a while now, and for good reason; if you don't buy into the "death-cult" nonsense that permeates and pollutes discussion of the I/P issue in some circles, then you can logically conclude that the Palestinians can eventually be turned to peaceful solutions once they realize that the suicide bombings are pragmatically useless... but any senselessly or overly violent repression is going to toss them right back into the "tit for tat" mindset and provides ammo for the ready-made (and tragically circular) argument that killing Israeli civilians is fine, because Israelis kill Palestinian civilians. I'm sure the Israeli military and government knows this too, so why the hell would they have even risked an attack that lead to, what, almost 200 dead and wounded in an attack on one man that can no doubt be easily replaced?

It just doesn't make sense, especially if those rumors (again disparaged by the "subhuman warlike paleostinians" crowd) were true and a good chunk of the Palestinian leadership was willing to follow in the footsteps of those intellectuals who wrote that letter earlier and finally commit to ending suicide bombings of innocent civilians as a useless, futile, violent, cruel, and counterproductive tactic that has utterly backfired and should be discarded.

It is that realization and a commitment to putting it into action that is key to ending this conflict, not pop-psychological, base, insulting and ignorant diatribes about the supposed constitution of the Palestinian character, and it would be tragic were the resolution (or at least the beginning of such) to have been in our grasp, and then taken away not by malice, but by thoughtlessness.

No comments:

Post a Comment