Extreme prejudice

Israel has pushed its policy of assassinating inimical Palestinians too far, says Kesava Menon.

LAST WEEK Israel pushed its policy of assassinating inimical Palestinians so far down the scale of the tolerable that it threatened to tip beyond the point where equilibrium could be restored. Till it launched a helicopter gunship attack on Tuesday Israel had, with one singular exception, targeted Palestinian militants who were directly involved in terrorist activities. By killing two Hamas political leaders in that Tuesday attack Israel threw open the question whether it would begin targetting personalities higher up in the Palestinian leadership.

On Tuesday, an Israeli Apache helicopter gunship suddenly popped up in the sky above the West Bank town of Nablus and fired missiles through two third-floor windows of a five-storey building. The room in which the missiles exploded housed a research and media outreach centre that was run by a Hamas activist but reportedly not an official branch of the Islamic movement. Jamal Mansour, the person who ran the study centre, his brother, Omar Mansour, another leading Hamas activist of Nablus, Jamal Salim, a journalist and two other Hamas members were killed in the explosion. Two young brothers, aged seven and ten, who were waiting for their parents on the pavement outside the building were also killed in the explosion.

Well over 500 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have died in the clashes raging for the past ten months. There have been a number of particularly horrendous incidents, including the deaths of children on both sides, in the course of the random fire-fights, suicide bomb attacks, sniper attacks, rioting, shelling and so forth that has occurred almost on a daily basis in this period. For all that, a different kind of ethical question has been raised by Israel's policy of assassinating or liquidating Palestinians who it believed had carried out, or were planning to carry out, terrorist strikes. About 40 Palestinians are believed to have killed through this type of action.

In the defence it has put up following near unanimous international condemnation of the Nablus incident, Israel has tried to show that the basic thrust of its policy remains unchanged. The Foreign Minister, Mr. Shimon Peres, took offence at the terms `liquidation' and `assassination' being applied to such acts. Fine-tuning Israel's argument that such actions were measures of self-defence, Mr. Peres said it would be inappropriate to apply such terms to ``interception operations'' that Israel was carrying out against suicide attackers. The ethical question is whether such extra-judicial killings can be carried out especially when neither side has formally declared that it is at war with the other.

Such ethical questions remain to be answered. But so does the question whether suicide bomb attacks on innocent civilians is justifiable on any grounds whatsoever. That leads on to the counter-question whether people living under conditions of occupation are forced into such levels of despair that they see no point in living and decide that they will take people who are on the side of the occupying force along with them when they go to the great beyond.

Easier to analyse are the political questions thrown up by such incidents, especially the operation that was carried out in Nablus. Except for the one case where it killed a Fatah- affiliated physician in the early days of the current intifada, Israel had largely `intercepted' (`with extreme prejudice' as spy thrillers would have it) activists who were directly involved in suicide bomb attacks. The most famous of these, though his death occurred a few years ago and well before the start of the intifada, was the `Engineer' Yahya Ayyash who was reputedly the top expert at bomb-making. Even Israel does not argue that those killed in Nablus had anything to do with the technical side of suicide missions.

What Israel does say is that Jamal Mansour had a big role in selecting would-be suicide bombers, in indoctrinating them and in choosing the time and site of suicide bomb attacks. This is tricky ground. Hamas of course makes no bones about its total rejection of Israel and the extolling of martyrdom is a very important component of its ideology. Israel's argument also appears to be that Jamal Mansour, as a rising political star of Hamas, had the capacity to calculate how to make a terrorist strike achieve the most political value. There are, however, several problems in following this chain of argument.

For one, Hamas has been quite careful about keeping those involved in its political arm in a markedly different compartment from those active in its military arm, the Izzedine al Qassam Brigade. Till Mansour was killed, there had been word from Israel that he straddled the line between the political and military wings. This is all the more peculiar since Mansour was apparently pretty well known for his political activities in the Nablus area. (In the past he has been jailed on political grounds by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority and he was among the 400 activists whom Israel had deported across the Lebanese border in 1992). The office in which the explosion took place reportedly does not function in a clandestine fashion and is under observation all the time from an Israeli military post on a hill- side near Nablus.

If Israel feels itself justified in killing a political activist who was supposedly directly involved in terrorist strikes, then where will it draw the line. At various points in time, it has accused the entire Palestinian leadership including Mr. Yasser Arafat of being connected with terrorist activity.

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