Last Friday, as Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was meeting with President Bush at the White House, trigger-happy Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the West Bank shot and killed a 4 -year old boy and injured two young girls, one of them seriously, in a burst of gunfire directed at the pickup truck they were riding in. The vehicle was riddled by bullets from a machine gun fired by one of several soldiers atop an armored personnel carrier. An Israeli spokesman told reporters it was all an unfortunate accident, �an operational error.�
Sure, sure, all seventeen of the bullets fired were just that, an accident. Not a hate crime.
The fact of the matter is that Israel�s notions of �eretz Israel� not only demonize Palestinians as a lower species of men to be subjected to the rule of the gun, but they foster the belief that vacating settlements and effecting a meaningful evacuation of the occupied territories is unthinkable.
Fawaz Turki Arab News 31 July 2003
