STOP THE SUICIDES

Peace in the Middle East doubtless will involve a compromise in which the Palestinians finally disavow violence, Israel gives up land and both sides agree on the coexistence of a Palestinian and a Jewish state. But mere exhortations to both sides to lay down their arms makes no more sense than did a plea a half-century ago by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, that the Jews and the Arabs stop fighting and come together in the true Christian spirit.

One of the biggest impediments to progress is the horrible but successful Palestinian weapon of suicide bombing. Israel can no more give ground while confronting daily suicide bombings than the United States could have been expected to compromise with terrorism while Osama bin Laden’s network plotted further attacks from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Who can doubt that suicide bombing has succeeded? The Palestinians certainly think so. The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reported from Gaza City in Monday’s paper that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, the largest of the militant Islamic movements there, boasted that Palestinians celebrate their casualties as martyrs while the Jews cry “every time a drop of their blood is spilled.” The sheikh went on: “They are living in fear and panic now. We have broken through all their borders and fences. If they use force against us, it will only make us stronger.”

Stopping suicide bombing is difficult. How do you deter someone who wants to die, who seeks martyrdom as life’s greatest honor and a key to an eternity of peace and pleasure? In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, traces Islamic martyrdom back to the year 680 A.D., when Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of the Caliph Ali, died at Karbala in southern Iraq. Except for the Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II, suicide bombing in modern times has been an Islamic strategy, practiced wholesale by Iranian Shiites in their revolution in 1979 and in the war with Iraq in 1980-88. Mr. Gerecht says those conflicts “electrified and made modern the concepts of martyrdom and holy war throughout the Islamic world,” spreading the concept that martyrs’ deaths can “bring honor and paradise to themselves, their families, and Muslims everywhere.” Recent meetings of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference rejected moves to formally disapprove the random suicide bombing campaign by Palestinian groups.

How to stop the suicide bombings? Some Israelis suggested the harsh measures that were employed by the ancient Romans – announcing that an entire town would be wiped out in retaliation or destroying the entire family of an enemy fighter. Instead, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, like President Bush in Afghanistan, chose a military offensive to wipe out the terrorist network at its source. In both cases, many innocent civilians have been caught in the crossfire.

Mr. Bush now has touched on another method. He has called on Iran to stop sending lethal modern weapons to the Palestinians, weapons that make the suicide bombers enormously more deadly. And he has demanded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein stop sending $25,000 bonuses to the families of the bombers. More must be done to halt the broad foreign support enjoyed by the suicide bombing campaign. Leaders of moderate Arab nations, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, must stop honoring the bombers as martyrs and rewarding their families with gifts of cash and new apartments.

Until the leaders of the Islamic world expose suicide bombing of innocent civilians as a perversion of one of the world’s great religions, there can be little hope of a compromise that will bring peace in the Middle East.