Caoimhe Butterly, who has joined Yasser Arafat in his besieged bunker, is clearly a very brave young woman, and I hope that she emerges from her ordeal emotionally and physically intact. But her presence in the bunker does rather presuppose that the Israelis will show some military restraint on account of her being there.
Does she think that her presence at a bar mitzvah might have a similarly deterrent effect on any suicide bombers? I somehow doubt that it would. If one is determined to be a martyr, and if one has so little regard for one's own life, and for the bonds of love and duty that tie one to the world of the living, it's unlikely that one will care greatly whom one kills.
Death is lord of all, especially if one is taking as many Jews as possible. That seems to be the central ambition of the suicide bombers. Essentially: Jews will do, even teenage Jews coming through the rite of passage into pre-adulthood.
Glorious end
Now we haven't seen anything quite like this in quite a while, this willingness to kill lots of people of all ages and of either sex simply because of their Jewishness. And we certainly have not seen so many people place so little value on their own lives that death in an act of murderous hatred of the innocent is seen to be a glorious end.
Complex questions arise here, which might or might not have been asked by those people who tied themselves to a tree in the grounds of the Israeli embassy in Dublin the other day. No doubt they were, and were answered to their own satisfaction. I confess, deplorable though events in Bethlehem clearly are, I am unable to share whatever lucidity of thought others seem to enjoy.
Let us ask the most basic question. What deal is possible with an organisation whose members are queuing up to blow themselves and as many innocent people as possible to kingdom come? This is not about power-sharing, or self-respect, or self-government, which are negotiable things in the real world. Indeed, this is not a secular question at all, but a metaphysical one, and one which is beyond the powers of the rest of us. It is about the relationship between Muslim fundamentalists and God, one in which life is an impediment to be disposed of as swiftly as possible.
So the Israelis are in a dilemma which no worldly power has faced before. Soldiers are trained to kill the enemy, the logic being that the enemy will not want to die, and will do his best, within the confines of his duty, to avoid death. But when the enemy both shares your country with you, and will undertake to kill himself (or herself) as he kills at random, then the normal rules of engagement are inverted beyond ordinary comprehension.
What deters a terrorist when what the rest of us regard as the ultimate deterrent is for him and her actually the ultimate incentive? Yasser Arafat says he wants to die, to be a martyr. That might just be rodomontade; but we know it is not for so many people, who place far less value on their own lives than do their enemies. The Israelis do not deliberately kill 16-year-old girls; what are we to make of an organisation which will enlist the services of such a girl to kill herself and others? And are there terms which it is possible to offer which will cause such horrors to cease?
Means to an end?
Some people might argue that such attacks are merely means to an end. Yes, but what end? Is not the means actually the end itself, a passport to paradise, and for men 74 virgins (what women martyrs get in the hereafter is a little less clear)? And is the worldly, non-personal end not simply the end of the Israeli state? What Israeli politician is going to negotiate for that? Politics is about dealing with the problems that history bequeaths us. It is the easiest thing in the world to point to blunders the Israelis have made; and the greatest of these was probably the conquest of the West Bank and Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, from which a toxic hubris grew.
But that is in the past. There is no hubris now in Israel, just incomprehension and fear, in a world of lethal paradoxes. It is open season on Jews again, but now in the very state which was created to prevent such a thing. The one place where the Final Solution culture should not exist is the one place where it is now flourishing.
Moreover, the enemies of Israel are weak: yet their weakness is their greatest strength. What need have they of tanks? Tanks are for people who wish to survive battle; and they wish to perish in it. They have turned death into a cult which tolerates no other creed or no other value, and with which there can be no meaningful negotiation.
Tragic history
Like most Irish people, I have enormous sympathy for the Palestinian people whose history has been unspeakably tragic. But as George Mitchell reported, the present intifada began as a deliberate means of extracting further concessions from Prime Minister Barak, who had been offering a return of 97 per cent of the Occupied Territories. He is now gone, and the intifada has become an endless celebration of death itself.
Moloch, the Canaanite god before whom living children were burnt, is once again master of his ancestral lands: for Canaan is the name by which Palestine was known before the Jews first arrived there, over 3,000 years ago.