THE DEATH OF an entire Palestinian family -- a father and his six children -- on a Gaza beach earlier this month, followed just a few days later by an Israeli missile strike that killed nine more Palestinian civilians, has reopened the controversy about whether there is really much difference between Palestinian terrorism and Israel's military retaliations.
Writing in Israel's Maariv, columnist Dan Margalit argues that "even if an Israeli shell killed them, there was no intention to kill peaceful civilians on a beach in Gaza. On the other hand, the Kassam [rockets] fired at Sderot is an ongoing, systematic and conscious effort at the premeditated killing of [Israeli] civilians." He concludes that "only a world lacking integrity and full of conspiracies ignores the decisive difference in intentions between the two sides."
The last time this controversy flared was following the release of Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich." The movie was criticized for its "moral equivalence," allegedly equating Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliations. Much in the spirit of Margalit's angry comment, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic argued at the time that the equation is false because "the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective."
Israel: A June 18 article on the Mideast conflict stated that a father and his six children were killed in a June 9 Israeli artillery strike on a Gaza beach. A man, his wife and five children in their family died. The article also said that Palestinian civilians have been killed "virtually every day" since Israel's disengagement from Gaza. Statistics from B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, show that Palestinian civilians have been killed on fewer than half the days since the disengagement last year.
The vast disproportion between Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli "mistakes" and Israeli casualties from Palestinian terrorist assaults also brings into question the distinction between the two. It suggests that the killing of Palestinian civilians is, at the very least, more a matter of Israeli indifference than a mistake. Not a single Israeli has been killed by a Kassam rocket since Israel's disengagement from Gaza last year, although during this period Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis. (According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis).
