The Shehada Strike

The U.N. Security Council held a hastily scheduled meeting on the Middle East Wednesday night after it was requested by Saudi Arabia. They met to consider a proposed resolution circulated by Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians which condemns "the continued Israeli military aggression against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority." Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that Israel had failed its "legal and moral responsibility to take all measures to avoid the innocent loss of life."

The loudest criticism came from the Arab world. "We call for severe punishment for these crimes committed against Palestinian people," pontificated Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. The document doesn't mention attacks against Israelis. It would have passed, too, had not US Ambassador John Negroponte threatened a veto, saying that 'past resolutions are a more than adequate basis to guide efforts to achieve a negotiated solution.'

The United Nations has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than it has against all the rest of the member states combined. But for the US, there'd be one more. Instead, Negroponte forced the Security Council to consider two deadly attacks perpetrated by Palestinians last week, which left more than 10 Israelis dead. "These attacks are morally repugnant and rightfully of serious concern to the entire international community. We should question why they are not more often a focus of council attention."

A surface reading of the facts at issue put Israel in an indefensible situation. Who wants to defend the slaughter of children? Certainly not I. When I read the initial reports, I was stunned. It seemed they had gone much too far. My support of Israel is conditioned on two things. The first is that Israel must continue to exist. The Bible says so. The Bible does not say Israel will always be right. Indeed, the Bible is filled with examples of Israel being wrong. But the Bible says Israel will exist, must exist, and therefore, I lend my unqualified support to its right to exist. But Israel's right to exist is not the same thing as Israel's being right.

The second reason I support Israel is because Israel is a tiny representative democracy surrounded by a sea of autocratic theocracies and outright dictatorships dedicated to its destruction -- and by extrapolation, the destruction of its patron, the United States. I confess to preferring the mobocracy of democracy over autocracy, theocracy or thugocracy, and since I also am pretty fond of the United States, I admit my support is also self-serving in the here and now as well. Having said all that, I have not been feeling all that supportive of Israel over the last couple of days.

I felt the raid was ill conceived and reckless, but that was merely my gut reaction. However, after re-examining all the information and posing the acid test question, 'Who was the target?' the charge of 'war crime' is wildly inappropriate. A charge of poor judgement, perhaps. Maybe even poor intelligence. But not a war crime.

The UN Security Council met to condemn Israel roundly. If not for the presence of John Negroponte's veto pen, they would have passed yet another official resolution condemning the Jewish state, which would lend itself to giving the International Court its first victim, er, case. Israel used a precision guided one-ton bomb to hit Shehada. They wanted to make sure they got him. Shehada had already killed more than two hundred Israeli children.

And it could be argued that you could add to his count the ten children he was hiding behind when he took refuge in a crowded apartment building. A cynical argument, but at the same time, on balance, no more cynical than calling the collateral deaths of ten innocents a 'war crime.' It isn't like Shehada didn't know that he was a combatant in an ongoing war. He was the reason Israel used a precision guided weapon in the first place, it is important to remember.

After intelligence warnings of vulnerable Palestinian civilians caused Israel to pull the plug on eight prior attempts to kill Salah Shehadeh, the commander of the military wing of Hamas and one of its most extreme ideologues, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer ordered an air strike Monday night that obliterated the safe house that Shehadeh had chosen for the night. Going backwards, let's take a look at the man Israel killed on Monday night. Shehada is the leader of Hamas and the man who orchestrated Hamas' suicide campaign against Israel.

At Shehada's direction on June 18, a bus in Jerusalem was bombed. When the survivors tried to crawl to safety, they were systematically machine gunned by two Hamas terrorists dressed as Israeli soldiers. The toll was 19 killed, half of them children.

On May 17, Shehada sent a suicide bomber into a social club in the town of Rishon Letzion, killing 16 people and injuring more than 50.

On March 31, a Hamas bomber attacks restaurant in Haifa, northern Israel, killing himself and 14 Israeli Jews and Arabs. On the same day, another Hamas bomber kills himself and wounds four people in an attack on an office for paramedics at the Jewish settlement of Efrat, south of Bethlehem.

On March 27, a bomber walked into a Passover celebration dinner in Netanya. There were no possible targets except the families -- women and children. This bomber not only carried explosives, but also poison gas that failed to function properly. Thanks to the malfunctioning gas bomb, he "only" murdered 28 people, mostly women and children.

March 9: The Moment cafe in Jerusalem near Ariel Sharon's official residence - 11 killed - mostly children.

March 2: Nine people killed including two babies, and 57 injured after suicide bomb attack in an ultra-Orthodox area of Jerusalem.

On August 9 Shehada sent a suicide bomber against the Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem, killing fifteen people -- all of them women, children and elderly people, some of them Americans.

On June 1, Shehada's bombers attacked the Dolphinarium Disco, a nightclub popular with young teens. Twenty-one teenagers were killed, most of them of junior high school age.

The Palestinian Authority, in the times when they were pressured to condemn the attacks, always carefully quantify their condemnation, not to express regret at innocent lives lost, but instead to point out that such attacks are counterproductive to their aims.

In other words, deliberately and obviously targeting Israeli children for death is bad PR.

Contrast that to the outpouring of anguish among the Israeli public over the collateral deaths of the innocents.

Israel is at war with an enemy that deliberately targets its own children, yet it weeps when it accidentally kills the children of its enemy. Although the world says nothing when Palestinians seek out children in their homes for the express purpose of murdering them, it rises in righteous indignation to condemn Israel for the deaths of ten children, without ever once acknowledging there was also a military target -- Shehada.

Which brings us full circle. Was striking the apartment complex in Gaza a blunder? I think the international fallout that is still pelting Israel puts that question to rest.

Was it a war crime? Not according to the rules of engagement written by the people claiming victimhood. Israel didn't write those rules, and it clearly doesn't enjoy playing by them. That won't stop the 'war crimes' charge from sticking -- at least at the UN.

When it comes to Palestinians targeting Jewish children, there are no rules. When it comes to Israel targeting the ones who sent the killers, the rules aren't written until after the smoke has cleared. It's easier to blame Israel that way.

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