Roger Simon has a good post that expresses my views nicely, but I'd like to come at the question from another angle. See, it's like this...
Israel kills Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in an airstrike (link | timeline | pictures | editorial cartoon). In return, Hamas vows bloody revenge.
Which means what, exactly? Ruthlessly murdering men, women, children and old people in calculated strikes? Committing to a goal of genocide and cleaning against Jews, regarding them as sub-human? Doing everything in their power to annihilate the Jewish state and its inhabitants?
As opposed to what would have happened if Israel had left Hamas and its leader alone, of course...
In which case Hamas would continue to ruthlessly murder men, women, children and old people in calculated strikes, remain committed to its long-standing goal of genocide and cleansing against sub-human Jews ("sons of apes and pigs"), and do everything in their power to annihilate the Jewish state and its inhabbitants.
Most Israelis seem to have come to a similar conclusion. In fact, they've pretty much had it.
Note for the 'peace' crowd: if you want peace in the Middle East, you'd better start considering Israeli sensibilities too. There can't be peace without the Palestinians... but there can't be peace without the Israelis either. And there can never be peace, of any meaningful sort, with people like this.
They wish to be martyrs? So be it. Oblige them.
UPDATE: Good follow-up analysis by Belmont Club: Transition.
For me it's pretty straightforward: this guy, in fact this very Saruman clone guy authorized the suicide bombings, which is quite different from the previous waves of Intifada in the sense that it killed [is killing] innocent people in the heart of Israel. So it is only self-defense for the Jewish state.
What did they expect, really?
It is interesting that the political scene in many countries is so clouded that many authorities have condemned the attack and called it inhuman, because the guy was physically disabled... Political correctness, up to where?
I wish "the left" would go back to their roots, in opposing Nazism, or civil rights and looked carefully beyond the simple recipes and did some real critical thinking.
My apologies to Christopher Lee.
Now Hamas is really, really, really angry. And they may do something bad. And it will be all Israel's fault.
Jed -
You mean, as opposed to the calm, happy way they were last week?
A.L.
That would make a great US Army recruiting ad.
Cue music:
Images of masked terrorists at training camp.
Announcer: They want to be martyrs!
Announcer: You can help!
Images of US pilots taking off from a carrier, special forces firing at caves in the mountains, A-10 pilot strafing buildings in Iraq, sub launching a cruise missile.
Announcer: Call your recruiter today!
Iblis,
Where do I sign up? Let's give the workers at that heavenly virgin factory some overtime.
Best short comments, at Oliver Kamm's blog -
Stephen Pollard: "Hamas said Israel had 'opened the gates of hell'. Is that to allow wheelchair access for Yassin?"
Anon: "Given that they don't care about death, they seemed surprisingly irritated."
There is a good article which I think sums up my feelings on this by Johann Hari of the Independent. His site is at http://www.johannhari.com/index.php
The article:
Sharon is dragging his people towards an abyss
The window of opportunity for a two-state solution is closing
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was a far-right theocrat. If the Hamas programme he inspired is ever put into practice, the dream of Palestinian liberation will turn into a nightmare on the day of an Israeli withdrawal. He explicitly wanted to turn a Palestinian state, when it finally came into existence, into a fundamentalist state under shariah law.
There would be no liberation for women in his Palestine. Dissenters would be dealt with as they are in all fundamentalist states. The savagery inflicted on any Jews who remained there would be too horrible to describe. I would be stoned to death there for being gay. It is understandable that some Palestinians, driven to psychosis by the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the occupation forced on them since 1967, have sympathy for this programme. No outsider should weep for Yassin, or support Hamas.
Yet we should weep for this assassination. Some of our tears should be for the consequences in Israel itself: when Ariel Sharon gave the order to incinerate Yassin, he guaranteed the incineration of countless Israeli civilians - innocent people - in retaliation attacks. But we should grieve mostly because it reveals a startling ignorance on the part of the Israeli government. This ignorance will ensure they carry on slaying and oppressing Palestinians.
The Likud government still fails to understand the causes of suicide bombing. Encouraged by the American right, Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu imagine that suicide bombing is the work of a few evil masterminds brainwashing impressionable young people into committing suicide massacres. This is why they have killed Yassin and may yet kill Yasser Arafat. They genuinely believe that if you take out these "terror masters" the attacks will be reduced. There is only one problem: I have met young men preparing to be suicide bombers, and this analysis bears no relation to reality.
