By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Good sense triumphs, at last: Israel has decided to abandon the policy of retaliatory house-demolishing in Palestine. That ugly process worked like this: a sixteen-year-old kid gets suckered into the suicide-bomber syndrome. Although his father, mother and all his siblings are apolitical, the family house is bulldozed. Over the years there were many other security-related excuses for reducing whole districts of Palestinian housing to rubble.
Obviously the Israeli bulldozer dispatchers never believed that such a tough love policy would convert a homeless family and all their friends, relatives and neighbors into Israel boosters. They couldn’t be that stupid.
But house-razing is a terrific way to accomplish ethnic cleansing, to clear the land for more Israeli settlement. Get rid of the beautiful old stone houses! Get rid of those land-greedy old olive groves! Like the Afghan Taliban destroying the famous ancient Buddhist sculpture in Bamiyan, get rid of as much guilt-inducing physical evidence of Palestinian history and culture as possible!
Yasir Arafat played into this policy, as did many of his rivals, who are still on the scene. He would and they will "save" Palestine by getting it destroyed, stone by stone.
However, anyone sensible could see that the mutual eye-for-an-eye policy was a lose-lose proposition. The Palestinians weren’t cowed, and Israel was having a hard time retaining its hold on the moral high ground, although none but the ruthless righteous condone the killing of ordinary shoppers or school bus riders or people taking tea at a café. Palestinian violence had been indiscriminate, but the response had been disproportionate.
So innocents were suffering on both sides. Even the notorious fence hadn’t stopped all the killing. Kudos go to Ariel Sharon for deciding to remove settlements from Gaza. But the idea of razing abandoned settler homes is a bad one, for all the reasons pointed out by Walter Isaacson in his op-ed piece in the Times on February 18. It’s good housing. A scorched-earth approach to pulling out of Gaza will cancel out the good will generated by the policy itself.
Let the new policy be a-house-for-a-house, then, and let there be no more flirting with the notion of collective guilt. It’s too reminiscent of the times when Jews were killed just because they were Jews. Palestinians, too, deserve to be judged on the basis of what they have actually done, not because they have relatives who are guilty of crimes, even murder.