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Let them be
martyrs! By Reuven Koret January 23, 2002 Nina Kardashov was joyfully celebrating her bat-mitzvah, the rite of passage to Jewish womanhood, with her friends and family. The band was playing, couples were dancing. The proud twelve-year-old, resplendent in her party dress, had just appeared on the stage. Then, as the amateur videos so horrifically showed, the Palestinian gunman starting shooting and people started dying, including Nina's grandfather and five other celebrants. An hour later, another celebration took place. In the Palestinian city of Tulkarm, hometown of the gunman, cars honked their horns, men shot in the air, strangers embraced in the streets and handed out candy. A loudspeaker announced the name of the latest martyr, he who so gloriously and courageously sacrificed his life for the greater Palestinian cause by gunning down defenseless Jews. Palestinian TV played a prerecorded video of the heroic shahid, proudly displaying his M-16 and his Koran. Among the first Israeli responses was the bombing of Palestinian Authority security facilities in Tulkarm, followed by blowing up the Ramallah broadcasting station of the Voice of Palestine, an incessant source of incitement to murder. Within hours it was back on the air. "The Voice of Palestine is in the hearts of the people," a spokesman said. Monday morning IDF tanks and troops descended on Tulkarm, searching house-to-house for terrorists and their weapons. Israel may find some of each, but they will not need to look far to find what is barely hidden in Palestinian hearts: hatred of Israelis, hatred of Jews. The desire to kill Jews, and support for the killers is at an all-time high. According to Palestinian polls, some 80% of those surveyed favor attacks on Israeli civilians. The number of volunteers for suicide bombings is at an all-time high. Hundreds of young men are waiting in line. That unquenchable desire to kill Israelis, bred in their schoolbooks and on their TV, encouraged in many cases by their parents, is not going away, no matter how many terrorists Israel captures and how many buildings or stations it destroys. The would-be martyrs, dressed in white hoods and wearing belts of mock explosives, lust for Jewish deaths, burn effigies of Israeli leaders, blow up cardboard busses, and burn down red-roofed construction-paper settlements in their public demonstration. Israel shares top billing with America as the enemy of Islam. Israel speaks of the need to arrest or eliminate terrorists defined as "ticking bombs" - those planning or executing bombings. But what to do with these thousands of beating, hating hearts? No fences we could build can separate us from them. Even if the long-deferred separation zone in Israel's vulnerable seam area - the area that separates cities like Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Nablus and Jenin from the cities of Israel's coast - is created, there is no sure-fire way to stop an Arab with murder in his heart from entering a pizzeria or a disco or a banquet hall, and opening fire with a rifle, or detonating an explosive device. So what are we to do? Let's start by listening. The Palestinians tell us they want to be martyrs for their cause. That need not be a problem. The suicide bomber who suffers a premature detonation is still a martyr whether he kills a Jew or not. It's his intentions that count. Even if he succeeds in killing only himself, he remains a shahid. In such a case, everyone benefits. Israel assists would-be martyrs to realize their ambitions more efficiently, helping them practice in the privacy of their own neighborhoods and clubs. Practice, in the case of a suicide bomber, makes perfect. There should be no moral qualms about helping the shahid in perfecting his technique, even if "work accidents" occasionally occur. Once an Islamic young man, fired with freedom-fighting fervor (and perhaps a vision of the seventy-two virgins who await him in paradise), vows to sacrifice his life, his death becomes to him a mere formality, an after-thought. He becomes a dead man walking. The question is not whether but where he explodes. Israel's goal must be to force Palestinians to confine their self-sacrifices to their own towns, preventing them from entering our midst with their ticking bombs and trigger fingers. Suicide is the martyr's wish and right. It is Israel's right to do everything to prevent them from committing murder, too. No one benefits more from this policy containment than Yasser Arafat, who declared this week that he will see Palestine established, one way or another, "martyred or alive." Until now, Arafat has been a master at proxy murder, sending others to kill, sending others to death. Now, at last, he vows to become a martyr himself, desperate calling for even more terrible waves of destruction, ensuring the martyrdom of his people after missing opportunity after opportunity to give them something to live for, in coexistence with Israel rather than in its place. Israel may not be able to prevent Arafat and his people from pursuing paradise in their own homes, mosques, and streets. The Palestinians celebrate death, their own and ours, in pursuit of their cause. We take no pleasure in their deaths, even if their elimination allows us and our people to live.
But pardon us if we decline the invitation to join them in their santimonious glorification of
martyrdom. We've been there, and done that. And we've learned along the way that the celebration
of victimhood, however self-sanctified and self-satisfying, brings only mourning and sorrow. Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
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