Editorial

The Logic of Barbarians

In response to pressure from the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia, Hamas recently issued a statement that it would accept a cease-fire and end all suicide bombings in return for the withdrawal of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) from the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon's reply came almost immediately; at midnight on July 22, he sent an F-16 warplane to bomb an apartment building in a heavily populated area of Gaza City, killing 15 Palestinians, including nine children between the ages of two months and 13 years. The target of the attack was apparently Salah Shaheda, a top Hamas military leader, who was killed along with his family and neighbours. The three-story apartment in which Shaheda lived and another nearby building were completely destroyed and four other buildings in the area were heavily damaged. It has been reported that 70 to 100 people were injured in the bombing.

In the wake of the bombing, Deputy Defence Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelosof resigned from the Sharon government, charging Sharon with destroying the life work of her father, the late Yitzhak Rabin.

Ariel Sharon hailed the bombing attack as one of Israel's "major successes"claiming that the civilian deaths were unintentional. The IDF also issued a statement "regretting" the civilian deaths, adding, "Regretfully, this is what can happen when a terrorist uses civilians as a human shield and their homes for places of refuge". However, even the Bush administration was forced to admit that the air strike was carried out "knowing that innocents would be lost in the consequences of the attack". Despite recognizing the fact that the Israeli forces had deliberately targetted civilians, an internationally-recognized crime against humanity, the Bush administration merely charged the Israelis with being "heavy handed". In the face of broad international outrage, the Israeli government has been forced to backtrack on its initial boasts, blaming the loss if innocent lives on a "failure of intelligence" and suggesting that the Israeli Defence Forces had no way of knowing that the target's family and neighbours would be home at midnight.

The logic of Sharon and his Zionist supporters is the logic of barbarians, the logic that any crime is justifiable if it serves their interests. This is the same logic used by the Nazis to justify the murder of civilians in retaliation for Partisan actions. For that matter, it is the same logic as that of the Hamas leaders who strap explosives to children and send them to kill Jewish civilians.

It is obvious to anyone that the Israeli attack was a clear case of cold-blooded murder, carefully calculated to destroy any chance of a cease-fire with Hamas, the main organizer of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. It is an open invitation to Hamas to step up its suicide attacks in Israel, because Ariel Sharon can remain in power only on the basis of a constant flow of Jewish blood. A cease-fire would not only spell the end of Sharon's regime, it could also spell the end of his long-time dream of expelling the Palestinians from all of Palestine and creating a Greater Israel.

The logic of the Bush administration is equally barbaric. It "tut-tuts" whenever the IDF commits blatant crimes against humanity, but continues to equip it with the weapons of mass destruction which it uses to commit those crimes. Furthermore, every mild rebuke of Israel's "heavy handedness" is inevitably followed by a ringing condemnation of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as "terrorists" and "thugs", thereby signalling the Sharon regime that it has the full support of the Bush administration regardless of its actions. Meanwhile, supporters of Israeli Zionism, including in the U.S. Congress, issue calls for the deportation (or murder) of families of suicide bombers, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and other crimes against humanity, all in the name of "combatting terrorism". Is it any wonder that Sharon sees no reason to modify his genocidal behaviour?

Monday's massacre of Palestinian civilians in the name of "combatting terrorism" proves that the main opponent of peace in the Middle East is not Hamas and its squads of suicide bombers, but the Sharon government and its supporters in the Bush administration, which are provoking and encouraging the suicide attacks to justify their own crimes against humanity.