Israel may well indeed be a rogue state, as claimed by Senator David Norris in the Seanad the other day, but at least those who so virulently denounce it might suggest a few ideas about how these rogues should protect themselves against Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Martyrs' Brigade, writes Kevin Myers.
For the first real question is: What is Israel to do to protect itself? Or, conversely: What should it not do? Well, that's easy. It shouldn't build walls, or assassinate selected targets, or protect illegal settlers; we all know the wish-list because we all agree on it. But then most Israelis would agree on it too, if times were different. They're not. They are the times we all live in, times of terrible complexity and hideous danger, and our position in the heart of the Anglo-American protectorate in the Atlantic allows us to speak with an enormous moral condescension towards a people who are not so protected.
So what are the Israelis to do? What? The mood is now so frenzied and hysterical in the West Bank and Gaza that the various suicide organisations there could probably find hundreds of volunteers, frantically looking for the chink in the Israeli armour.
I asked this question before. What are the Israelis to do? No reply. I repeat it again. What are they to do? What? Tell me. What are they to do? All right, so they demolish the wall, the fence, whatever term you prefer. And then what? Will those Israel-is-a-rogue-state senators, or any of those "peace activists" who leapt to protect that venal clown Yasser Arafat, agree to join a queue of Israelis at the nearest bus-stop next to where the wall used to be? No? Ah. Why not?
I detest Sharon. I absolutely loathe him. His policies were largely responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese in Lebanon in 1982 and afterwards. But he is the democratically elected leader of the Israeli people, and he has a duty to defend his people. Must he wait for the terrorists always to strike first? Or has he the moral obligation to strike first, before innocent people on their way to work or children to school are killed?
Nonetheless, the killing of Ahmed Yassin was a shocking and terrible deed. It was also deeply stupid, for Israel was forgetting it has duties beyond those of its own immediate self-interest. The effect of the killing on the profoundly dangerous security situation in Iraq has been devastating. It cannot be in Israel's longer-term interest to turn Iraq into another Afghanistan. Any more Palestinian paraplegics being blown to pieces as they emerge from a mosque, and Kirkuk will be like Kandahar.
That said, Yassin was a deeply evil man who had theologically embraced the utter nihilism of the suicide bomber. So what dark waters we have entered in recent years, ones without precedent in the history of civilisation? The US did not condemn the murder of Ahmed Yassin, for how could it? It tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein repeatedly, and instead repeatedly killed innocent people. So here we have democratically accountable states quite openly approving of the cold-blooded killing of their leading opponents.
But are they wrong to have done that? Terrorists, after all, hide behind the law and exploit the restraints of the law-abiding. Is it a sign of abject weakness to allow them to exploit our rules? Or is it a sign of our moral strength? And how do you then explain the merits of such moral strength to a mother whose children have been blown up by the man whom you chose to allow to remain free? Any answers? No? Good. I have no answers either. Even breathtakingly evil men like Hitler and Stalin were on the extreme end of the continuum of conventional political life. Their intent was to make this a better world - better, that is, by their own insane standards. The methods they employed were of course utterly unspeakable, but they had logical, if perverted goals which had a certain bizarre intellectual coherence. But the suicide bomber is the briefly-living contradiction of this. There are no terms to offer, no concessions to make, no demands to meet, which will make the suicide bomber pause. The glorious deed is the glorious end, in every sense, and Ahmed Yassin personified and articulated the culture of the suicide bomber. He was in love with death, and his objective was the extermination of the Jewish people of Israel.
He employed the same diabolical psychology as al-Qaeda, one which has bewitched so many Islamic youngsters, and which is now being used to wage war on us all. Of course it's easy for the senators of Ireland to denounce Israel; but can they propose any defensive measures for its people? And though press coverage of the Seanad is, thank God, rather modest, no one seems to have stood up and said: "How would you protect the population of Rathmines if self-governing Ranelagh were swarming with suicide bombers who yearned to exterminate Rathminians? What do you do about Renalighi terrorist leaders who publicly celebrate suicide-massacres, and openly recruit more volunteers to slaughter more Rathminians?"
No-one apparently had the modesty to ask what every decent Israeli, day in and day out, must now be asking. How can any people cope with this murderous threat and remain decent and law-abiding? And is this it? Is this how Israelis must spend the rest of their days, to the last syllable of recorded time? Or, to find individual peace, must they leave instead?
Well, down the centuries, Jews know something about that.