IP: On the way to school -- Ha'aretz editorial 25Nov01

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2001 11:28:29 -0500
> Subject: On the way to school -- Ha'aretz editorial 25Nov01
> From: Jan Ziff <janziff () soundbytesradio com>
> To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
> Dave:
>
> I thought Ip-ers might find this interesting. Ha aretz has been described 
> as Israel s New York Times, it s certainly the most influential Israeli daily.
>
> Jan Ziff
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Ha aretz
>
> Israel's Leading Newspaper
> Sunday, November 25, 2001 Kislev 10, 5762 Israel Time: 05:34 (GMT+2)
>
> On the way to school
> By Gideon Levy
>
> http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=98327&contrassID=
> 2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
>
>
> Five children get up in the morning and leave home for school. Dressed in
> their school uniforms, carrying a school bag in which is a pencil-case, they
> cross an open field at the end of their neighborhood, not far from their
> house. Suddenly there is a huge explosion. All five are killed.
>
> At first the circumstances are not clear. Maybe the Israelis were shelling
> the area - the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit in the area fired from tanks
> a few days earlier, wounding a mother and her two children. Maybe some
> ammunition fell, maybe it was a land mine.
>
> Israel isn't claiming it was a so-called "work accident" - a terrorist
> blowing himself up while arming a bomb - because the dead are children. Nor
> can Israel claim that the victims were on their way to perpetrate a
> terrorist attack, as the IDF usually does without anyone being able to check
> it out.
>
> Then the picture becomes clearer - the five children were apparently killed
> by a bomb left at the site by the IDF. At first the IDF spokesman declines
> to comment, even though it's pretty obvious the IDF knows very well what
> caused the death of the children. The horrific pictures are screened around
> the world.
>
> The five children were all from the Al Astel family - Mohammed, 14, Omar,
> 13, Anis, 11, Mohammed-Suleiman, 11, and Akram, 6, left their home in the
> al-Star al-Arabi neighborhood of Khan Yunis refugee camp, to go to school.
> There is no need to dwell at length in the tragedy of their death. Their
> blood-drenched school bags and books tell the whole story.
>
> Five children killed is an intolerable price, the fruit of the policy
> according to which Israel sets itself very loose limits in its war against
> Palestinian violence. But not everything is permitted, not even in the war
> against terrorism, or against the mortars that are trained on IDF camps and
> on the settlements at the extremity of the Gaza Strip.
>
> One thing that's not permitted, for example, is to plant explosive devices
> on a path used by children on the way to school. That has to be beyond the
> pale, utterly forbidden, without ifs or buts, because of the danger posed to
> civilians by the bombs. Whereas in the West Bank Israel seems to have set
> itself a few red lines, the impression is that in the war to defend the
> vacuous settlements in the Gaza Strip it has abandoned all restraint. In
> Gaza, far from the eyes of the Israeli media, the game has different rules.
> The explosive devices Israel has planted there is proof of that. After the
> liquidations, the arrests without trial, the shelling of homes and the
> wholesale kidnappings, now come the bombs, which don't distinguish between
> children and terrorists.
>
> On the slippery slope that Israel's moral character is sliding irreparably,
> this is a new nadir. A state places explosive charges where children are
> likely to pass and then claims that only the other side practices terrorism?
> We have to admit that an act of this kind can be considered an act of
> terrorism, because it strikes at the innocent and doesn't discriminate
> between the victims, even if the intention was not to kill children and even
> if the goal was the war on terrorism.
>
> No one set out to kill five children, but that can no longer change very
> much. It's difficult to go on and believe you're right when 160 children and
> youngsters below the age of 18 - 72 of them below the age of 15 - have been
> killed in the past year alone. The fact that the IDF didn't do enough to
> prevent their being killed is almost as grave as the intention to kill them.
>
> Udai Draj, 8, was shot in his children's room in Ramallah; Majed Jalad, 5,
> was shot while traveling in his grandfather's car, near Ramallah; Aiman
> Haju, 3 months old, was killed in her grandmother's house in Khan Yunis by
> an IDF tank shell shortly after her mother had finished breast feeding her,
> not far from the place where the five school children were killed on
> Thursday. Amani Genaim, one year and nine months old, was shot in the head
> at El Khader, near Bethlehem.
>
> Israel did not intend to shoot these children and infants, but it cannot
> shake off its heavy responsibility for what happened to them. The killing of
> the five children in Khan Yunis must now become the Kafr Kana of the war in
> the Gaza Strip - in 1996, during Operation Grapes of Wrath, IDF gunners
> accidentally killed about 100 civilians in the village of Kafr Kana.
>
> Israel must immediately accept responsibility for the killing, if it was
> indeed caused by an explosive device planted by our soldiers, apologize and
> not only express its regret, as the defense minister rightly did, but offer
> to compensate the bereaved family - and above all, to stop using
> unacceptable, pernicious methods like this.
>
> The way to protect the settlers of Ganei Tal and Netzer Hazani is to
> evacuate them immediately. The war on terrorism has to be fought within red
> lines that must on no account be crossed. And Israel must direct the demand
> for a cease-fire and for a cessation of terrorism not only at the
> Palestinians but, to a certain degree, to itself, too.


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