Who Is to Blame for Grief on a Beach?

Who Is to Blame for Grief on a Beach?
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25

It was another one of those pictures that goes instantly around the world. A
young Palestinian, wailing in wretched sorrow, grieving over her dead
father, stepmother and five siblings who had been killed by an explosion on
a Gaza beach. Then came the blame. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas (he's the moderate) immediately called the killings an act of Israeli
"genocide" and, to dramatize the crime, legally adopted the bereaved girl.

The sensational coverage and sensational charges raise the obvious question:
Why would Israel deliberately shell a peaceful family on a beach?

The Israeli government, clumsy as ever, seemed to semi-apologize by
expressing regret about the deaths, implying that perhaps they had been
caused by an errant Israeli shell targeting a Palestinian rocket base. But
then, a few days later, an army investigation concluded that it was not
Israel's doing at all.

First, because the shrapnel taken from the victims (treated at Israeli
hospitals -- some "genocide") were not the ordnance used in Israeli
artillery. Second, because aerial photography revealed no crater that could
have been caused by Israeli artillery. And, third, because Israel could
account for five of the six shells it launched at the rocket base nearby,
and the missing one had been launched at least five minutes before the one
that killed the family.

An expert at a local chapter of a human rights group disputes the Israeli
claims. Okay. Let's concede for the sake of argument that the question of
whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious
question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are
setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel -- and placing them 400 yards
from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?

Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians' classic and cowardly
human-shield tactic -- attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding
behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists -- and the
Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate
unmolested -- it's a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill
innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it's another success in the
terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel's preventive and deterrent
attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the
iconic "Israeli massacre" picture makes the front page of the New York
Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.
But there is an even larger question not asked. Whether the rocket bases are
near civilian beaches or in remote areas, why are the Gazans launching any
rockets at Israel in the first place -- about 1,000 in the past year?

To get Israel to remove its settlers, end the occupation and let the
Palestinians achieve dignity and independence? But Israel did exactly that
in Gaza last year. It completely evacuated Gaza, dismantled all its military
installations, removed its soldiers, destroyed all Israeli settlements and
expelled all 7,000 Israeli settlers. Israel then declared the line that
separates Israel from Gaza to be an international frontier. Gaza became the
first independent Palestinian territory ever.

And what have the Palestinians done with this independence, this judenrein
territory under the Palestinians' control? They have used their freedom to
launch rockets at civilians in nearby Israeli towns.

Why? Because the Palestinians prefer victimhood to statehood. They have
demonstrated that for 60 years, beginning with their rejection of the United
Nations decision to establish a Palestinian state in 1947 because it would
have also created a small Jewish state next door. They declared war instead.

Half a century later, at the Camp David summit with President Bill Clinton,
Israel renewed the offer of a Palestinian state -- with its capital in
Jerusalem, with not a single Jewish settler remaining in Palestine, and on a
contiguous territory encompassing 95 percent of the West Bank (Israel making
up the other 5 percent with pieces of Israel proper).
The Palestinian answer? War again -- Yasser Arafat's terror war, aka the
second intifada, which killed a thousand Jews.

This embrace of victimhood, of martyrdom, of blood and suffering, is the
Palestinian disease. They are offered an independent state. They are given
all of Gaza. And they respond with rocket attacks into peaceful Israeli
towns -- in pre-1967 Israel proper, mind you.

What can Israel do but try to take out those rocket bases and their crews?
What would the United States do if rockets were raining into San Diego from
across the border with Mexico?

Now look again at that terrible photograph and ask yourself: Who is
responsible for the heart-rending grief of that poor Palestinian girl?

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