They Must Pay The Price

By Gideon Levy
26 May, 2004
Haaretz

On a day when bodies of children were being stuffed into a big refrigerator used to store potatoes, and when thousands of homeless people were fleeing for their lives (some of them refugees rendered homeless for the second or third time), life in Israel went on as usual, as though what was happening in Rafah was not being done in the name of the country's citizens. Such apathy renders all of us responsible - and yet there are some who bear a heavier burden of responsibility. In a climate less lax than the one which has gripped Israel in recent years, they would be ostracized.

When Ariel Sharon was found guilty of indirect responsibility for the massacre in Sabra and Chatila, he was denounced by wide sectors of Israel's public. Demonstrators denounced him as a "murderer," and some of his personal friends turned their backs on him and cut off relations with him. Like his predecessor Moshe Dayan after the Yom Kippur War, during the Lebanon War, Sharon was ostracized. Nobody thought to fete and honor him. For his part in the killing of Israelis and Palestinians in Lebanon, he paid a heavy personal price, beyond his removal from the post of defense minister.

Some 22 years later, Sharon again bears direct responsibility for bloodshed, but this time nobody considers ostracizing him. He continues to be perceived as a sympathetic figure, one who enjoys an image as a friendly farmer and grandfather. Whatever he does, he does not encounter a hostile public. Benjamin Netanyahu, who caused far less serious damage to Israel and the cause of peace, is the scourge who is loathed by the left.

Nor have the two other architects of the bloody IDF operation in Rafah and of the brutal policies in the territories in general - Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon - paid a personal price for their acts. On the contrary: last week, Mofaz received an honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University; a few days before that, he was the guest of honor at the annual Israel Bar Association conference in Eilat. Why, exactly, was an honorary doctorate conferred on Mofaz? Why did lawyers pay tribute to a figure whose actions are deeply problematic in moral and legal terms?

http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-levy260504.htm

Jerusalem - The Israeli army destroyed the family homes of two Palestinian militants in the West Bank town of Nablus, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

The soldiers used explosives to demolish the second floor of the home of Nayef Abu Sarah, the Nablus head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement.

Israeli soldiers also destroyed the family home of Sami Sayed Salameh, a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was killed five days ago in a suicide attack in the West Bank.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1533677,00.html

How does this work out in the law? In America is it legal to destroy things of relatives of people who did something bad? Can Bush's daughters be imprisoned if their father is found guilty of Manslaughter?