On Saturday, an Israeli Defense Force helicopter fired two missiles towards an automobile on a street in a small West Bank town. According to the BBC, one of the passengers in that car was Rafat Daraghmeh, a member of a \martyr brigade"" which is linked to the political party of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. The Israeli government claimed that Daraghmeh was planning a ""major attack"" on Israeli civilians.
The first of the two missiles destroyed the car, killing Daraghmeh and two other passengers. But the second missile, rendered pointless by the first, damaged a nearby building. Two children were killed, and six others were injured including a 7-year-old boy who is, at last report, in critical condition.
In the hours following the strike, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the civilian deaths were regrettable. Nevertheless, the government generally declared the attack a success.
If taken at face value, the governmental apology can be seen, somehow, as decent. Moreover, the claim of success can be generally accepted' an odious man whose main goal in life was to kill innocent Israelis will not, thankfully, be heard from again. But, as is always the case in this conflict, the present cannot be properly analyzed without reference to the past. And in this specific case, ""past"" means six weeks ago.
On a night in July, an IDF warplane bombed an apartment building in Gaza. The target of this raid was Salah Shehade, a principal paramilitary leader of Hamas'a terrorist organization that is responsible for a large number of suicide bombings in Israel. Both he and his bodyguard were killed. Yet, the strike also killed 13 innocent civilians, including nine children.
Now, I would not normally remember specific tragedies in the Middle East. I have, to an extent, become desensitized to the daily horrors. However, an image from the funeral procession that followed the airstrike stuck in my memory.
It was, in most respects, the usual scene'thousands of mourners moving slowly through a narrow street, screaming out for vengeance. A few of these mourners carried flag-draped corpses on their shoulders. But in the middle of that throng was a thin man, carrying the body of Dunia Matar high above his head. Matar was only two months old when she died.
It goes without saying that Matar had no idea who Shehade was. Nor did she know anything of the conflict which took her life. Nevertheless, there she is'being feted not as the amazing woman she would have been, but as a martyr to a cause that she had no capacity to comprehend.
Initially, Sharon called the attack ""a great success."" However, he and his handlers were alone in their opinion. Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, offered the best expression of the world's condemnation of the bombing. She called the attack a violation of international law, and said that the attack was a part of a continued ""cycle of savagery"" in the region.
The barrage of international criticism caused the Israeli government to initiate an official investigation of the raid. At the same time, the government furiously back-pedaled on its initial assessment of the bombing's success. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that ""what happened is really regrettable. It wasn't done intentionally. I think all of us feel sorry for the loss of life of innocent people, particularly children.""
In light of what happened on Saturday, Peres's apology rings false, as does Sharon's nonsensical declaration of success. Yes, the terrorist targeted in the Gaza bombing was dispatched, just like Daraghmeh was. But how can anyone who knows the history of this conflict as intimately as Sharon declare any sort of victory when innocents are killed?
Anyone who has paid attention to the Middle East for more than 10 minutes knows what will happen next. The Palestinian people who will hear of this weekend's attack will see through Peres's hollow words and straight into the glazed eyes of children who died much too young. The usual calls for vengeance will rise from an enraged populace. And some of those who join in the shouting will decide to constructively demonstrate their anger towards the Israeli government in the coming weeks by blowing themselves, and Israeli civilians, into oblivion. This will instigate a parallel sequence of events on the Israeli side of the border, and will cause the shedding of more innocent blood. And the cycle of savagery will begin again.
In the end, empty apologies from Israel'and from Palestine'for the continued slaughter of innocents will not suffice any longer. If the people running both nations are truly decent and contrite, they will make their apologies count by renouncing violence in full and constructively acting to settle their differences, once and for all.
