Month: June 2008

[digg-reddit-me]On April 22, 1979 a seventeen year old boy, who we will call Charlie for now, was part of a group of four men that raided a small coastal city. A policemen came across Charlie’s group as they approached their target, a large apartment building. They killed him.

Around midnight, the four men stormed the apartment building throwing grenades and firing weapons at anything that moved. In the chaos, Charlie and the one of the other men saw a woman closing the door to her apartment in a panic – they charged after her as she slammed the door shut. The woman was a young mother – with two daughters, aged two and four, and a husband. The husband helped his wife and his youngest daughter hide in a crawl space and was trying to get his older daughter to another space when Charlie broke through the door.

The police began to arrive at the apartment building as Charlie and his accomplice searched the apartment for the woman they had seen. Charlie’s accomplice kept a gun trained on the husband and his daughter as Charlie searched the apartment, shooting at random targets, hoping to scare the woman he had seen out of her hiding place. The woman, fearing her baby daughter would scream or give away their position, kept her hand tightly placed over her baby’s mouth. Knowing that they did not have much time before the police surrounded them, Charlie forced the husband and daughter down to the beach. As Charlie left, the wife noticed her daughter limp in her arms. She had accidentally smothered her to death.

The other men stood keeping watch for the police who were still searching the apartment building, as Charlie prodded the husband and his daughter towards the ocean water. Charlie shot the husband at close range in front of the daughter, and then held the man’s head under the gently breaking waves to make sure he was dead. He grabbed the four year old and threw her on a rock while raising his rifle butt to smash her head. She covered her head, screaming, “Mommy, Daddy, help me!”, thrashing about, hysterical. Charlie managed to pry the girl’s hands away from her head long enough to get in a few blows. Her cries became weak, and he kept pounding her head between the rock and his rifle butt until her skull was completely crushed.

Two of Charlie’s accomplices were killed in a shootout with the police shortly after this. Charlie and another man were captured and put on trial. Charlie was sentenced to life imprisonment. He later admitted to the murders, and expressed pride in them. In his infamy, Charlie became a celebrity. The leader of his cult claimed that this attack was justified in retaliation for a peace treaty signed between the family’s country and a country that was allied with Charlie’s.

Today, almost thirty years later, Charlie has a number of supporters, including some who maintain he is innocent, and others who insist that the murders were justified. His friends and associates are agitating for his release, insisting he be treated as a political prisoner.

I maintain that there is something deeply rotten in any state and in any society that would enable and support behavior like Charlie’s. I don’t think I am going out on a limb here. This is solid ground.

Nothing could justify what Charlie did. Absolutely nothing. If he was a psychopath, one might be able to summon some distant sympathy for his derangement. As a solider, his actions were beyond the pale.

For those reading closely, the sheer irrationality of the response to this situation probably gives away where these events took place. Charlie’s name was Samir Kuntar; he was Lebanese and belonged to the Palestine Liberation Front. His victims, Danny, Einat, and Yael Haran, were Israeli. The wife and mother was named Smadar Haran. She wrote this opinion piece in 2003 in response to a proposed deal in which Samir Kuntar, or Charlie, would be freed. The leader who called for this attack and defended it afterwards was Abu Abbas. The peace treaty the attack was responding to was the Camp David Accords in which Jimmy Carter presided over the cessation of hostilities between Egypt and Israel. Samir Kuntar recently promised to return to jihad, as he described the murders, if he was freed. The current Israeli government has apparently agreed in principle to release him in return for the bodies, or perhaps the lives, of three soldiers who were abducted by Hezbollah last year.

***

I remember vividly the climactic scene of John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill. The novel tells the story of a racially charged case in which a young black girl is raped and beaten almost to death by two white men. The girl’s father murders the two white men. The hero of the novel, a young attorney defending the father, tells the jury in his closing remarks to close their eyes as they imagine of the rape and beating of a young girl in all of it’s disturbing and graphic details.

And then, after asking the jury to imagine each gruesome detail, he concludes: “Now, imagine that girl was white.”

***

Sometimes we become so focused on the politics, on the other-ness of others, on the special circumstances that we push aside our instinctive reaction. Perhaps, even, we become so desensitized that we forgot to feel anything at all. There is so much tragedy in the world; there is so much conflict. We cannot be expected to sort through it all.

Every story seems to have two sides. We assume that those committing horrific crimes have some justification. In an age where we gain most of our knowledge through the media, we often see truth as a point equidistant between the two stories competing for our attention. This is a dangerous tendency – and one that demonstrates a lack of imagination. Alternately, many become apathetic or refuse to engage in the struggle to find out the truth and make some stand. This is also dangerous.

We cannot refuse to judge the actions of our fellow beings – for all it takes for evil to succeed is for those who know better to be silent. And we cannot take this responsibility lightly. Before taking a stand, we have a moral responsibility to walk in the shoes of our fellow beings. And then we have a responsibility to take a stand.

This is often a messy business – but it is necessary.

The Israeli-Palestinian issue is a thorny one – and I do not believe that there are simple answers. But it is essential when judging the issues and actions involved to see them clearly for what they are. We can and should judge what “Charlie” Kuntar did for what it was – despicable, evil murders. And we should judge the pride he takes in his actions. Finally, we must in some way incorporate the seeming widespread support for Kuntar into our view of the various groups opposing Israel.

Last of all, we should remain aware that after his actions, Kuntar was not summarily executed – but was instead given the right of a trial. He was sentenced according to a judicial procedure and not sentenced to death. He still had rights, and even married in prison. He has been able to publish opinion pieces in the Palestinian press while in prison. This says something very important about Israeli society.

There are many stories to be told on both sides of this issue. But it is important that we grapple with the hard truths rather than settling for the easy symmetry of false analogies. We must struggle to attain some understanding and then act on our best judgments.

In Israeli society, this struggle is ongoing in a way that is almost unimaginable in the mainstream American press. The Israeli newspaper Haartz has editorialized in favor of releasing Kuntar, saying, in a demonstration of just this moral struggle:

Leaders will only end war if they are convinced that their constituents demand it. They will only make peace if they are convinced that families of the living care more about the living than they do about exacting pain on the other side.

Of all the issues in the Mideast thicket, normalization of relations, determination of borders, sovereignty of holy sites, freezing of settlements, the element that receives the least world attention is that of prisoners. Yet the issue is of paramount importance to large numbers of Palestinians and Lebanese, whose families love their imprisoned sons, daughters, and fathers no less than we do ours.

The issue must be of paramount importance for us as well.

Samir Kuntar is a monster. He may never have deserved a life.

But Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser, and Eldad Regev do. So do their families.

Free the monster. Let them live.

This constant struggle is the only salve in our times to the easy answers of fundamentalisms and overcompensating confidence of certitude.