Pushing Back the Boundaries

For Israel, as for few nations on Earth, terrorism is no series of abstract bulletins but a series of bloodbaths so real that it brings tears to peoples’ eyes and anguish to their faces time and again. For Israel, as for few nations on Earth, retribution seems the only hope of ending the bloodbaths.

But retribution that rests on Israeli fighter planes plucking an unarmed executive jet from the sky and forcing it to land so that its passengers could be put through a kind of terrorist lineup went too far. It was excessive, the more so because the plane was occupied not by terrorists but by Syrian politicians on their way home from a conference of radical Arab states in Tripoli. Syrians have enough bad habits as it is without being taught another, without being led to believe that Israeli executive jets might be fair game for Syrian fighters.

Israeli intelligence apparently had hoped to find Abu Nidal, wanted for masterminding the massacres in air terminals at Rome and Vienna. It was a bum steer. The Syrians were not likely to have been thinking kindly thoughts of Israel even before they were forced down, but they were not identifiable terrorists.

The risk, as always, is that in pushing back the boundaries of search-and-seizure in the fight against terrorism, the Israelis may have pushed back the boundaries for terrorism as well. Ironically, no nation would feel the lash of new dimensions of terrorism more cruelly than Israel itself.