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COMMENTARY
March 24, 2004
A moderate act
On the moral question whether it was right for the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to order the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin there is no difference from the question whether it would be right to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden co-founded Al Qaeda Yassin founded Hamas. These are organizations which exist for the express purpose of killing people; Qaeda being committed to killing "Crusaders and Zionists" plus bystanders; Hamas more specifically Jews plus bystanders. The question is not whether one should do it but how. On the tactical question -- why now? -- there can be a variety of views. We will see what the consequences will be. In the short run a great deal of excitement not only in the Palestinian territories but throughout the Arab world. Al Jazeera the Jihad-friendly satellite TV network based in Qatar has been running a poll of viewers in which they are asked whether Palestinian reprisals should be confined to Israel or "expanded". At the time of writing the results are breaking 61 to 39 per cent in favour of the more general conflagration. Note the poll's assumption that 100 per cent of voters will favour reprisals. But while the immediate excitement over the assassination may be intense it soon subsides. The Israelis are calculating that the advantages of disrupting the management of Hamas which actually delivers the terrorism outweigh the disadvantage of providing them with a recruitment tool. Most seasoned observers of the Middle East would guess they got it right. It is certainly the calculation the Bush administration has made in going after Qaeda's senior management; and it appears to be working -- preventing more terrorist hits than it inspires. The clich? about amplifying "the cycle of violence" immediately uttered by the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin and a Pavlovian chorus across Old Europe is beside the point. Sheikh Yassin was a one-man amplifier of the cycle of violence; and now he is dead. The Israelis calculate Sheikh Yassin cost them 377 dead and 2 076 maimed -- including only a handful in military uniform. He was known to personally order the hits and he ordered hundreds of them both through Hamas and affiliates; culminating in last week's attack on the Israeli port of Ashdod in which terrorists very nearly succeeded in blowing up large stores of toxic industrial chemicals. That was also the first successful "vengeance operation" (I use Al Jazeera's terminology) mounted from inside Gaza since the Israelis succeeded in fencing the territory -- a "heritage moment" in Hamas propaganda. Yassin is the reciprocal Israeli heritage moment. The Arab media are sceptical that Mr. Sharon will do the politically daring thing that he has pledged -- withdraw the Israeli presence from Gaza entirely. But he has a fairly good record of acting on such pledges and I would think we misunderstand his motivations if we assume he was merely lashing out to no sensible purpose. He has undertaken to withdraw from Gaza but doesn't want to turn it over to Hamas. Strange to say (and I can hear the guffaws of my numerous if inattentive leftwing readers) the assassination was a typically moderate act. Note he killed Sheikh Yassin and not Yasser Arafat though the latter is also up to his ears in innocent Israeli blood and the IDF know where to find him. The unbelievable truth is that Mr. Sharon is trying to advance the "peace process" by giving Arafat's Palestinian Administration a leg up on Hamas before their inevitable civil war. For despite all its butchery even Arafat 's Fatah is the slightly more accommodating party. The only thing that keeps Fatah and Hamas together is their common target of Israel; with Israel removed they become two scorpions in a bottle. There are big risks in weighing in so decisively but even bigger ones if Hamas succeeds in its ambition of ruling Gaza after the Israeli departure. The mistake almost everyone makes about Mr. Sharon is to believe the leftoid depiction of him as a bloodthirsty fanatic. He is in fact a pussycat; a product of multi-party electoral politics. He still has his eye on a practicable settlement one in which he now realizes Palestinians and Israelis will have to be separated by a wall. He is looking ahead to the sort of Palestinian leadership that is likely to emerge behind that wall. To which end he is and will be pruning Hamas and the most murderous other Jihadist cells. A truly aggressive Israel would need some other prime minister. And that is what might emerge if Mr. Sharon's calculations prove wrong. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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