Amid all the propaganda and spin regarding Israel's unlawful, unwarranted attack against Syria, the Financial Times puts things excellently in perspective with an editorial comment entitled "Bombing Syria." Please thank the newspaper - it only takes a minute, and your support goes a long way.
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The editorial comment is reproduced in full below:
Sunday's air raid near Damascus was the first time in three decades that Israel has struck directly at Syria. In those three decades, following the armistice reached after the 1973 October or Yom Kippur war between Israel and the Arabs, not a shot has been fired over the Israeli-Syrian border, even though Israel continues to occupy Syria's Golan Heights. Even in normal times this change in the rules of the game would be a matter for concern. But these are not normal times.
With deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, growing chaos in postwar Iraq, tension over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme and uncertainty over whether the Bush administration wants further regime change in the region, the Middle East is a seething cauldron. In these circumstances, Israel's attack is not only contrary to international law; it also risks aggravating regional instability.
Israel says it is reacting to the latest Palestinian suicide bombing, in a Haifa restaurant on Saturday, which killed 19 people. Obscene as that outrage was, its relationship to the Syrian target struck in reprisal is far from evident.
Israel, echoed by Washington, says Damascus continues to harbour some of the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This is broadly true, even though the Syrian government has forced them to adopt a lower profile. It is also true that Hamas leaders are to be found in residence in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Qatar. But the point - well known to Israel - is that the recruitment and operational decisions of the Islamist groups take place within the occupied territories, including zones under complete Israeli control. Put another way, if Syria were suddenly transformed into Switzerland, the problems faced by the Israeli occupation would continue.
All evidence suggests, furthermore, that what Israel bombed was a derelict site long abandoned by a defunct Palestinian diaspora group - totally unconnected to the suicide bombers.
Since the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has tried to equate the scourge of itinerant Jihadi terrorists with what essentially is a struggle between two nationalisms over sharing the Holy Land - even comparing the beleaguered Yassir Arafat to Osama bin Laden. Similarly, Mr Sharon and his allies in Washington have tried to establish that Syria presents the same sort of threat as Saddam Hussein's Iraq was said to do.
While there can be no compromise with suicide bombers, these propositions should be rejected. On the one hand, while they may serve the Sharon agenda, they shift the focus away from the strategies needed to resolve peacefully the problems arising from Israel's continuing occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land. Syria, at the same time, has provided invaluable intelligence on al-Qaeda and Islamist terror networks; and the west right now needs that more than a further deterioration in regional stability.