The wave of suicide bombers currently massacring civilians in Israel are the children of the first Intifada. The formative experience of their lives was watching their parents stage a massive programme of peaceful resistance to occupation. Israel's response was clear: Yitzhak Rabin gave the order to "break their bones". No brainwashing is needed to turn these men to crazed violence; they learned it in their childhood from Israeli occupiers.
All that happens when Israel kills Palestinian figureheads is that humiliation stabs deeper into their gut. Yassin will now become a ghost at every Palestinian feast, urging martyrdom. He is far more dangerous - both to Israelis and to the cause of a secular Palestinian nationalism - dead than alive.
To understand this we can listen to the explanation for terrorism offered by a man once universally regarded in Britain as "Terrorist Number One": "All we wanted was to be a free people in our own country ... our enemies called us terrorists, but we used physical force only because we were faced by physical force ... For this reason we delivered attack after attack against the oppressor, and our revolt burst into a great flame."
These are the words of Menachem Begin, who went on to become Israel's first Likud Prime Minister. He led the Irgun, a terrorist group who fought against the British occupation of Palestine in the 1940s. If anybody should understand how the unique agony of living without a state turns people to terrorism, it is the Israelis. Begin's compelling autobiography, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, is a mirror-image of the writings of contemporary Palestinian terrorists. He coldly justifies the massacre of 91 people at the King David Hotel as "necessary" to ensure a free Israel.
It is a simple truth that if you deprive people of a state, they will fight for one. What we are witnessing today is a straightforward Palestinian war of independence. The only way to bring it to an end it is to grant independence. This can only mean a state comprising Gaza and the West Bank.
This would not be a magical solution to everything. There will still be some fanatics who seek not a two-state solution but a Greater Palestine cleansed of Jews. Yet opinion polls suggest that such Islamic fundamentalists would be a minority in a free Palestine, even after years of psychosis-inducing abuse. But how much longer can this last? How many more provocations before they are all driven mad?
The tragedy is that Israel is cursed with a leadership that is psychologically incapable of taking the road to peace. All opinion polls show that most Israeli citizens can see that Israel's only chance for survival is as one of two states, divided between the two peoples who share the tiny patch of land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea.
Yet Sharon sees all Arabs as part of a seething mob with whom there can be no discussion, no reasoning, no co-existence. Peaceniks and suicide bombers, Abu Mazen and Sheikh Yassin: they are all equally murderous, and only a fool would try to compromise with such savages. Sharon grew up in Kfar Malal, a small Jewish village that was eternally besieged by Palestinians. This sense of an absolute threat - they're coming for us, pass the ammunition - has never left him. For Sharon, the entire Middle East is an eternal Kfar Malal.
He is tipping Israel/Palestine towards a situation from which there can be no return. At the moment, a majority of Palestinians seek their own state divided from Israel along the 1967 borders. This is an agenda which can be met while leaving Israel safe and intact. Yet Sharon making it impossible to return to those borders, by constructing a fence that cuts deep into Palestinian territories.
The effect of this will not be what Sharon hopes: that the Palestinians will be so terrified that they will settle for the scraps that Likud is prepared to leave behind after a unilateral withdrawal. No; it will be that Palestinians will ditch the goal of two states altogether.
Ahmad Qureia, the Palestinian Prime Minister, made this clear when he explained that Sharon's unilateral moves would render the drive for a Palestinian state a "meaningless slogan." No viable state could exist on what Sharon proposes to - perhaps - leave behind. So the Palestinian goal will change.
"If the situation continues as it is now, we will go for the one-state solution," Qureia says. One big state encompassing both the Occupied Territories and Israel proper would mean an Arab majority and the end of Israel. Sharon - by refusing to see the difference between moderate and extreme Palestinians - is pushing the Palestinians further away from secular moderation and towards Hamas fanaticism and a thirst to eradicate all Israel. He has just united all Palestine behind a Hamas fanatic.
If one state becomes the Palestinian raison d'etre there will be perpetual war with no possibility of compromise, and I will still be writing laments for peace in the Middle East when I am an old man. This is the abyss towards which Sharon is dragging his people. Unless he radically changes direction, his legacy will be rows of Jewish and Arab graves stretching out into infinity.
I think Hari is wrong on so many levels here, but let's cut to the chase. Given that all major players in Palestinian politics, from Yassin to Arafat, have this as their goal and have worked to indoctrinate Palestinian youth in that goal for the last decade... you may want to start polishing that pen.
