Abdel Aziz Rantisi was an implacable rejectionist of Israeli (and indeed Jewish) existence. If Hamas apologists termed Yassin "contemplative," Rantisi was a man of unmitigated hatred. He was a pediatrician the way Karadzic is a psychiatrist and Josef Mengele was a geneticist - the racist, genocidal kind. Nobody would defend Ratisi as a mere "spiritual leader."
The world community has quickly moved to condemn the killing of Rantisi, characterizing it as a violation of "international law." (As usual, the term "international law" is used in a general sense, apparently synonymous with the less diplomatic but more precise "it's all fucked up, man." )
I think Israel, for starters, should send its ambassadors to the foreign ministers of these dissenting countries and ask them to be more specific: what tractate to which Israel is a signing party, has been violated? Under what precedent is this opinion being formed? What preponderance of experts in international law consent to this opinion?
I'm asking around myself, but in the meantime I'm going to assume that there's nothing to this "violation of international law" argument. It's just a sleight of hand to make the criticism seem more "objective," somehow.
So, what other reasons are there for criticizing Israel?
First, let's stipulate that killing someone in particular is nasty business. It's one thing that soldiers die because they put themselves in harm's way and had bad luck. It's tragic but somehow unavoidable that random bystanders are killed in war. But to find one particular person and kill him makes it all so much more personal, especially at a time when judicial homicide is falling out of favor most places in the world. So it's only natural that the killing of Rantisi makes us uneasy, to say the least.
We are often uneasy (or worse) about things that we nevertheless have to do. So what else is there? There are moral and political objections of various kinds. Some are stronger than others, but none are particularly persuasive.
Many commentators argued, when Yassin was killed, that this would only make things worse. The Arab street would erupt, making it easier to recruit and motivate terrorist operatives. They also felt that such methods made the conflict that much more violent because Israel had broken some kind of code of conduct. All bets were off when Israel did this sort of thing. One Norwegian researcher fears that this will "radicalize" Hamas.
This argument fails to take into account the overwhelming sense among Israelis that Palestinian terrorist organizations have long since given up any pretense of scruples. Hamas has promised to avenge Rantisi's death "in kind," which is to say they want to kill Sharon. But who would honestly believe that Hamas wouldn't have killed Sharon or any member of the Israeli cabinet, if they had the chance? The truth is that Hamas, PIJ, and Fatah/"Martyr Brigade" are pretty much as extreme as they're going to get. Their methods - murdering random Israeli civilians - are not heroic or even particularly effective. They are methods of last resort.
Then there's the moral argument: it's wrong to kill people with premeditation. Yediot Aharanot (toh to the Israeli MFA for editorial summaries) writes: "it can not be that those who dispatch others on suicide attacks will be able to sleep peacefully in their beds... if eliminating terrorists on the way to an attack is justified, then eliminating the commander and the inciter who dispatched the terrorist on his way is justified seven times over."
You simply can't say that it's wrong to kill someone like Rantisi without considering the wrongness of letting someone like that live and continue murdering innocent people. And if you want to argue that any leader of Hamas will in equal measure dispatch death cult bombers, you're making the argument for Israel: it makes perfect sense to decapitate Hamas.
The awful truth is that European leaders are scared shitless of Hamas. They know that their governments wouldn'd survive a terrorist attack of the type Israel experiences on a regular basis, and that a series would cripple their societies, bring their economies to a standstill, and create an anti-Arab popular opinion that would get ugly, fast. The more Israel prevents successful attacks against her citizens, the more likely it is that Hamas would look for other targets. That's what's behind these objections - the strategy of containing the conflict, even at the expense of Israeli and Palestinian lives.
I AM ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS AT SHARON FOR NOT KILLING YASSIN AND RANTISI SOONER. EVERYTIME I WOULD SEE RANTISI IN THE NEWS--USUALLY GLOATING OVER A FIENDISH MASS MURDER AND PROMISING MORE--I WOULD WONDER "WHY IS THIS PERSON ALIVE? WHY DO THE ISRAELIS ALLOW THIS MURDERER TO LIVE AND BREATHE?"
Posted by: ERIC | May 01, 2004 at 02:34 PM