The days since Israel’s assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin have certainly raised my blood pressure. And they’ve taught me to roll up the windows of my car during my commute to work.
Tuesday morning, fellow eight-to-fivers could have witnessed me cursing and gesticulating at my car radio.
Unfortunately, my blood pressure continued to rise when I read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s top editorial, titled, “Strike, reprisal, strike…”
That headline, referring to the so-called “cycle of violence,” suggested that Israel strikes first and then the Palestinians respond — a claim that betrays a painfully shortsighted view of the conflict.
The phrase suggests moral equivalence between Israel’s military strikes and Palestinian terrorism. That blurring of the lines between fact and editorializing has unfortunately become commonplace in our news media.
The “cycle of violence” suggests that our goals are morally equal. But to people raised in cultures of civility — in which the word is preferable to the sword — that phrase strikes a chord of falseness.
Israel, for all her failings, does not legally permit terrorism. Though we’ve all heard stories about immoral behavior in Israel, we also know that Israel is a democracy that arrests, tries and convicts those who break the law.
Though, as in America, some criminals slip through the cracks, Israel is a Western democracy that is based on the rule of law.
Israel does not deliberately target civilians. Yassin and other terrorists do.
Israeli politicians do not encourage bloodshed. Yassin and other terrorists do.
Israel’s ultimate aim, as evidenced by the songs we teach our children, is peace. Yassin’s, through his teachings, was the destruction of Israel.
The phrase “cycle of violence” and the Journal Sentinel headline perpetuate the myth that the murder of innocents is a reaction to Israel’s action, that if Israel hadn’t targeted Yassin, the violence may have ceased.
In fact, to Yassin and other terrorists, Israel’s great crime is her existence. As quoted in Wednesday’s Journal Sentinel, the Hamas Web site published a letter it said Yassin sent to the coming Arab summit in Tunisia.
“The land of Palestine is an Arab, Islamic land which was occupied with the force of weapons by the Jewish Zionists and we will not get it back except with the force of weapons.”
Let me come clean. I believe with deep conviction that peace will only come through words, through honest negotiation with a real partner.
I believe that the Palestinians should have their own state, and I harbor a sweet and sad hope that a future Palestine will be a peaceful and cooperative neighbor to Israel.
I believe that in peacetime, no human being has the right to take the life of another — not as a penalty for crime, not for political reasons and certainly not for ideological or religious reasons.
But this is not peacetime and, unfortunately, rules are different in a state of war.
In Israel, the talk on the street is not of justice but of survival as they adjust to renewed Palestinian threats of revenge. As Yael Gavritz wrote in Tuesday’s editorials in the Israeli daily, Yediot Ahronot, Israelis woke up to a new reality on Monday. “When we go out in the morning, we are scared to death.”
The Israelis, who debate each other at each turn of this conflict, would likely agree that there is a cycle, but they might define it as, “fear, attack, grief…”
Or maybe, “wake up, make it through the day, thank God, go to sleep and hope for another day in which to teach our children songs of peace.”
Loading ...