Assassination as a boomerang

Traveling in a car last week through the streets of Gaza City and through the alleyways of Dir al-Balah, Khan Yunis and Rafah, I saw hundreds and hundreds of graffiti messages, which once more "decorate" outer walls in Palestinian cities. The intifada has revived "wall communication" - and nearly all the messages bore the signatures of the various shahid (holy martyr) brigades. In every corner of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, groups have arisen to avenge the deaths of local people who have been assassinated. All these groups declare the attacks they will launch in that person's memory. Will the Israeli defense establishment assassinate these youthful masses? Already one notes an exaggeration in the high ranks Israeli leaders assign to the assassinated Palestinians. Granted, some of them did head terrorist networks, but some of them were local blood-thirsty punks, not commanders of military wings as certain people are trying to present them.
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When the cage bursts

Neither killing nor house demolitions frighten people here. "In prison it's not the inmates who are afraid and in the cemeteries the dead have no more fear in their heart," says a resident of Gaza. "Let the jailers be afraid."

On these streets, in which the rainwater has mixed with the sewage to form a malodorous ooze, there is no danger of a powder keg blowing up. It has already exploded, spraying everything in the area: the children going to school even though absolutely nothing awaits them at the end of the track; the young people who have finished school and plunged from the heights of the final grade to the muddy street corners; the fathers who are being forced to leap over an entire generation of realizing dreams for their children; and the uniformed, Kalashnikov-carrying guards who no longer guard anything and only hope they will not wake up one morning and find themselves trampled under the feet of the residents. Suicide, it seems, is not only an operation against the enemy; it is an honorable way to put an end to the dying.
(...)

Israel can shout that the PA is infested with terrorism, but that represents the less cogent danger. Because if a situation arises in which the PA no longer exists, Israel is going to have to deal with each and every resident of the Gaza Strip. The cage will no longer be able to contain them.
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