A question of morality

Editorial

In April 2001, a Palestinian military operative was playing a game of cards with colleagues. According to Amar Abu-Snehna, a young Palestinian who was participating in the game, the former Tanzim commander for Bethlehem, Atef Abayat, lost the game and, in keeping his part of a bet riding on the game, killed an Israel Defence Forces soldier near Rachel's Tomb.

When this news became public last week, it was greeted with revulsion. How far have we drifted as a species that one of us would consider the murder of another human being as payment for a gambling loss? What sort of people would participate in such a bet?

It seems that this sort of casual brutality still has the ability to startle us out of whatever media-induced numbness to which we may have succumbed.

Thanks to the saturation of news via radio, television, Internet, print and ever-evolving new electronic sources, we can now get immediate news from the most remote parts of the world. We can see an array of horrific images from the Middle East and elsewhere. Tragedies that forever alter the world for a family in Rwanda are summed up in a paragraph, if at all. Likewise, the many-fronted battle in the Middle East has challenged even ardent followers of news reports and those of us with personal connections to the region to keep up with daily developments.

But grotesque reports such as the card-game murder have the capacity to stand out from all the other atrocities and remind us of the depths to which a human can plummet.

Another, similar affront to our sense of morality is under debate in the Middle East right now and deserves equal attention.

In a courageous move early this week, Israel's High Court of Justice issued an interim injunction, temporarily banning the IDF from employing what is referred to as the "neighbor procedure." The neighbor procedure has been used by the IDF to approach suspected or known terrorists. A neighbor, possibly an innocent bystander, is forced by the IDF, sometimes at gunpoint, to approach a suspect and ask them to turn themselves over to the IDF.

The practice has been referred to as using human shields and, though the term is not exactly accurate, it can have the same end result.

Last week, 19-year-old Nidal Abu M'khisan was shot and killed. Reports say he was forced by IDF soldiers, at gunpoint, to knock on the door of Nasser Jarrar, a Hamas terrorist, whereupon he was shot dead by Jarrar or someone else inside the house who assumed M'khisan was an Israeli soldier.

The court demanded that the IDF provide, within seven days, an explanation for the neighbor procedure before the court issues a final judgment on the practice.

The High Court made the judgment on the neighbor procedure in response to a petition from a number of activist groups, which cites a long list of IDF activities they deem similar to the neighbor procedure. Included were allegations, initially publicized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that Israeli soldiers force Palestinians to walk in front of them at gunpoint, to go door-to-door in search of terrorists, and to stand in front of soldiers while the soldiers fire over their shoulders (presumably because terrorists will be less likely to fire back knowing their Arab brethren are the most likely recipients of their fire).

These reports are enormously disturbing.

It has been said that Israel is being held up to a higher international standard than other countries. Many would argue that, like any state under attack, Israel must implement policies that protect its citizens and that it should not be judged more harshly than other states. Those who recognize the difficulty Israel has had in combatting terrorist activities over the past two years would similarly argue that such methods of capturing enemies is justified if it results in the saving of Israeli lives.

But Israel must show itself to be better than the terrorist thugs like the one who allegedly killed an IDF soldier on a card-game bet. Even in the midst of war, which many experts believe is the state of affairs in the Middle East, there must be some minimum standards of humanity applied by Israel, even if the Palestinians do not adopt the same level of behavior.

God willing, the fighting and killing will soon stop. Until then, Israel must ensure that its soldiers take the moral high road. That, in the end, is all that separates states with a moral right to exist from the terrorists who seek to destroy it.

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