Peace will only be possible when the Palestinians abandon their dreams of aniihilation and genocide for the Jewish population of Israel. There is no prospect of that happening unless something changes, and as long as Yassin and his ilk are alive that prospect is remote.
Yassin declared total war. He got war in return.
The Palestinians, even without their leaders, may yet be foolish enough to insist on total war too. Israel is trying not to give them their wish, but if they're persistent enough they may yet get it. I hope they discover the wisdom to change course, and that removing the organizers of hatred and terror will open an opportunity for something different. We certainly weren't going to get there with people like Yassin in charge, that's for sure.
Time will tell.
"If one state becomes the Palestinian raison d'etre there will be perpetual war with no possibility of compromise, and I will still be writing laments for peace in the Middle East when I am an old man."
You seem to think that all Palestinians want to see Israel be destroyed and they all want to kill Israeli civilians.
In 1995, at a time when the peace process was working less than 20% of Palestinians supported suicide bombing. Today, that figure is above 60%.
There will always be extremists on both sides. Israel has Bibi Netanyahu, the Palestinians have (or had) Yassin and Hamas. There are people who want peace too. Hanan Ashrawi or Raja Shehadah on one side; Amram Mitzna and Shimon Peres on the other.
The key is to start a peace process between moderates with 2 states as its goal. This will not destroy the extremists, but it will make them less and less popular till they are completely marginalised.
The problem seems to be that neither Sharon nor Arafat care about peace. Both are corrupt, old militaristic dinosaurs. Sharon has been involved in grotesque attacks against Arabs such as Sabra and Shatila, while Arafat has also played his part in the murder of Israelis.
If only the two sides had decent leaders...
You seem to think that all Palestinians want to see Israel be destroyed and they all want to kill Israeli civilians.
In 1995, at a time when the peace process was working less than 20% of Palestinians supported suicide bombing. Today, that figure is above 60%.
There will always be extremists on both sides. Israel has Bibi Netanyahu, the Palestinians have (or had) Yassin and Hamas. There are people who want peace too. Hanan Ashrawi or Raja Shehadah on one side; Amram Mitzna and Shimon Peres on the other.
The key is to start a peace process between moderates with 2 states as its goal. This will not destroy the extremists, but it will make them less and less popular till they are completely marginalised.
The problem seems to be that neither Sharon nor Arafat care about peace. Both are corrupt, old militaristic dinosaurs. Sharon has been involved in grotesque attacks against Arabs such as Sabra and Shatila, while Arafat has also played his part in the murder of Israelis.
If only the two sides had decent leaders...
There needs to be a Marine Corps poster
"72 Virgin Dating Service"
If one state becomes the Palestinian raison d'etre
"Becomes"? "If"?
Why do I get the feeling he's been spending more time on fantasies of peaceful Palestinians than on reading the founding documents and policy statements of the PLO, Hamas, Fatah, et cetera for comprehension?
(My cynical side is muttering that this is the next rhetorical tactic being floated: the anti-Israelis will shortly begin to officially notice that the Palestinian leadership and most of the people are annihilationist, but Hari's line of thinking will give them a way to blame that, too, on Israel. "If only the Jews had not been so obdurate as to bring about this disastrous shift in Palestinian thinking", etc.)
The Israelis did try to negotiate a two-state solution and got an Intifida in return. The Israelis elected Barak to negotiate and the Intifada turned around and elected Sharon. Sharon is not the cause of the Intifada, the Intifada is the cause of the election of Sharon.
A straightforward Palestinian war of independence?
Exactly correct. The primary mastermind is Yasser Arafat. It is the Palestinian leadership that has refused a two-state solution for many decades and has lead and encouraged the many decades of Palestinian terrorism. A terrorism that started before the first Intifada. The Arab states made war on Israel in the very first moment of existence, and swore they would annhilate Israel. The Israelis have been skeptical ever since.Absolutely not. The PLO and Palestinian National Council have said for over 30 years that their goal was the complete destruction and elimination of Israel, and they acted on this with violence. The states of Syria, Egypt, and Jordon made war on Israel to destroy it. Hari and Fann ignore this central, vital, overwhelming fact. The conflict is not becoming a war to destroy Israel, it started as a war to destroy Israel.
It was the second Intifada that persuaded the Israelis that the Palestinians do not want a two-state solution.