If you consume any form of news media, you’ve probably already heard mention of each of the following, maybe many times. I ask you to bear with me anyway. I have something to say at the end. If you’re not familiar with the information, I invite you to sigh with the rest of us.
A Palestinian suicide bomber runs into a banquet hall in a Natanya hotel. The ensuing explosion kills 25 Israelis. An 18-year-old Palestinian woman blows herself up in a Jerusalem grocery store, killing two patrons. Another suicide attack kills 14 in a Haifa restaurant.
Hundreds of Israeli tanks and troops enter the West Bank in response. In Ramallah, an Israeli sniper kills a 56-year-old Palestinian woman on her way home from the hospital. That same hospital later runs out of room in the morgue and resorts to burying bodies in a mass grave. One of those bodies belongs to a 21-year-old American citizen who died shielding her infant son from a hail of bullets.
In Bethlehem, an 80-year-old man is shot to death outside his home. The body lies rotting in the streets. Ambulances aren’t allowed to run, so many of the wounded bleed to death. A tank attack kills a 60-year-old woman and her son. Their family waits a day and a half for someone to pick up the bodies. Another tank attack, in Nablus, leaves a Palestinian girl dead inside her own home, the victim of a stray shell.
I imagine you’re thoroughly disgusted by now, but don’t stop reading just yet. I haven’t even gotten to the worst part. Everything listed above happened during one eight-day period in an area about the size of New Jersey.
The current Middle East crisis exists in a moral vacuum so devoid of decency that I am now officially ashamed to be human. And the more I think about it, the more ashamed I get. Have you ever peered through the scope of a rifle? It’s better than having a pair of binoculars. So how did that 56-year-old woman end up dead? Unless she had a beard, I find it hard to believe that the Israeli sniper mistook her for anything but a 56-year-old woman. Through the scope of his rifle he could probably see the expression on her face.
And the girl in Nablus — how did she die? Do people aim tanks at private residences? It seems like a couple of machine guns would do the trick. It could have been aimed at another building, perhaps a police station. But how does anyone, let alone a trained solder, miss a building with a tank? Whoever botched that shot literally couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Why, then, were they operating a giant, armored death machine?
The acts committed on the Palestinian side are no less revolting to the civilized palate. Blowing up one’s military adversaries is one thing; soldiers knowingly put themselves in life or death situations. Blowing up civilians is entirely another. Take a look at the two most successful bombings in the first paragraph. One happened in a restaurant, the other in a banquet hall. The suicide bombers chose communal dining areas as targets, places where friends and families gather to enjoy food and company. They weren’t hoping to catch an Israeli general or politician on lunch break. They wanted a large, civilian body count. That sounds more like “bloodlust” than political struggle.
I guess my only point here is to offend your sense of decency as mine has been offended (yes, I have a sense of decency). Israelis and Palestinians are not only ruining each other, they are doing the world a great disservice by displaying so openly those parts of humanity we would much rather hide.
E-mail columnist Aaron Rorick
at [email protected]. His opinions
do not necessarily reflect those of the Emerald.