The Boys in the Cave
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
The Boys in the Cave Murder by stoning, death by shrapnel: The fallacy of moral equivalence. BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON MAY 9, two 14-year-old Israeli boys who had been playing hooky from school...
...Tragedy all around...
...When the "Engineer," the terrorist behind a string of deadly suicide bombings, was assassinated, Arafat declared him a martyr and national hero...
...Israel was trying to silence the mortars...
...Army would not cross into Tijuana to silence them...
...Both sides...
...Fourteen-year-old boys are neither spies nor soldiers...
...As practiced today in the Middle East, it remains so...
...What could the story be this week...
...I hate the Israelis," declared Palestinian first lady Suha Arafat only two weeks ago...
...There is a difference, an immense moral difference, between this kind of unintentional death and what happened to those two Israeli boys...
...They were not deliberately sought out by a terrorist on a mission...
...When that child in Gaza was accidentally killed by Israeli gunfire, Prime Minister Sharon immediately expressed his regrets and apologized...
...Yet they were bludgeoned to death with stones, their blood then dabbed on the walls of the cave...
...Or as CNN summarized it, "In a region seemingly numb to violence, the deaths of both Palestinian and Israeli youngsters has struck nerves on both sides of the conflict...
...BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON MAY 9, two 14-year-old Israeli boys who had been playing hooky from school and hiking on the West Bank were found in a cave battered to death and mutilated...
...What of the lynching of the two boys...
...That hatred is in the air Palestinians breathe...
...The deaths of children have enraged both sides," reported USA Today...
...It is savagery so grotesque that it might not have been believed had we not all seen that picture last fall on the cover of Time of the Palestinian, having just beaten to death the two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, exultantly holding out his blood-stained hands to the crowd in a gesture of triumph...
...If every Arab did this, it would be the end of the Jews...
...Consider these two incidents...
...For years Arafat's mini-policestate has been feeding his people the rawest Jew-hatred since the Third Reich...
...In Western news reports, this horror was not permitted to stand alone...
...What happened in that cave was murder as an end in itself...
...It is no mystery where the Palestinians have learned it...
...It was routinely coupled with a recent Palestinian death...
...When Baruch Goldstein committed a massacre of Palestinians in Hebron, he was vilified by every major leader in Israel...
...The deaths came two days after a 4Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...When practiced during the Cold War, moral equivalence (between East and West) was a form of moral obtuseness...
...Keep that up for years, and you have raised a generation prepared— no, designed—to bathe in the blood of 14-year-old boys...
...This is not from crackpots...
...month-old Palestinian baby girl was killed by Israeli tank fire and further roiled emotions in a week of spiral-ing violence that neither side seems able to control," reported the New York Times the next day...
...On the contrary...
...The Palestinians then made up the story that the Israelis were suspected undercover agents...
...People are not born with blood-lust...
...This is not even terrorism...
...Israeli tanks did not gratuitously go hunting for babies in Gaza...
...On the 50th anniversary of independence, Israel TV produced a historical series so sympathetic to the Palestinians as to raise the question whether Israel had taken sympathy to the point of self-flagellation...
...His name became anathema to Jews everywhere...
...The plain fact is that Israelis are not raised on bloodlust...
...From the 1972 Munich massacre of Israel's Olympic athletes to the suicide bombers of today, the world has long since grown accustomed to Palestinian terrorism...
...The Israeli firings in Gaza were not, as the reader might presume, unprovoked...
...They learn it...
...This is from the highest level of the leadership among Israel's neighbors...
...The coupling was invariable...
...And it is entirely wrong...
...This is not war...
...These boys were not targets...
...In television, radio, newspapers, and textbooks, Arafat has created the psychic infrastructure that sustains his endless war on Israel— and gives us the barbarism in the cave...
...Israelis had been attacked by mortar rounds fired from Palestinian territory...
...They are not taught to hate Arabs...
...The presumption of moral equivalence between these two events— and, by implication, between the two sides—is by now entirely characteristic of the Western view of the fighting...
...Clearly, what happened in Gaza was the inadvertent death of an infant in the urban warfare the Palestinians launched eight months ago...
...It is the difference between tragedy and infamy...
...Utter silence from Yasser Arafat...
...And then were torn to pieces...
...Such deaths happen in every instance of urban warfare, from the post-Normandy fighting in the villages of France in World War II to the more recent NATO bombing of Serbia...
...If, say, Zapatista guerrillas were launching mortars into San Diego, is it conceivable that the U.S...
...The most chilling part of this story is that the boys were merely chanced upon...
...Terrorism at least has a perverse logic: It is murder as a means to some political end...
...But even ter-rorism—the deliberate murder of innocents—pales beside what happened to those two boys...
...His defense minister then said on television: "When I see a Jew before me, I kill him...
...A few days later, Syrian president Bashar Assad—in the presence of the pope, no less—accused the Jews of trying "to kill the principle of religions in the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and in the same way with which they tried to kill the Prophet Muhammad...
...Last year, two Israeli reservists lost their way and strayed into Ramallah, where they were lynched by a frenzied mob...
...This is not from the political fringes...
...This is bloodlust...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 35
