Barbarism squared.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Middle East violence - Brief Article

Despair.

There is no other word I can find to describe my reaction to the violence that exploded in Israel and Palestine at the end of March.

Just as it seemed that finally there was a flicker of hope with the Saudi peace plan, a Palestinian suicide bomber destroyed a Passover celebration in Netanya, killing at least twenty-six Jews and wounding 100 others. When I turned on CNN and saw the carnage, I was almost physically ill. Suicide bombings are utterly unjustifiable. The intentional killing of innocent people, and the rejoicing over such killing, should offend every moral conscience. It certainly does mine.

Then Ariel Sharon responded in his own barbaric fashion. The Israeli invasion, with its brazen brutality, took its ghastly toll, and it was guaranteed to maximize the feelings of resentment, helplessness, and rage that wire the suicide bombings.

The only solace I could find was in the courageous, nonviolent acts of the international solidarity movement that interposed itself between the Israeli forces and the Palestinians. We need more acts of such creative, aggressive pacifism.

In this issue, David Rabin reports on one of these: a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace protest in Tel Aviv. We also present you with an account of Israeli refuseniks--those soldiers who will not follow the orders of Ariel Sharon. And we offer you a painfully honest essay by Eetta Prince-Gibson, an Israeli activist and journalist who has almost lost hope.

To top things off, there is a portrait of the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. Our interviewer, Nathalie Handal, spoke with him a few days before the eruption of violence and then called him back later for his reaction. His perspective, after fifty years of poetry and exile, is invaluable.

Ted Rall illustrated the cover of our December issue. As you may remember, it was the cartoon of a guy at his computer with the...