By Gary Rosenblatt
Many of us reacted this week to the news of Israel’s targeted killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin with a mixture of grim satisfaction and deep foreboding, sensing that the conflict with the Palestinians may not have reached bottom after all. Far from it.
On the one hand, Israel had every right to eliminate the leader of Hamas, a group whose expressed goal is the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
Yassin had the blood of hundreds of innocent Israelis on his hands. Since the suicide war began in September 2000, Hamas has carried out 425 terror attacks, according to the Israeli government, and killed 377 Israelis — Jewish and Arab.
Clearly, in a war one has the legal and moral right to kill one’s enemy before he kills you; and though referred to as a “spiritual leader,” Yassin preached death and gave the orders, and rationale, for acts of murder.
But we also realize that Palestinian fundamentalists became even more determined to intensify the violence when the Israeli helicopter missile found its target Sunday. The ultimate question is whether the killing of Yassin will lead to the murder of fewer, or more, Israelis. For that we have no immediate answer.
But there is a misperception at play in those who suggest that killing the sheik will only escalate the violence. That is the notion that if Israel refrained from targeting leaders of Hamas and the other terror groups, there would be fewer attacks and killings by the Palestinians.
It’s like the old joke about the two Jews waiting to be executed by a firing squad. One asks his friend, “Do you think I could ask for a last cigarette?” The other says, “Shhh, don’t make trouble.”
Some of us are still worried about making trouble. What will the Europeans say if Israel targets and kills the leader of Hamas? What new resolution will the U.N. Security Council pass condemning Israeli morality?
Sad facts
The sad facts are that the Europeans will oppose Israel’s position as long as Palestinian demands are not met fully; and the United Nations has not passed a resolution sympathetic to Israel related to the conflict since 1947, and probably never will.
More important, the Palestinian terror attacks on Israel continue unabated, as many as 50 attempts a day. The only reason more innocents are not killed is because of the courage and skill of the Israel Defense Force, and its security and intelligence network.
What probably sealed Yassin’s fate was the Hamas-initiated double suicide bombing in Ashdod earlier this month, which killed 10. More ominously, army officials concluded that the attackers sought to blow up nearby fuel tanks, which could have resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths. This was not the first attempted “mega-attack” from Hamas.
Israeli officials say the notion that targeted killings only lead to more violence is not true. Since Israeli troops went back into Palestinian cities and towns, searching out terrorists in response to the Passover seder suicide bombing in a Netanya hotel two years ago, the killing of Israelis has been reduced by almost half.
“We are braced for more attacks,” historian and author Michael Oren told me the day after Yassin was killed, “but given the choice of risking retaliation or letting the sheik go unpunished, it is unthinkable not to go after him. Otherwise, we Israelis have no right to be here, we might as well just go back to Poland.”
Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and author most recently of “Six Days Of War,” a history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, said there is a moral, and Zionist, dimension to the killing of Yassin.
“We came to this land so people could not kill Jews with impunity,” he said. “The point is that no one is immune.”
Dan Schueftan is a political scientist at Haifa University whose book “Disengagement: Israel and the Palestinian Entity” has been a keystone of the government’s unilateral withdrawal policy. He said the only way to fight terror is to eliminate the terrorists and their leaders.
If you worry about the short term, he says, in terms of retaliatory strikes, you are already defeated. “You can never say ‘reduce their motivation’ because their motivation is irreducible,” he explained.
“You have to understand that they don’t care if you kill a thousand of their children, or destroy their economy or ruin their future, because they’ve already done that,” he continued. “The only thing that hurts is when you kill their leaders, so you have to do that again and again and again.”
The bad news, Schueftan said, is that the patience required in continuing such an effort is one thing civilized people don’t have. “But in the end,” he said, “it will bear fruit.”
In the short term, though, the only way to stop the terror is to capitulate, said Schueftan, who is also a senior fellow at the Shalem Center. He said that was what Spain did after terrorists struck its railroad system recently, and he called the Madrid government decision to pull its troops prematurely from Iraq a cowardly act that will only lead to more bloodshed of innocents.
“You must do only what infuriates the terrorists,” Schueftan insisted. “It’s not a cost, it’s a benefit.”
That’s a brutal message, but it has a cold, hard logic that is difficult to refute. Hamas is not about two-state solutions, shared land, logic, tolerance or humanity. It’s about destroying Israel, the Jews and, ultimately, the democratic lifestyle America symbolizes.
There can be no compromise with those who find meaning and holiness in destroying you and everything you stand for. The sad fact is that terrorism can’t be negotiated, it can only be defeated.
Gary Rosenblatt is editor and publisher of the New York Jewish Week.
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