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How Should Critics of Israel Relate to Indiscriminate Palestinian Terror?

[Ha'aretz] Alexander Yakobson - Some minimize the ill effects of the Palestinian "armed struggle," disparaging it as a display with nothing much to it, certainly not something that can threaten Israel or justify harsh steps that might be justified if a real threat were involved. Such descriptions avoid taking a clear moral stand against the intentional murder of civilians by the Palestinian terror groups - murder that is an inseparable and central part of their fighting method. During the second intifada, the Palestinian armed struggle killed more than 1,000 Israelis - more than the number of Israelis killed in the first and second Lebanon wars together, or in the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition or the Sinai Campaign. How should a person whose attitude toward Israel is critical or negative relate to indiscriminate Palestinian terror? Perhaps we may take the example of Marek Edelman, the Bundist, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who died recently. All his life he was a staunch opponent of Zionism and a harsh critic of Israel and its policies. A few years ago he wrote an open letter to the Palestinian "partisans" - a name that angered many. Edelman told them that murdering civilians was a cruel crime that could not be justified under any circumstances. Here was an ideological adversary of Zionism who takes a truly universal and moral stand. He was not influenced by the fashionable theory that "partisans" may do anything they want, and we must not censure any cruel act they commit because they are weak and oppressed.
2009-10-09 06:00:00
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