Grim news from Israel this morning, not that that's a rare thing. Having discovered the bodies of the three murdered teenagers near Hebron in the West Bank, premier Netanyahu has sworn there will be dire consequences. There already have been. Within hours of the kidnapping, as I reported on this blog recently, Israeli shock troops were charging through the refugee camps, destroying homes and arresting dozens, and then hundreds of Palestinian youths. Most are still incarcerated despite the fact that the search has been narrowed down to just two men, thought to be in a splinter group of Hamas. Fourteen people have died during the IDF's most recent activities, three of them children. Already then, the Israelis have killed nearly five Palestinians for each Jewish boy murdered. And don't think it will stop there.
Apart from the official actions, groups of militant Israeli citizens have been patrolling East Jerusalem looking for Palestinians to punish vicariously. News has just emerged of a Palestinian youth being kidnapped. Meanwhile, any vestige of peace talks have melted away. When the pope visited the West Bank recently and basically embarrassed both sides into actually doing something, I warned that factions among the Zionists and Hamas would be busy calculating how any possible progress could be torpedoed before they got off the ground. And look! Here we are.
In 1998, not long after the famous "Good Friday Agreement" in Northern Ireland, a splinter group of the official IRA calling itself the "real" IRA set off a bomb in Omagh and killed 30 people. They didn't want the peace process to work either. Fortunately the authorities did not react by roiling through catholic areas, arresting everybody they didn't like the look of and bulldozing the houses of sympathisers. They kept their eye on the prize because the peace process was something worth struggling for, not killing for. Israelis, take note...
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