Editorial: Little hope of peace as the killing spirals

The Israeli Government strikes again, and now its people await the Palestinian rejoinder. Nothing is more certain than that in days or weeks or months the assassination of the Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, will be followed by some dreadful reprisal, probably another suicide bomb in a place chosen to cause maximum carnage. The assassination was itself a reprisal for a suicide bombing that killed 10 Israeli civilians at the port of Ashdod last week.

So continues the deadly tit-for-tat that has characterised much of Israel's short history but particularly the three years since the collapse of the last sustained peace effort. It is hard to see that either side is making any progress with present methods. Each time a Palestinian militant group delivers terror to Israeli citizens it only hardens their conviction that any concessions to the Palestinian cause would leave them less secure. And each time Israel responds by taking the life of a militant leader it only gives to Palestinian minds another martyr to their cause.

Sheikh Yassin seems a particularly bad target in that respect. An ageing cleric confined to a wheelchair, he was by common description a "spiritual" leader of Hamas rather than an active commander or even a strategist for its methods. If he was inspiring for the cause from the pulpit he probably will inspire it even more so in death.

None of these assassinations adds anything to the security of Israel. Each militant leader is replaced by another and each extra-legal killing by Israel only reinforces Palestinian nationalism. It is easy to see why. State-sponsored murder is justifiable only between nations at war. When the enemy of a state is supposedly a citizen of it, criminal justice should apply.

That is the mistake Israel and its apologists make when they claim legitimacy for its policy of assassination from the international war on terror. True, the United States may care little for due process when it spots suspected terrorists in the Yemeni desert or anywhere else outside its borders. But the US claims to be in a state of war with an external foe. Israel regards Palestinians within the occupied territories as subject to Israeli law. It cannot deny them sovereign statehood and at same time treat them as enemies it can execute without trial.

The two sides in Israel are equally to blame but it is reasonable in any conflict within a state to expect more of the side that holds political power. Israel has the power to provide space for the national aspirations of Palestinians if it chooses. So far the terms it has offered - limited self-government in pockets of the territories occupied since 1967 - have not satisfied Palestinian aspirations and the carnage continues.

Israelis are understandably wary of satisfying aspirations which they still believe stop at nothing short of the displacement of the Jewish state. But the Palestinian leadership has said it accepts Israel's right to exist and Israel's present Government says it accepts a degree of Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has announced a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which perversely may explain the latest assassination. Both sides have increased the level of violence in preparation for the withdrawal, as though each wanted to give the other a parting message.

Israel is also planning a partial withdrawal from the West Bank, once it completes a security fence that further intrudes on Palestinian communities in places and which, in any event, is proving porous to suicide bombers. The retaliatory assassination of Sheikh Yassin in a place Israel plans to relinquish is probably a warning that it will not hesitate to take such reprisals from a Palestinian state if it is a launching pad for terrorist attacks.

It does not augur well for the two-state solution, or the US "roadmap" to that end. But nothing in this vengeful region gives much hope of a lasting solution.