Two Deaths
by Martin Peretz
Post date: 03.26.04
Issue date: 04.05.04
Just about every world leader one can count on to be sanctimonious has condemned Israel's killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and "spiritual" leader of Hamas. (Why were they never as outraged when Yassin's minions slaughtered Jewish civilians?) Kofi Annan, the pope, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana--they all sang more or less the same trope: Israel's missile strike was a criminal act. So did Syria's President Bashar Assad and every shade of theocrat competing for power in Tehran. Yasir Arafat, a man who knows something about the mass homicide of civilians, also condemned the attack. He was joined by Hanan Ashrawi, one of the few Christians remaining in Arafat's Palestine and a virtual staffer at PBS. For his part, Ahmed Qurei, pretender to the prime ministry of the viable state his boss rejected at Camp David and Taba, simply lied, saying, "Yassin was known for his moderation." After an equivocal statement on Monday morning, the White House--trying to show exactly the right amount of distress, not too little, not too much--announced that it was "deeply troubled" by the "incident in Gaza." John Kerry is yet to be heard on the matter.
If anybody really believes it was wrong for Israel to kill Yassin, they must also believe the United States should immediately give up the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri. (Or at least pursue them only in a court of law, not on the battlefield.) Yassin was as much a combatant as they are. (Even Human Rights Watch places Yassin at the center of Hamas terrorism.) If Israel cannot kill the leader of an organization dedicated to killing Jews, how exactly does the world propose that it defend itself? Perhaps by taking merely defensive measures, like building a fence to keep the terrorists out? No, Israel's security fence now sits in the dock at the Hague. Perhaps the world wants Israel to take the Spanish option: Wait for an enormity and then arrest some after-the-facts suspects. But Israel has already suffered many Madrids over many years. And one big reason is Sheik Yassin, who, unlike Arafat, does not even pretend to favor a two-state solution. The litany of innocent Israeli civilians murdered by Hamas alone from March 4, 2001, to March 14, 2004, is more than 300, and the wounded and maimed number in the thousands (these figures exclude victims of the other Palestinian "liberation fronts," including Arafat's multiple militias). The dead are irrefutable evidence of the Palestinians' unwillingness to accept a reasonable territorial compromise while insisting on a pathological war that assures the suffering of Arabs and Jews alike.
<snip>
But there is at least one hopeful story coming out of the Muslim world today--and it is the growing power of the Kurds. In Iraq, of course, the Kurds are experiencing a new birth of freedom after their slaughter at the hands of Saddam Hussein. And the experience seems to be emboldening their cousins across the border in Syria. The plight of the Kurds across the Middle East rarely garners much sympathy on the left, even though this mostly Muslim people has been persecuted by Arabs for more than 1,000 years--which is to say a millennium before anyone ever conceived of the term "Palestinian." Perhaps it is because the Kurds generally like the United States. At a soccer game in El Qamishliye, Syria, on March 12, the Kurds, cheering on their local team, chanted, "We love Bush." Syrian security services responded by firing into the crowd, killing several Kurds. The stadium cleared out. But unrest spread elsewhere in the country, and some more Kurds were murdered, a total of perhaps 30, and many others were arrested. Such repression shouldn't surprise anyone--after all, Syria has a Baath government. But it does stand as a useful reminder to those commentators who wrote so optimistically about the gentle optometrist, Assad, when he succeeded his father four years ago.
Sheik Yassin yearned for death and martyrdom, and he got them. George Khoury did not yearn for either. But, last week, Arafat's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade gave him both nonetheless. Khoury was a 20-year-old Israeli Arab studying international relations at the Hebrew University. Last Friday evening, he was jogging from the campus through the adjoining neighborhood of French Hill when he was felled in a drive-by shooting. His father is a lawyer who has defended many Palestinians in Israeli courts. His grandfather was killed in a bombing by another of Arafat's bands in Jerusalem's Zion Square in the summer of 1975, two bookends of a family destroyed by one man. That 1975 bombing was one of the first mass atrocities of emergent Palestine. I was in the city with my young son back then, and I still remember the shock that coursed the populace. There is no longer shock. But the grief has not become routine. My Jerusalem friends wept for young Khoury. His family was not appeased when Al Aqsa, finding that they had not murdered a Jew as planned but a Christian, apologized and dispatched him to heaven, also as a "martyr" just like Yassin. Khoury is the latest victim of Palestinian nationalism. I doubt he will be the last.
Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR.
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http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040405&s=diarist040504
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