Who to blame? Israel!

Editorial

Based on the accepted wisdom that Israel implements security measures mostly because it likes to be cruel, the world is outraged – outraged! – at the images of the invasion of a Palestinian prison last week.

The world tends to view every Israeli military action as symptomatic of a streak of base cruelty. That Israel trespasses against Palestinian rights for nothing more than perverse pleasure is a concept that is possible to swallow only because much of the world has already gobbled down the presumption that Israel has no legitimate security concerns. Israel, the tiny ribbon of Jews surrounded by genocidal Jew-haters, is the sole source of Middle East woes and peace would certainly ensue if Israel relented to every terrorist demand: So goes the clear, if usually unstated, "logic" of the anti-Zionists.

The security barrier is the clearest example of this atrocious double-standard in action. The Israeli government, having weighed six decades of relentless killings of Jews against limited inconveniences to Palestinians, determined that, in the absence of any indication of peaceful intent from their neighbors, they had no alternative but to create a physical deterrent to the free movement of murderers. In response, the world has spat venom at Israel. Even statistics indicating that the barrier has saved hundreds, possibly thousands, of Israeli lives, are dismissed as no justification at all. Based on the widely accepted view that Palestinian terrorists target Israeli civilians because they deserve it, an Israeli-made barrier that saves innocent lives is unthinkable, therefore, the barrier is condemned as aggression.

It was in this well-trod rut of prefab outrage that the incident at the Jericho jail was met last week. The world, appalled at the sight of Palestinian prisoners paraded out of their prison in underwear – pictures that were eerily reminiscent of the American treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib – is up in arms against Israel again.

Yet shahids, known in English as suicide-murderers, continue to gather almost no criticism from the global community, who justify such acts of "resistance" as a natural outcome of the desperation caused by Israeli policies. The desperation argument is the catch-all that justifies everything terrorists do against Israeli civilians. Because Israeli policies supposedly breed the desperation, there is nothing that cannot be explained away by attributing terrorist violence to desperation.

The irony, of course, is that if anyone is eligible for forgiveness based on desperation, it should be Israelis, who have withstood decade after decade of assaults. Unlike Palestinians who, with only very rare exceptions, are injured or killed only when engaging in violence, Israeli victims are overwhelmingly non-combatants. Those Palestinians who have been injured or killed in the last six years of the intifada have almost all been engaged in terrorist activity. A surprising number of them have also been killed not by Israelis, but by the Palestinian Authority and the region's notoriously fighting factions. Dead and injured Israelis during the same period have overwhelmingly been guilty only of riding public transit, ordering pizza or dancing in discos.

Such was the backdrop against which the case of the under-dressed prisoners transpired last week. The world community, which has never been concerned with details, saw the Israeli army invading a Palestinian prison and asked no further questions before condemning the incident in the starkest terms. But why was Israel involved in this unsavory incident?

The invasion occurred after American and British guards, whose positions at the prison were part of an international agreement, abandoned their posts. The Palestinian Authority was about to release Ahmad Sa'dat, the leader of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who is responsible for the assassination in 2001 of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi. Palestinian prisons, when not under the guard of third-party states like this one was until last week, have revolving doors that routinely release mass murderers after paltry sentences. In this case, which involved one of the worst affronts a democratic state can endure – the assassination of a duly elected official – the murderer had spent five years behind bars in what has been reported as a veritable holiday spa. Under international and bilateral agreements, the Palestinians were bound by conditions that included allowing neutral guards to ensure that the prison doors stay locked. Once these safeguards were gone, Israel was not bound by these agreements.

Israel's worst offence in this instance was not sharing the PR savvy the Palestinians exhibit and keeping cameras away from unappealing scenes.

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