You Make Them Suicidal And Anti-Semites

Hazem Saghieh     Al-Hayat     2003/10/29

As a start, I am not one of those who admire suicide operations. There are many moral reservations, not to mention its uselessness on the military and political levels. The perpetrators of these suicidal actions are terrorists not martyrs. Their victims are mostly innocent civilians. There should be no confusion between understanding their actions and justifying them: as in saying that despair and total military imbalance with Israel push them to do what they do. This explanation is similar to the one we give when a man kills or steals because his children are hungry. However, making a justification out of the interpretation eliminates the work of law and makes life a jungle with no limits, generalizing some terrible values in society at large.  

Therefore, the killer, or thief, should be charged or convicted, despite the explanation we gave and despite our understanding to this case or that.

Moreover, I am not an admirer of anti-Semitism. It is the lowest expression of racism, and as a result, millions have died throughout history. It has always been an excuse to numerous vicious acts that only deserve grief, condemnation and disgust. Furthermore, it would help no one to deny that the Arabs were infected by anti-Semitism since the beginning of the struggle over Palestine and forcing the Arab-Jewish communities to emigrate. Arab anti-Semitism magnified in the last few years with the escalation of the conflict with Israel, the rise of a certain sense of impotence among Arabs and the surge of fundamentalist movements.

However, let us look at the current events in Palestine: stealing land, humiliating the people and destroying the houses. Crops of land that is not stolen are destroyed. People are forbidden to enter houses that are not demolished. This is taking place before and during the construction of the fence that would eat half of the nation and the state that are supposed to be established!

Palestine became, because of this policy, a group of devastated villages. Its history is written as the history of villages that did not develop and were not given the chance to develop into a nation and a state.

This all happens under the pretext of stopping terrorism, followed by combating anti-Semitism that pushes toward terrorism against the Jews. The shameful and painful matter is that the Israeli policy, which is ferocious, would only widen the number of terrorists and increase anti-Semitic feelings.

Even the blind can now see that the Sharonist policy of killing and destroying would lead nowhere. He can now see that Sharon follows this policy to prevent reaching a solution.

All this makes the mobilization of Israeli public opinion to stop the Sharonist massacre the mother of all issues. It is true that suicide operations played, and still are playing, their obstructive role in this regard. But it is also true that the absence of action would increase suicide operations and anti-Semitic feelings that reach the four corners of the world.

It is up to this public opinion to react: either to refer to its near interests in security, and abandoning its far interests in everything, including security, or rising to the heights of belonging to a one humanity and taking some risks during the process. Mind you: the policy that makes all the Palestinians terrorists and anti-Semites can't
provide that public opinion any security whatsoever!