Dangerous Game: An Israeli boy collects shrapnel after a Grad rocket was fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2011 in Beer Sheba, Israel. The rocket injured a 56-year-old man and comes a day after Israeli shell struck a home in Shejaiya on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City killing at least four Gazans. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
The calm of the non-brave (as opposed to the "peace of the Brave," as Yasser Arafat called his tenuous peace deal with Israel and Yitzhak Rabin in 1993) was bound to end in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies. So it has.
The calm was not based on much more than coincidental fortunes and outright fears. The West Bank has been doing better economically, thanks to billions of dollars pouring in from the European Union and the United States, and the Palestinian Authority has been attempting to keep the lid on discontent within its own ranks, chiefly Palestinians who have discovered that the Authority is not much more than a care-taking, corrupt group of man and a few women whose best, and only, attribute is that they're not Hamas.
Meanwhile, Israel and its heedless prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have carried on building illegal "settlements" in the West Bank and Jerusalem, slowly, simmeringly keeping Palestinians' rage just this side of explosive. On March 12, a rabbi, his wife, their 11-year-old son, their 4-year-old son and a 30-month-old baby were stabbed to death in their settler home in Itamar, in the West Bank, triggering a manhunt by Israeli forces in nearby villages where every male Palestinian over 15 was detained and fingerprinted. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, called the murders "abominable, inhuman and immoral," but those are the words of a man whose moral authority is the equivalent of a bottom desk drawer.
It isn't known who murdered the family, or if it is even a Palestinian perpetrator, though just as in the old racist U.S. South blacks were presumed to be the perpetrators of any brutality (excluding the far more prevalent and routine brutality perpetrated on blacks), Palestinians are the default suspects for anything that goes wrong in the West Bank. When Israelis do pay the price of their crimes on Palestinians, the price is usually wrist-slapping and change.
The Jerusalem Magistrate Court today sentenced an Israeli settler to a year and a half in prison for brutalizing a Palestinian and killing his goat. Haaretz reports the incident this way: "According to the verdict, in 2007 Struk, together with another unidentified individual approached some Palestinians from Kfar Kusra on an all-terrain vehicle and fired in the air. Following that, Struk and his friend snatched a 15-year old Palestinian teenager and hit him all over his body. Struk and his friend bound the complainant's hands behind his back, covered his face, sat him between them in the all-terrain vehicle and drove off. During the ride, the complainant was beaten and lost consciousness. When he eventually woke up he was wet." For all that, just a year and a half in prison, as if the settler had just taken a little ride in a vehicle that didn't belong to him.
A few days before that murder spree on the settler family, Israel launched four raids on Gaza City, including a missile attack, compliments of US-made F-16s, in Gaza's Zeitoun District, from where rockets had been fired at southern Israel. There's been several other raids since, killing eight Palestinians, including two just today. On Friday, Netanyahu said he was ready to act with "great force" in retaliation for rocket fire from Gaza. And just last Thursday, a ball-bearing bomb planted at a Jerusalem bus stop exploded, killing a British woman--Mary Jean Gardner, 59--and injuring 25 in the first such bombing in Jerusalem in seven years.
The calm is ending. Palestinians are watching. So are Israelis. The diversions beyond their borders can distract them only so long. The recent bombings, murders and incursions are indications that much worse is likely ahead. Particularly with the revolts of the Middle East. Akiva Eldar, a columnist for Haaretz, put it this way recently: "The day after the military operation in Libya, U.S. President Barack Obama will have a hard time explaining to the Arabs why he is a big hero regarding an Arab leader who oppresses his people, at a time when he is helping a Jewish leader who is stealing land from members of the Arab people and is thumbing his nose at America."
When that calm, ends for good in Palestine/Israel, taking cover there may not be enough.
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