Israel's "Next Logical Step"

By Ali Abunimah

"The next logical step" for the Israeli government "will have to be a decision whether to target the top political leadership" of Hamas. So said an Israeli official quoted in The Jerusalem Post. Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party and chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, echoed the call, arguing that "There's no difference between those who wear a suicide suit and a diplomat's suit." Following a cabinet meeting on 10 February, Israel's Interior Minister Shimon Sheetrit specifically called for the execution of Ismail Haniyeh, the democratically-elected Hamas prime minister, and added that for good measure "We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map."

Last September, Yossi Alpher, the co-founder of the European Union-funded publication Bitterlemons, wrote an article advocating "decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and 'civilian.'" Alpher, a former special adviser to Israel's defense minister Ehud Barak when the latter was prime minister, worried that Israel would "pay a price in terms of international condemnation," for "targeting legally elected Hamas officials who won a fair election," but that overall it would be well worth it.

Executing democratically-elected leaders may require more chutzpah than even Israel has shown, but the possibility and its disastrous consequences have to be taken seriously given Israel's track record. Israel executed Hamas' elderly, quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound co-founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, followed shortly afterwards by the execution his successor as the movement's leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

Aside from the United States, Israel is the only country where the murder of foreign leaders is openly debated as a policy option...