My friend Ellen sent me a copy of this article by Martin Peretz, which I hadn't seen before. I think it's the best response to the brouhaha over the assassination of Salah Shehada I've seen so far.
Israelis are now engaged in a process of examination and self-recrimination: How could they not have known that a big bomb, however "smart," would cause collateral casualties? And why was Israeli intelligence so wrong in thinking that this operation could be carried out with pinpoint accuracy? I do not know the answers. But I am proud that Israelis pose such painful and perplexing questions to themselves, professionally and communally, and that they insist their government protect them while also protecting--as their military rules command them--adversary civilians, "their lives, bodies, dignity, and property." Many outside Israel, of course, are eagerly asking the same questions about the attack. But too few acknowledge the basic fact that Shehada did not have an idle mind nor idle hands and that every additional hour he lived he was preparing another enormity against innocent life. This is the difference between the Israeli and the Palestinian ways of war. In fact, the Palestinian polity's distinct contribution to world politics--from Arafat almost four decades ago until today, from Munich to the bombing in the old Tel Aviv bus station last week--is the utter routinization of the savage killing of innocents, "the banality of evil" in another era. And Shehada was the ultimate routinizer. He was an exemplar of the Palestinian political tradition, not an exception to it. Which is why he enjoyed so much popular support. The rage in the funeral streets of Gaza would have been just as great had he been the only casualty of the bomb.....To Shehada one can attribute literally dozens of successful mass atrocities and hundreds of innocent dead. Shehada had been atop Israel's most-wanted list for two years, and Israeli interlocutors had pleaded again and again with Yasir Arafat's men that this master terrorist be arrested--which, of course, he was not. At least eight times the Israelis had aborted operations meant to assassinate him, each time in order not to endanger Palestinian noncombatants. The last aborted attempt occurred the day before Shehada died.
Peretz is right. Most of us have done some serious agonizing over the unintended loss of life that occurred as a result of taking Shehada out. Was the bomb too big? Was the intelligence sloppy? Why couldn't it have been avoided? All good questions, but Peretz puts the prime focus back where it belongs. And he reminds us in the process where our values and our strengths, as well as our priorities, lie.
