in a Time of Pain—and Murky Moral Ambiguity
by Dr. Eran Lerman
Director Israel/Middle East Office
Noam Leibowiz was just seven when she died, near midnight the night before last. The car in which her family was driving, returning from a celebration in Jerusalem, was fired upon from the rear by an unknown hero of the Palestinian armed struggle who then slid back as he had come, through a water culvert under the wall, where he and an accomplice had cut a hole through the iron grid, into the Palestinian town of Qalqiliya. Two organizations—Yasir Arafat’s own Al-Aqsa Battalions (i.e., Fatah) and Ahmad Jibril’s “Popular Front-General Command” (a long-dormant but deadly and innovative terrorist organization)—took pride in claiming responsibility for this foul deed.
Those who were with us on the recent AJC solidarity mission and joined the heartwarming visit to Or Akiva, a development town that has become a thriving city, will remember this last section of Road 6, Israel’s first-ever toll road, where it loops around Qalqiliya. Those who came with us on previous solidarity missions will remember the wonderful place where little Noam grew up, Yemin Orde, where her father works with the director, Haim Peri, to create a home—an open-minded and open-hearted place—for hundreds of needy children and young people.
This morning another attack—this time by a suicide bomber in a grocery store in the sleepy moshav (village) of Sde Trumot in the Beit She’an Valley—took the life of the store’s owner, a father of six, as well as that of the perpetrator. There is a word to describe people who take lives in such a manner. It is evil. And, yes, there is a difference between those who actively pursue an exterminatory goal—the total destruction of what a Hamas leader publicly described as “so-called Zionist civilians,” or as Abdel-Aziz Rantisi put it, again in public, “Not a single Jew will be left”—and those who find themselves facing the tragic dilemma of whether to strike at terrorist planners and leaders, even when they hide behind their own women and children. Israelis who cross this well-defined moral line are put on trial as criminals (as happened recently to a group of Border Guards in Hebron); Palestinians who cross the same line are put on a pedestal as “martyrs.” All the more reason for us to keep our moral compass.
We shall need it. In the days, weeks, and months ahead, American envoys will come and go (and are likely, as IDF officers ruefully observe, to be met by outpost evacuations on Israel’s part, requiring much planning and attention, and with waves of terrorist warnings on the other side). As we wade ever deeper into the murky waters of the “road map,” we are going to face highly troubling, ambiguous issues and decisions. They will be ambiguous not only in terms of the strategic uncertainty as to where we are going, but also because they involve mutations on the basic premise that terrorists should be killed, not coddled. Here is a short list of questions we already face:
· Can we accept a short-term “truce”—hudna in Arabic—while Hamas and others take a breather and rebuild their strength?
· Even more perversely, can we live with a Hamas-Mahmoud Abbas agreement, brokered by our “friends” the Egyptians, under which the terrorists will limit themselves to “small- time” operations—just a little murder every day or two, a girl here and a grocer there? Or maybe just soldiers and settlers?
· When President Bush spoke of “a new and different” Palestinian leadership and heaped praise on Abbas’s head, did he really mean a national unity government of Palestinian parties that would include representatives of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various other factions of murderers—which is exactly what Abbas is now proposing to his interlocutors on the other side of the Palestinian table?
· Do we release a known master of murderers like Marwan Barghouthi (not that others on the Palestinian side are saints) because his release will help Abbas? Do we drop the charges against a corrupt and dangerous man in Gaza, Rashid Abu Shabak, the current head of Preventive Security there, just because Muhammad Dahlan now demands this as a new condition for fighting terror?
· Ultimately, can we handle a situation in which local arrangements will work in some areas while terrorist cells rampage in others, as the slow and troubled implementation of the road map rolls along?
Strangely enough, we have to steel ourselves for the possibility that the answers coming from Jerusalem and Washington (let alone from Brussels or Cairo) to some of these questions might be “yes, for the time being.” We need this time:
1. To move toward the necessary goals of an end to violence and separation by agreement—the key components of President Bush’s vision, which Prime Minister Sharon has agreed to (and in fact, presented as early as February 2002, a few months before Bush did). This is not being forced on us; this is what we need if we seek to remain—to quote Bush again—a “vibrant Jewish state.”
2. To allow for the broader effects of the massive changes in the regional balance to play out—including the struggle to stabilize Iraq, giving the liberal Shi`is there a chance to build an alternative to despotism; the growing storm of protest in Iran, which could lead to profound changes and an end to Iranian active support for terrorism; the pressure on Syria, Saudi Arabia, and radical Muslim elements in the West to cut off their aid to the terrorists; and ultimately, the work that must be done to put an end to the climate of vile hatred fostered even in “friendly” Arab countries. (Egypt, for example, now shows reruns of “Knight without a Horse,” the television series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
3. Meanwhile, a lot of work needs to be done on the positive side to offer the Palestinians a better life, cleaner government, and reliable social services, which will lessen their dependence on the services now provided by Hamas. Men like Salam Fayyad, the PA’s finance minister, are showing the way, but find themselves constrained by Arafat; and across the river in Jordan, where an extraordinary session of the World Economic Forum will meet next week, Israeli-Jordanian cooperation in the “Qualifying Industrial Zones” or QIZs, has already created nearly a half billion dollars in exports to the United States and 30,000 jobs. But then King Abdullah works to better the lot of his people, “Transjordanians” and Palestinians alike, while for Arafat, their abject misery has been the fuel feeding his own strategies and designs.
In other words, we might be paying with morally ambiguous actions to gain time for good things to happen. On the other hand, we might end up on the slippery slope to oblivion, as an important voice, former Supreme Court judge Moshe Landau, warned yesterday in Ma’ariv: American interests, as interpreted by Colin Powell’s State Department, push us to take risks and offer concessions that might ultimately destroy us. I believe Landau is wrong; but I believe so largely on the strength of my conviction that on neither side of the Atlantic shall we lose our moral compass. Even as we make short-term maneuvers, we must keep the bright flame of commitment burning: a commitment not to forget the murder of children and to hold true, in the long run, to the moral underpinnings of the war on totalitarianism and on terrorism.
One of the most harrowing moments in all of Shakespeare is when Titus Andronicus, looking upon what has been done to his children, laughs:
Why, I have not another tear to shed:
Besides, this sorrow is an enemy,
And would usurp upon my watery eyes,
And make them blind with tributary tears:
Then which way shall I find Revenge’s cave?
For these two heads do seem to speak to me,
And threat me I shall never come to bliss
Till all these mischiefs be return’d again
Even in their throats that have committed them.
Come, let us see what task I have to do.
What we have to do—what our revenge should be—is to hold on to our hopes, refuse to have them broken by the murderers and their masters, and work hard, on both sides of the water, to change the nature of the region in which we live. What began after September 11 will yet be done, even if twists and turns in the road obscure our goals at times.
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