Death in the Heart of Jerusalem

Edna Yaghi’s Column

The human bomb that set himself off on Thursday, August 9 in a crowded Jerusalem restaurant during the busy lunch hour came as no surprise. After nearly a year of political assassinations, shooting children at random, blowing up homes, demolishing houses, uprooting trees, closures, curfews, isolating one Palestinian area from another, starving and economically strangulating the Palestinians, Israelis could expect little else.

Perhaps it is just what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon really wants. He kills off Palestinians right and left, he brutalizes them, he makes life as miserable as he can for them knowing full well that there are young Palestinian men seething with anger who are willing to die so that the rest of Palestine can be free.

Once these human bombs blow themselves up taking as many Israelis as they can with them, then Sharon finds his excuse to wage an even greater war against the civilian Palestinian population. When his war escalates, Sharon thinks he can get away with more evil and take away more of the Palestinians’ human and inalienable rights from them. He knows full well that American President George Bush is an idiot without an ounce of intelligence and he also knows that the Arab leaders are impotent and have no desire to stop the carnage being waged against the Palestinians.

It really makes no sense that Palestinians must die and be brutalized by a people who have no business being there on their land in the first place. Since all Jews came from some place else, like Europe, Russia, or America, it makes no sense that they are taking away a country not their own and annihilating the indigenous inhabitants at the same time.

Of course the Israeli war state is supported and defended by the American government. How ironic that the Americans who once struggled so valiantly for their own freedom are so ready to criticize the Palestinians in their own fight for liberty and the Americans even condone the way the Israelis take more land and kill more Palestinians.

Though Bush expresses his outrage at the Palestinian human bombs, he is silent about the terror that is constantly inflicted on the Palestinian civilian population. He said about the Jerusalem bombing, “The deliberate murder of innocent civilians is abhorrent to all.”

But where was Bush when an Israeli helicopter rocket attack earlier this month in the West Bank city of Nablus killed 6 Hamas members and two children? Such indiscriminate bombings only increase the chances of Palestinians risking their lives to liberate their people. Where has Bush been when more than 500 Palestinians have been killed? And where has he been when more than 13,000 have been injured, many of them permanently? And where is he when the Palestinians are losing between $7 million to $10 million a day because of Israeli oppression?

Where was Bush when Israelis have beaten Palestinians to death? How does he expect the Palestinians to go on suffering without fighting back?

I watched the news yesterday about what happened in Jerusalem. I hate to see anyone hurt. I hate to see anyone killed. But as Israelis have tears to cry for themselves and their loved ones, so do the Palestinians. When Palestinian mothers lose their children no one hears them cry or sees their tears and no one cares. When Palestinian children are orphaned because of Apache helicopters bombing their fathers by remote control, no one is concerned.

The whole world watches as Palestinians die every day. The whole world does nothing. The Arab leaders could not care less and they are too far immersed in their useless lives to even call for a summit. They are blinded by their own greed and self-complacency. And as long as this vast sea of indifference continues and as long as Sharon practices his latest form of murder and oppression, then there will be human bombs that will go off at any moment and at any place. No Israeli is safe.