Israel's children are the target of Middle East terror campaign

	By Nolan Finley / The Detroit News
	Sunday, March 17, 2002

	http://www.detnews.com/2002/editorial/0203/17/a15-442135.htm

	The ugly little secret of the Middle East conflict is that a favorite target 
	of Palestinian terrorists are the children, teen-agers and young adults of Israel. 

	They appear to be intentionally killing Israel's kids.
 
	The slaughter is carried out by cold-hearted murderers who search for bar mitzvahs, 
	high schools, teen discos, wedding parties, family restaurants -- any place likely 
	to draw young people -- before touching off their suicide bombs. And it is being 
	done without the world condemnation that such a heinous campaign should provoke. 

   	It is a deliberate and despicable effort to accelerate the demoralization of the 
	Israeli people and force them to accept compromises that may leave the nation far 
	less secure. 

   	"It's a way of killing the future, and of raising the temperature -- what is more 
	painful than the funerals of the young?," says Stewart Schoffman, a father, former 
	New Yorker and columnist with the Jerusalem Report. 

	Schoffman says he and his fellow Israelis now try to keep their children always 
	within sight and are reluctant to take them to crowded, public places. 

	Certainly, Palestinian children are dying as well. And while there is a clear moral 
	difference between intentionally targeting children for killing and accidentally 
	killing children in a military engagement, a dead child is a dead child. 

	The parents mourn equally. Though it is difficult to understand how Palestinian 
	parents can grieve over children killed by Israeli gunfire, while celebrating the 
	deaths of children they themselves brainwash and turn into human bombs. 

	The late Golda Meir, the heroic Israeli prime minister, once said peace would come 
	to the Middle East when Arabs love their children more than they love killing Jews. 
	Former Sen. George Mitchell, who was in Livonia earlier this month to speak to the 
	Michigan State University Political Leadership Program, offered a somewhat similar 
	prediction, saying peace will come only when both sides reach a "general weariness 
	of war." 

  	If dead children don't bring that weariness, nothing will. 

   	With so many children filling up graveyards, the real danger is that the already 
	incredibly deep hatred between the two peoples will harden to the point where peace 
	is no longer an option. 

	Mitchell, who headed the presidential commission that produced a not-yet-followed 
	blueprint for Middle East peace, remains optimistic, despite acknowledging there 
	is "an absolute absence of trust" in the region. He points to Northern Ireland, 
	where he also helped broker a peace deal, and says if the combatants in that 
	conflict could overcome their hatred and stop killing each other, so can the 
	Israelis and Palestinians. 

	"Life is so painful for both, it will come to the point where they lay down their 
	weapons and come to the table," Mitchell says. "But it will be generations before 
	you will have absolute reconciliation. It takes a long time to change what's in 
	hearts and minds." 
	
   	In the end, Mitchell says a peace deal will look very much like the one Palestinian 
	chief Yasser Arafat walked away from at Camp David 18 months ago. 

   	If that's the case, getting back to that beginning will have taken the devastation 
	of the Palestinian economy, a total loss of Israel's sense of security and far, far 
	too many dead children. 

	Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The Detroit News. You can reach him at 
	nfinley@ detnews.com or (313) 222-2064. 



	Yes: Israelis can stop cycle of violence with negotiations, not provocations
	
	Sunday, December 9, 2001
	By Ahmed Bouzid / Special to The Detroit News

	http://detnews.com/2001/editorial/0112/12/a19-362132.htm

	In a gripping October Harper's article, New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges 
	described how every afternoon around four o'clock at the outskirts of the Khan Yunis 
	refugee camp, a voice on a loud speaker is heard spewing out insults in Arabic, 
	calling out, "Come on, dogs! ... Son of a whore!" 

   	To his astonishment, Hedges discovered that the loud speakers were mounted on armored 
	Israeli vehicles. Soon after, riled by the invectives, young Palestinian boys, most of 
	them no more than 10 or 11 years old, would dash toward the armored vehicles and begin 
	throwing rocks at the soldiers. At which point, the soldiers would open fire. 

   	To Americans, the notion that Israel would go out of its way to provoke and incite 
	Palestinians, let alone Palestinian children, to violence is beyond belief. 

   	And yet, evidence is abundant that Israel is not engaged in self-defense -- certainly not 
	as it is understood under international law -- but rather in deliberate provocation aimed 
	at creating an unstable atmosphere within which Israel can undertake its military operations 
	with impunity. 

   	Let's revisit the few weeks before the tragic Dec. 1 and 2 bombings in Jerusalem and Tel 
	Aviv. Nov. 7: the Red Crescent reports that Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers shoot in 
	cold blood three wounded Palestinian gunmen under their custody after medics were unable 
	to save the life of a wounded Israeli soldier; Nov. 13: The Israeli human rights group 
	B'tselem uncovers that the IDF has a policy of not prosecuting Israeli soldiers who have 
	shot and killed, without provocation, Palestinian children; Nov. 22: Five boys are killed 
	when an ordnance planted by the IDF deep into civilian Palestinian territory explodes; 
	Nov. 23: Four Palestinians are killed during the boys' funeral march, among them a 
	14-year-old boy. 

   	But what ignited this latest firestorm is of course the Nov. 23 assassination of military 
	Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud. As expected, Hamas vowed revenge. And so there was. 

   	Did Israel expect such a reaction? Of course it did. It knew full well that just as the 
	taunted children of Gaza throw rocks at their tormenting soldiers, so do Hamas and Islamic Jihad, 
	taunted by assassinations, bombings of densely populated areas, house demolitions and land 
	confiscations, react with their weapon of choice: suicide bombings. 

   	Why would Israel engage in such provocations? 

   	As demonstrated by Camp David, the Palestinians are not willing to settle for anything less 
	than a sovereign Palestinian state, and the Israelis are not willing to offer anything 
	resembling a sovereign Palestinian state. The Palestinians, militarily no match for the 
	Israelis, have time and again pleaded for an unconditional return to the negotiation table. 
	
	The Israelis have decided that negotiations are a dead end for attaining their goal of a 
	semi-autonomous Palestinian state and have instead opted for the time-tested strategy of 
	divide and conquer: Establish a state of chaos, so Israel is no longer faced with solving a 
	political problem, but rather with confronting a security crisis, and then tighten control 
	over the remaining Palestinian territories. 

   	In this light, it becomes perfectly clear why the Israelis are making it virtually 
	impossible -- not only politically, but now physically -- for Yasser Arafat to bring 
	about order among his people. 

   	Between 1993 and 2000, about 400 Israelis were killed in militant Palestinian actions 
	(3,000 were felled on the Palestinian side). The only period during that interval when 
	Israeli fatalities fell to almost zero was during the last year under Ehud Barak, when 
	Palestinians truly believed their ordeal was at an end. 

   	The cycle of violence will be broken only if and when Israel abandons its tactics of 
	provocation and collective punishment and realizes there is no alternative to creating 
	a free, sovereign Palestinian state. 


	Ahmed Bouzid is president of Palestine Media Watch in Philadelphia.