Misconceived murder backfires on perpetrators

Tom Wicker, New York Times

Transcribed from the clipping

“WASHINGTON — The government of Israel has not denied, and tends to confirm by its silence, that it ordered the murder of Khalil al-Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad. This order, efficiently carried out by Israeli gunmen, violated Israel’s established policy not to assassinate leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

It violated also the decent behavior demanded of a democratic and law-abiding government. John Kifner of The New York Times has reported that the Shamir government ordered the murder of Abu Jihad because he was ‘directing the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories’ of Gaza and the West Bank.

If so, the order was misconceived as well as disreputable; it set off the bloodiest day of rioting yet seen, and though the situation has calmed it may yet become more difficult to control.

This act of state murder testifies, too, to the seeming blindness of the Israeli Cabinet; it acts as if what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is not a popular uprising against Israeli occupation but something ordered and orchestrated from the outside by the PLO.

Thus, the cabinet approaches the uprising more as a temporary problem to be handled militarily than as a fundamental challenge to the existing order. How else could the cabinet conclude, as Kifner reported, that this act of counterterrorism might ‘give the army time to bring things back to normal’?

But Israel is faced only superficially with a military problem for the army; the Palestinian uprising ultimately calls for a political approach.

Politically, however, the violent death of Abu Jihad also appears to have backfired on its perpetrators; the murder of the military leader and second-ranking official of the PLO has resulted in at least a partial reconciliation between the PLO and Israel’s bitter enemy, Syria, where Abu Jihad was buried.

And because his burial there and not in Jordan was a calculated PLO insult to King Hussein of Jordan, it makes the king even less likely ever to be acceptable to Palestinians as their spokesman, let alone their ruler. The American initiative unsuccessfully pushed in the Middle East by Secretary of State Shultz depended heavily on Hussein’s participation.

Now it’s even less likely that he can play a useful role on behalf of Palestinians or in easing their pressures on Israel. Some Israeli sources suggest that the murder of a well-known terrorist leader was intended to remind Palestinians of Israeli strength, to discourage potential recruits from joining the PLO and to undermine PLO morale while boosting that of Israelis.

These are weak justifications for calculated state murder, and miss the main point anyway. As Zeev Schiff, the military analyst, wrote in Haaretz: ‘It is a mistake to think that this is what will bring the end of the uprising. It did not begin because of Abu Jihad and the P.L.O. and its end will not come because of his death.’

Schiff added that the murder of Abu Jihad, who was regarded as a moderate within the PLO, ‘might allow more extreme forces to take control.’ And the newspaper Hadashot raised another pertinent question: ‘If P.L.O. leaders are targets for bumping off, with whom, actually, do we intend to discuss the settling of the Palestinian problem?’

To an American anxious for Israel’s survival and success, and alarmed by the potential for a Middle Eastern war that could result in superpower confrontation, all of this is dismaying, but not more so than the idea of Israel’s highest, most responsible leaders deliberately approving a political assassination.

It’s true that Israel lives in a virtual state of war, surrounded by implacable enemies. It’s true, too, that one not resident in that country can hardly comprehend its pressures and dangers, or the conflicting passions they produce. It’s true, finally, that the opprobrium of outsiders sometimes takes insufficient account of realities on the scene.

Nevertheless, the good opinion of mankind is important, especially to a nation whose roots are planted in moral revulsion against the Holocaust. Law-abiding behavior is necessary to a democratic government, most particularly when that government is under challenge.

Calculated murder is terrorism’s instrument, not that of decent societies, in which it must always be illegal, inhumane, immoral. For whatever purpose, Israel should not be a party to it.”

Context added by this archive

Printed the same day as the news that Israel had taken the press cards off two American correspondents for reporting the same killing. Frankel and Fletcher lost their credentials in Jerusalem for putting it in the paper without clearing it with the censor.

Tom Wicker, writing from Washington and syndicated to Kansas, calls it state murder, calculated state murder and a political assassination in so many words, and nothing happens to him.

The column also quotes the argument as it was being had inside the Israeli press: Zeev Schiff in Haaretz saying the killing will not end the uprising because the uprising did not begin with Abu Jihad, and the paper Hadashot asking who is left to negotiate with if PLO leaders are targets.

Cite this item

"Misconceived murder backfires on perpetrators," Salina Journal, 27 April 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-068. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-068