The agony of Gaza
EVEN BEFORE Israeli shelling killed 19 Palestinian civilians on Wednesday in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, lucid observers on either side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could foresee the inevitability of just such a horror. Until that conflict is resolved with a mutually acceptable sharing of land and recognition of political sovereignty, it will go on producing one massacre of innocents after the other.
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed regret and conducted an inquiry that concluded the killings were caused by a technical problem with the radar of the artillery battery that fired into a residential area. Olmert's gesture is welcome as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.
An editorial in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz stated the awful truth. "No excuse can justify this atrocity," the paper said. "When artillery batteries aim their shells near a residential neighborhood, such a disaster is inevitable, even if it is unintentional."
In the maelstrom of attacks and counter-attacks that define warfare between Palestinians and Israel, each side argues that it must retaliate for the other side's latest killing of noncombatants. Nonetheless, the deliberate targeting of civilians by suicide bombers and the firing of artillery shells or missiles into populated areas must both be condemned. Both are inhumane, and both doom civilians on one's own side to suffer reprisals.
In this vein, the Hamas leader in Damascus, Khaled Meshal, declared that the truce -- or hudna, as it is called in Arabic -- that Hamas has observed since February 2005 will be ended. Meshal promised to dispatch suicide bombers to Israeli cities, and armed groups linked to Fatah vowed to do the same.
The fact that the Olmert government was trying to halt the firing of home made Qassem rockets into Israel from Gaza can hardly justify Israel's disproportionate use of force. The Beit Hanoun atrocity came after a week of military assaults in Gaza that took the lives of 52 Palestinians, civilians as well as militants. And the shelling of people asleep in their houses also comes after months of a virtual siege of Gaza that has left the inhabitants more impoverished than ever, more despairing about the future, and more vulnerable to the extremists' code of vengeance.
The Israeli author David Grossman, speaking recently at the annual commemoration of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, called on Olmert to make the Palestinians "an offer their moderates can accept." Invoking the looming threat from Islamist radicalism, Grossman warned: "Should you delay, in a short while we will look back with longing at the amateur Palestinian terror." This is wise counsel, and it may be the only way out of the maelstrom.
