Wednesday, April 21, 2004

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Nicest Terrorist I Ever Met:
"…Entering Dr. Rantisi's home that day, I wondered how I would feel shaking the hand of someone who blew up Jewish children. I wondered, too, how he would feel about giving yet another interview to yet another American Jew, whose objectivity he surely questioned. But even killers can be charming, and reporters are disconcertingly adaptable. There was a gentle affability to Dr. Rantisi. The interpreter quickly became superfluous. He spoke English softly, musically, imperfectly but painstakingly. Though our talk was of targeted killings, he sometimes even laughed."

He described the degradation of occupation: the loss of lives and dignity, the dead Palestinian children, the uprooted trees, the bulldozed land, the desecrated holy places. The "martyrdom bombings" were retaliatory, he insisted, responses to Israeli murders and massacres. He spoke the language of the freedom fighter. "We are doing the same now that the French did to the Germans, and the Algerians to resist the French, and Vietnam to resist the Americans," he said. Taken in a vacuum, his reasoning was seductive. One could see how he charmed left-wing European journalists, including a crew of Englishmen there with us.

But there was something sinister and cynical in his choice of words — or, more accurately, one word: occupation. To most of the world, he knew, occupation was what happened to the Palestinians in 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza. The very word suggests temporariness, compromise. But to him and the organization he'd helped found, the occupation dated back not to 1967 and not even to 1948, when the state of Israel was created, but decades before that, to when the Zionists began buying up dunums and hectares of Mandatory Palestine. All of Israel was occupied territory. Dr. Rantisi talked of truces, but they were meaningless. His peace plan was simple: five million Jews should leave. Then there would be peace. Until then, there would be jihad.

To him, all Israeli leaders were alike. Ehud Barak had done nothing for peace, he said. Shimon Peres was every bit the killer Ariel Sharon was, only smoother. And the most dovish Israeli politician of all, Yossi Beilin, was merely Mr. Peres's disciple. (In a sense, Dr. Rantisi was posthumously vindicated, for Mr. Peres was among those who applauded his killing.) To Dr. Rantisi, what differentiated Prime Minister Sharon wasn't his convictions, which were run-of-the-mill Zionist, but his stupidity. With every targeted killing, he said, Hamas only grew stronger; increasingly, its leaders were underground, beyond Israeli eyes. Now, with two of the group's pillars eliminated, Dr. Rantisi's thesis will be put to the test.

"The history will write Sharon is the first one who started destroying Israel," he told me. "And if you will live — I hope so — for 120 years, you will see that." As he spoke to me, he laughed almost affectionately, as if he really meant it. Imagine that: the future head of Hamas wishing me a long life. All I had to do was to stay off the wrong Israeli bus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/opinion/21MARG.html

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