More threats and no solution

March 8, 2008

More threats and no solution


THERE COULD BE no justification of deliberate killing civilians in any conflict. This is the widely accepted universal convention and it has to be respected by all parties involved although it is widely ignored in most troublespots around the world. And when civilians do die in armed conflicts, the world reacts with sympathy and condemns the killing. For some reason, it becomes all the more relevant when it happens in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly so when the dead include Israelis.
It is difficult to find much of a difference between Thursday's killing of seven Israeli students at a school in occupied Jerusalem and the murder of innocent Palestinian children in Israeli military attacks in the Gaza Strip in the last few weeks. One of the marked differences was, of course, that while Israel used hi-tech military gear and bombs to carry out most of the killings, Thursday's attack involved a lone Palestinian and an assault rifle.
The world does sympathise with the families of those killed but does not have any sympthy for the Israeli political and military leaders who had no consideration for Palestinian civilians caught in the Israeli frenzy to destroy Palestinian resistance to the Jewish state's occupation of Palestinians.
More than 120 Palestinians — dozens of children and women — who were killed in Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip in the last two weeks. That is not to mention the tens of thousands of Palestinians who died in the course of Israel's occupation of their land since 1947.
If the Israelis want to highlight that Thursday's dead included Israeli teenagers, then the obvious response would be that the Israeli military's Gazan victims included children as young as one month.
An immediate Israeli target for victimisation after Thursday's attack would be the Arab-Israeli community because the assailant was an Arab-Israeli. Having an Israeli ID and working as a delivery man, he did not have any problem moving around in occupied Arab East Jerusalem. The Kalashnikov assault rifle he used is available for cash in most Israeli towns. We have seen how Israel treats its Arab community and we could now expect the Israeli establishment to exploit the chance that has presented itself to tighten pressure on its Arab citizens.
But then, it does not take anyone near the sought-for peace agreement in Palestine that should do away with the very root of the conflict.
Instead of accepting that its brutality against the Palestinians is spawning more security threats rather than removing them, Israel is bent upon pursuing the military option. As things stand today, it requires a dramatic and drastic change in the Israeli mindset even to hope for a fair and just solution in Palestine anytime in the future.