Conflicting feelings

Connect/Eddie Holt:  Television footage and newspaper photographs of Hassam Mohammed Hufni Abdo provided the symbols of the …

Connect/Eddie Holt:  Television footage and newspaper photographs of Hassam Mohammed Hufni Abdo provided the symbols of the week.

Reports which named the boy also said that, at 14, he would have been the youngest Palestinian suicide bomber yet. (It was later established he was 16.) His alleged attack was foiled when Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint challenged him and he raised his arms in surrender.

How are you supposed to feel when you see pictures of the Abdo incident? Unless you're incorrigibly supportive of one side or the other - Palestinians or Israelis - you must feel conflicted. On one hand, Abdo might have turned himself into a human bomb and butchered innocent people. On the other, the idea that a 16-year-old might be prepared to blow himself asunder is shocking.

So, the pictures make you want to condemn this child but simultaneously prompt you to understand him. Because he provokes such clashing reactions, he seems to embody the qualities of Greek tragedy: terror and pity. You really want to keep away from him yet human decency makes you feel sorry for him, but then you think of his potential victims and on it goes.

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Because he's reportedly 16, and looks younger, you might find solace in blaming whatever adults put him up to this deed. That allows you to condemn them - including Abdo's putative action - but clears space to feel sorrow for this unfortunate boy. That is probably how most people will reconcile conflicted attitudes towards the incident.

Perhaps that's the right and sensible thing to do. Who knows? Certainly, the Israeli government has sanctioned such an attitude as the most reasonable, most emotionally cogent, most human response. Dore Gold, an adviser to Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon endorsed such a reasonable, resigned, hand-wringing reading with his comments after the incident.

"No matter how many times Israel learns of the use of children for suicide bombings, it is shocking on each occasion. Israelis do not understand how Palestinians are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to kill ours," he said. It's not, of course, just Israelis who don't "understand" such thoroughly inhuman use of children. Nor can anybody else. Hence the account is suspect.

The Hassam Abdo incident may well have occurred just as reported. If so, you can see why Israel has used it (even if you can also argue that it shouldn't) - as Dore Gold's statement used it - to dehumanise "Palestinians". Yet, because soldiers at the checkpoint where Abdo was apprehended, were reportedly "warned" of an impending suicide attack, it's all a touch shady. There appears to have been an unusually prominent media presence at the Huwarra checkpoint when Abdo was arrested.

Israel, unsurprisingly - Palestinians did likewise when Israeli troops murdered 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura - is using the incident as propaganda. Given the "warning" about an impending attack, the question of who really set up Abdo must be asked.

The truth is that we do not know. Ostensibly, he was just another, albeit the youngest to date, Palestinian suicide bomber. Presumably, then, he was sent by a Palestinian outfit. If so, however, that Palestinian outfit was infiltrated - hence the "warning" - but we don't know just how compromised, just how many agents, Israel has successfully inserted into enemy militants.

Abdo's youth and the fact that his brother Hosni described him as mentally slow, saying of him that "he doesn't know anything", makes him an easy propaganda tool for either side. There would be no (or negligible) suspicion of Israel's role only that some of its troops are known to be callous child-killers who shoot-to-kill stone-throwing Palestinian children.

In that sense, there is a boy-who-cried-"wolf" aspect to the Abdo incident. When Dore Gold says Israelis do not understand how Palestinians are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to kill Israeli ones, Palestinians inevitably think they do not understand how some Israelis are so willing to kill Palestinian children in the first place.

Thus, Israel's record of child-killing taints what may even be an ideally moral case it makes over Hassam Abdo. Under Ariel Sharon, Israeli army child-killing is notorious and the prime motor of hatred in the region. Because killing children precludes even the live/die-by-the sword reconciliation possible between adults, Palestinian suicide bombers regularly target innocent young Israelis.

And so it goes. Sharon's assassination of Sheikh Yassin (to call it "Israel's" seems improperly indicting of an entire state and much of its people) looks sure to lead to more bloodshed. "What is coming will be very bloody," said Bassam Abu Sharif, an Arafat adviser. Israelis, you feel, as well as Palestinians, would be better off if they dislodged their hard-man premier.

We know that media distort - deliberately and unwittingly - much of what takes place in bitter, violent, prolonged wars.

The fact that Hassam Abdo was used as a symbol this week to prompt us how to feel about the Israel/Palestine fight must, if nothing else, even at risk of paranoia, properly make us suspicious. When conflict gets so nasty, you really can't believe your eyes.