In response to this weekend’s suicide bombing in Israel — ostensibly a retaliation for the Israeli army’s missile attack that killed a Hamas leader and nine children, and the latest bloody act in a cycle of violence with no exit in sight — President Bush had this to say: “There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started, and we must not let them.”
Now, if the problem were “a few killers,” the solution would be simple, and it would be Ariel Sharon’s solution: Peace would be a straightforward matter of, in Bushanese, smoking ’em out and hunting ’em down. But Sharon and the Israeli army have been doing that for months now, and for all their effort, the bombings continue.
Perhaps at one time Israel was at war with a handful of militants, but it seems increasingly plain that what the Israelis now face is a mass movement, radicalized by years of privation, hopelessness, bad leadership and propaganda. Any plan to end the bombings and move towards peace that fails to take this reality into account seems doomed to me.
More valuable than most conventional journalism on this subject, I think, was this weekend’s heartbreaking reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on NPR’s This American Life (Available soon at the show’s Web site).
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