THE shock and revulsion with which most people, including world leaders, reacted to the carnage that destroyed the lives of 20 young Israelis near a beach in Tel Aviv paradoxically may have created a precious opportunity to halt the dizzying descent into madness that is occurring in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. This latest opportunity may well disappear, as so many previous ones did, in a matter of days, if not hours, because no one in the Middle East ever seems to learn anything from past disasters. Resistance to occupation is indeed a Palestinian right, while terrorism is an abomination that discredits the Palestinian cause. Like the Palestinians, Americans themselves exercised the right to free themselves from occupation in 1776, for reasons probably less compelling than those Palestinians face. But they did not seek to achieve their freedom by blowing up innocent civilians in London.
Terrorism is also ineffective.
What this latest Hamas outrage has accomplished is to induce international opinion to accept an Israeli scorched-earth retaliation that could well set back the Palestinian cause 50 to 100 years. Of course, the consequence of such unrestrained vengeance might well have devastating effects on Israel's future as well, but that, one would like to believe, could hardly serve as consolation for the Palestinians. If the current hiatus holds but does not lead to a meaningful political change in Israel's intolerable occupation of the Palestinians, Arafat should heed the voices of his own Palestinian community that have been urging that the intifada be replaced with an extensive campaign of nonviolent resistance. Such nonviolent resistance is far more likely to succeed with Israel's public and to gain the support of the international community than the depredations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose intoxication with the slaughter of innocents is seen in the West as representative of the feelings of all Arabs and of Islam, thus reinforcing their most shallow stereotypes. He learned quickly it is a deception the United States would largely accommodate.