Palestinian Misery...

Every once in a while, the National Post has a terrific editorial...here's todays:

The Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza was the scene of Palestinian celebrations yesterday. No, a "martyr" from the camp hadn't managed to blow up a restaurant full of Israeli families, the usual reason for joyous gatherings among Arabs in this part of the world. Rather, the locals were celebrating the victory of their "human shields" in thwarting an air strike against the home of wanted terrorist Wail Barud.

But while the assembly of hundreds of Palestinians in anticipation of the planned Israeli bombing did succeed in protecting Barud's home, the tactic may have backfired from a propaganda perspective: It served to demonstrate that Israel does not seek to kill Palestinian civilians wholesale, as Arab propagandists constantly claim. Indeed, it is clear the Palestinians themselves do not believe their own propaganda about Israel's alleged thirst for blood. Otherwise, they never would have been able to recruit all those human shields.

If Israel really were as sadistic as its critics claim, it wouldn't have called off yesterday's bombing run. Just the opposite: It would have jumped at the chance to kill so many Palestinians at one go. Just imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, and hundreds of Israeli "human shields" positioned themselves in an unguarded cafe in the West Bank. Palestinian suicide bombers would be stepping over each other in an effort to attack the target. "Human shields" work only when your enemy fights like a human.

A second irony is that it is men like Barud who are at the root of Palestinian misery -- for if they were not firing rockets at Israel from Gaza, and smuggling in weapons from Egypt, there would be no need for the Jewish state to stage counterterrorist operations in Gaza, every square inch of which it evacuated in August, 2005. If Palestinians were more rational about where their society's interests lie, they would go to Barud's house not to offer protection -- but to arrest him so that others in the area could live in peace.