On the subject of the latest chapter in the Middle East trainwreck (the killing of Sheik Salah Shehada), I had intended to write about the disparity between the international condemnation following Israel's latest violence and the relative silence that has followed recent Palestinian terrorism. Basically, my question was "why is it that the international opinion machine that has proven so adept at condemning Israel's retaliatory strike is incapable of condemning Palestinian violence?" As I thought more about it, though, I wondered if perhaps that question itself wasn't obscuring a larger, and more significant question: Is it a healthy thing for Israel's supporters to be arguing for this sort of "moral equivalence"?

In considering these questions, I thought an example would be helpful.

Last week, three Palestinian gunmen, dressed in IDF uniforms, ambushed a bus near the Emanuel settlement in the West Bank, and killed seven people, including an 11-month old infant, her father and her grandmother. According to reports at the time, her mother and two-year old brother were wounded by gunfire.

Actually, "ambush" is an antiseptic, almost clinical description of what happened. To quote the New York Times,

As an armor-plated bus from Bnei Brak, an Orthodox town near Tel Aviv, lumbered up a winding road to Immanuel, a powerful bomb exploded, riddling the vehicle with shrapnel and blowing out its right tires, police and army officials said.

The gunmen, hiding in a scrub-covered rise by the side of the road, opened fire, closing in on the bus as it came to a stop in a shallow ditch by the side of the road, authorities said. The assailants poured gunfire and hurled grenades through the upper windows of the bus, which were not bulletproof. Passengers took cover on the floor, trapped in the vehicle, whose doors were disabled.

Three (count 'em, three) different terrorist organizations immediately claimed "credit" for the attack, including wings of Hamas and Fatah. Fatah, remember, has been linked to Arafat, and Hamas is widely regarded as a "legitimate" competitor for power in a post-Arafat Palestine. But read the Times article, or indeed, any coverage in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Nary a peep from the world community condemning the brutal killing and wounding of civilians. Not a word from the international community about the intentional and cold-blooded murder of an eleven month old girl.

[This is all the more difficult to understand when you consider, as the Washington Post noted, "it came hours before representatives of the "quartet" -- the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- met in New York to discuss moving forward on the Bush administration's latest Middle East peace initiative." To his credit, Bush had spokesman Ari Fleischer condemn the "latest act of violence", but apparently, the EU and the UN -- even as they were gathered to discuss the situation in the Middle East -- didn't comment (or, if they did, it wasn't reported in the mainstream press).]

Now consider Israel's bombing of Shehada's residence. As far as we know now, Shehada, under an assumed name, was hiding in a house in a heavily populated area in Gaza. Overnight, an IDF F-16 fired a one-ton missle into Shehada's residence, killing him, his wife and possibly three of his children (there are conflicting reports of whether it is two or three) either in the explosion or when the building collapsed around them. The bomb also destroyed two or more other residences nearby, killing an additional ten or eleven people (again, there are 14 confirmed dead, but it's not entirely clear who was where). As many as nine of the dead were children.

Here is how the major newspapers reported the international community's response:

The New York Times: But the Israeli airstrike and the resulting civilian deaths drew sharp criticism around the world, including from President Bush. "This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace," Mr. Bush's chief spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said today in Washington. Mr. Fleischer said the United States regretted "the loss of innocent life. Meanwhile, European, United Nations and Arab officials condemned the Israeli attack as unjustified and irresponsible, and some called it criminal. They said the attack was counterproductive to efforts to calm tensions in the Mideast. "This kind of operation is not conducive toward peace and reconciliation," said Javier Solana, the European Union's chief of foreign and security policy.

The Washington Post: European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana called the attack an "extra-judicial killing operation" that "comes at a time when both Israelis and Palestinians were working very seriously to curb violence and restore cooperative security arrangements. . . .[U.N. Secretary General Kofi] Annan issued a statement late Monday deploring the attack, saying, "Israel has the legal and moral responsibility to take all measures to avoid the loss of innocent life; it clearly failed to do so."

The Times of London: The West and the Arab world united in denouncing the attack, saying it violated international law by targeting innocent civilians. . . . Britain was among the most outspoken critics, with Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, calling the airstrike unacceptable and counter-productive. Mike O’Brien, the Foreign Office Minister, summoned the Israeli Ambassador to tell him the strike was considered unjustified and disproportionate.

This disparity of condemnation led me to the initial question: why isn't all Middle East violence -- regardless of who perpetrated it -- publicly deplored in the international community? My question, by the way, is one that any number of Jewish and pro-Israel organizations ask all the time. And it's a legitimate question. But as I alluded to earlier, there may be a deeper question that is obscured by focusing only on the condemnation issue.

For the record, as might be apparent, I, like many supporters of Israel, find the international condemnations of Israel in this and similar cases hollow and hypocritical because the same condemnations do not generally follow Palestinian attacks. What I term "moral equivalence" requires that, if you deplore the violence surrounding the attack on Shehada, you have to be equally fervent in deploring the violence that Hamas inflicted last week near Emanuel. In fact, perhaps more fervent -- if you assume that Israel and the Palestinians are at war (in fact, if not in name), then Shehada was a legitimate military target, and the civilian deaths that accompanied his, though tragic, were legitimate collateral damage in a wartime attack. Conversely, the attack at Emanuel is not defensible, since there is no evidence that the civilians attacked were targeted because they had military significance -- they were simply civilians who were attacked for being civilians. The rules of war prohibit that.

But this leaves the larger question: do we supporters of Israel really want it to be morally equivalent to Palestinian terrorists? As my discussion of the rules of war suggests, the answer is no. We want to believe that Israel has the moral high-ground. And so, we invent justifications (as I did in the last paragraph), and then deplore the disparity of condemnation since, obviously, we are arguing from the moral high-ground.

Part of the problem is the language of the international condemnations. You'll notice, if you look at the comments of Javier Solana and Jack Straw, that the Europeans were focused on expediency -- what is or isn't productive. The Israeli action was "counterproductive" to Palestinian concessions toward peace. Well, by that token, Palestinian violence is equally counterproductive to Israeli concessions, right? So it would stand to reason that if the proper measure is expediency, the EU and British condemnation should flow evenly whenever either side commits an act of violence, right? On this score, Israel's supporters are correct that international condemnation is frequently hypocritical and offensive. But this still leaves us fighting for "equivalence" when the real question is morality.

Notice Kofi Annan, however, who couched his criticism in terms of morals: "Israel has the legal and moral responsibility to take all measures to avoid the loss of innocent life." Here is a condemnation I will take. You see, the "equivalence" argument permits us to pass over the difficult moral issues Annan raises: what are Israel's moral duties in this undeclared war? In a conflict between a sovereign and a militia, does the sovereign, by virtue of its social compact, have legal obligations to refrain from certain actions? If you win the battle, but lose your soul, can you ever win the war?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think that instead of spending energy railing against the lack of equivalence, I would rather that Israel's supporters confront the moral and ethical questions. It's part of what Judaism is about.

In this regard, I commend to you a letter by Martin Lang to the editors of the New York Times that I found very wise. The letter said this: the laws of war aside, the Israeli government has lost its moral compass if it accepts the death of these civilians as simply collateral damage. Moreover, the attack sends precisely the wrong message -- to quote the author, the attack "makes a clear statement that there are no moral restraints on the killing of innocent people to achieve an objective."

In other words, to accept the civilian deaths as simply a cost of achieving the political objective is to become the very terrorists you are fighting. Is this the equivalence we want?