Opinion: Death by hands of hate

TALLAHASSEE -- At our temple, as perhaps at other synagogues Saturday, the rabbi's sermon concerned a young Palestinian man who had lost his life saving a Jewish child from drowning, how Palestinians throughout Israel and the occupied territories had hailed him as a hero, and how his uncle had remarked that the people of that tortured land could make peace if only the politicians would let them.

The people, said the rabbi, must insist that the politicians let them.

But that same day, perhaps even as he spoke, a hail of gunfire took the life of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy whose terror-filled last moments were shown on television and in newspapers throughout the world. Those photographs need to be seared in the world's memory and into its conscience just like another scene that comes to mind.

That other memory is of a small boy, his hands raised, marching out of the Warsaw ghetto under the guns of Nazi stormtroopers. We don't know his name, or to a certainty, his fate. We do know the name of the boy pictured dying in Gaza City, and we know his fate. He was Mohammed Jamal Aldura, and he died by the side of his father, who was trying desperately to shield him. No less than any Holocaust victim, he died of hate. It is immaterial which side's bullets actually killed him, or how he came to be in harm's way. That this happened on the Jewish New Year, a day devoted to prayers for peace for Israel and for the whole world, was the ultimate profanity.

The Jews blame the Arabs and the Arabs blame the Jews for the violence that continued through Monday, but it is indisputable what lit the fuse. It was Ariel Sharon's deliberately provocative visit to the Temple Mount, a flashpoint of religious passion, at a time of intense crisis in the peace talks. The blood of everyone who subsequently died is on his hands but not on his alone. It is on the hands of everyone, whether in Israel or elsewhere, who encourages his poisonous influence on Israeli politics. Sharon is exploiting the same wellsprings of hate as Slobodan Milosevic, and should he return to power in Israel the United States should treat him as no less of a pariah.

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