For months now, critics of Israeli actions have liked to point out that
anti-terrorism is a tactic and not a strategy, that anti-terrorism alone
will not bring the region closer to peace. They have decried Israel's policy
of striking at Palestinians who are about to strike at them, calling these
killings "assassinations." The appellation is morally idiotic. Preemption is
a duty of self-defense. If somebody is coming to kill you, an old Jewish
adage teaches, kill him first. A government, in Israel and in any other
country, that did not preempt the killing of its own citizens would be a
profoundly delinquent government. That is how a government protects its
people: by being stronger and smarter and swifter than its people's enemies.
But the fact on the ground, again, is that the Palestinians are acting
viciously on their rage but the Israelis are not acting viciously on their
grief. The Palestinians, indeed, seem to have become intoxicated by their
violence. Their politics, if that is the word, has taken on a weird,
delusional quality. When the Israeli tanks rolled out of Jenin after their
brief show of force, Palestinians in Jenin (as Clyde Haberman reported in
The New York Times) described it as a "retreat." They attributed it to their
own "heroic resistance," when there was no physical evidence of gunfire.
They screamed that the Israelis had killed two or three people, when nobody
died. They fumed that the Israelis had taken 70 Palestinians with them, when
none were missing. People cannot have a grasp of peace when they do not have
a grasp of reality.
Meanwhile something very different happened in Ramallah. In the Israeli air
raid on the Palestinian police station, two bombs were dropped. One
exploded, but the other did not. An Israeli military official told The
Jerusalem Post what happened next: "In order to prevent innocent people from
getting hurt, the IDF notified the Palestinian Authority of the unexploded
bomb through its liaison officers." After a Palestinian bomb that killed
innocent people in Jerusalem, then, the Israelis warned the Palestinians of
a bomb that might kill innocent people in Ramallah. The political situation
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may not be clear, but the same cannot be
said about the moral situation.