Jerusalem, January 31, 2002

Blame the Victim

REVIEW & OUTLOOK Wall Street Journal Europe, Jan.28/02

A close look at Israel's "cycle of violence."

First, there are the words that describe acts of horror. The "cycle of violence" is one commonplace; a CNN coinage, "attack and counterattack," is fast becoming another.

Then, there are the acts themselves, in their awful, but now-familiar regularity: the suicide bomb blast, the rush of police and ambulances, the official announcement of the death toll.

For the last 16 months, this has been Israel's reality. In Sunday's attack on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, the Palestinian suicide bomber, a woman this time, placed herself near a busy intersection at noon on a shopping day, when the street was full of innocents. The explosion, as she detonated the charges strapped to her body, was massive. Scores were wounded, at least one killed.

So it was also on Friday. A terrorist blew himself up in Tel Aviv, wounding two dozen noncombatants attempting to go quietly about their daily lives. Within hours, Israel responded, hitting military targets in Gaza and the West Bank, killing a Palestinian security officer. The Los Angeles Times chose this description of the Israeli response: "The F-16 airstrikes marked the latest escalation in an intensifying cycle of killing and revenge."

U.S. President George W. Bush seems to have begun to see it differently. In the wake of last week's attacks, Mr. Bush went so far as to say he was "extremely disappointed" in Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat. Vice President Dick Cheney reinforced the sentiment, allowing that Arafat might not be "100% committed" to peace. Talk about understatement.

Even as the Bush administration seems to be getting some clarity on the true state of play in the Middle East, however, the EU is showing every sign of moving deeper into the fever swamps. Yesterday it reiterated its full support for Arafat and came close to demanding, perversely, that Israel reimburse the EU for the damage it's done to buildings and structures built with EU funds. Given this divergence, a look behind the standard tropes of "peace process" and "cycle of violence" may offer some clarity.

The "cycle" in practice works like this: Palestinian terrorists conduct random, murderous attacks targeting high-density civilian populations -- public buses, pedestrian malls, shopping districts. The Israeli military pursues strikes against military or terrorist targets in response, attempting to disable terrorist networks that Arafat can't or won't interfere with.

In the one case, terrorists set out with malice aforethought to murder civilians. In the other, military operations are targeted against those known to be facilitating or sponsoring the terror. And, as President Bush said on Friday, any doubt that remained that the Palestinian Authority is facilitating terror at the highest levels was removed by he recent interception of the boatload of weapons and explosives bound for the Gaza Strip.

The attempt to draw a moral equivalence between the Palestinians' deliberate attempts to kill innocents and inspire terror and Israel's military responses to these attacks is not far different from describing the U.S. airstrikes on Afghanistan as "perpetuating the cycle of violence between al Qaeda and the United States." That cycle, of course, was started by the murder of 3,000 at the World Trade Center on September 11. But as we pointed out then, there is no equivalence between terrorist attacks designed to maximize the deaths of innocents and military strikes designed to limit the ability of terrorists to carry out future strikes. In these matters of life and death, the EU worries about damage to infrastructure.

The poverty of such comparisons was made painfully clear last week by a statement from Ahmed Abdel Rahman, secretary of the Palestinian cabinet, who blamed a recent Israeli raid on a Palestinian bomb factory in Nablus for the current spate of attacks. If one side is making the bombs (presumably destined to be strapped to suicidal terrorists) and the other side conducting raids to prevent their manufacture, there is little room to question who is in the right.

President Bush's recent statements are, if anything, too mild. Even former Israeli Premier Ehud Barak, long a harsh critic of Mr. Sharon, now calls Arafat a terrorist. If Israel and the Palestinian Authority are truly to be held to the same standard, then the talk of a "cycle of violence" and other phrases meant to equate Israeli self-defense with murderous terrorism have to be set aside. In that regard, Mr. Bush's statement, in showing that the U.S. is getting serious in applying its zero-tolerance for terrorism policy to the Israeli situation, can only be considered progress. So much the worse, then, that the EU has tacked in the opposite direction.