In Israel, an area twice the size of Manhattan was reduced to rubble by fire. Buildings, brush, homes, businesses, forests — all fell to the untrammeled scourge of fire.
Israel’s leaders believe that while the fires began in conditions of extreme dryness, some of them were stoked by Palestinian arsonists. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls this terrorism. Pyro-terrorism, if you will. In this he is correct. He is wrong, however, to let his emotions run away with him when he says:
“The severity of these cases is not equal in severity to other terror attacks because it is so powerful and it draws on the forces of nature to sow death and destruction.”
Terror, like pain and happiness, cannot be measured. There may be perverse distinctions in the “creativity” behind terror, but not in severity. Ramming planes into skyscrapers, ramming cars into crowds, blowing up cafes, throwing wheelchair-bound people overboard, blowing up airplanes, beheading people, or lighting forests on fire — the relative “creativity” of terrorists can be debated. To what end, we don’t know. But distinctions can be drawn.
Not so with severity. The taking of an innocent life for political purposes is not subject to degrees of severity because the worth of a human life is infinite. Just as there are no degrees of infinity, there is no “greater” or “lesser” loss to terror in terms of humanity. Certain terror attacks take more lives and other attacks take less. These numbers measure political consequences, size of compensation (if any) to survivors and family, and the dimensions of the required response. But they do not measure the human loss. That is incalculable. Whether terrorists intend to murder (or actually murder) one victim or 3,000 victims is irrelevant morally. The scale of humanity is infinite.
The idea that the harnessing of nature for terrorist purposes makes the terrorism more severe is not only an inaccurate argument. It is a dangerous one. The minute one type or method of terrorism is “more severe” than another type, that means that some terrorism is not so severe. This follows as night the day. If something is more, something else is less.
There couldn’t be a more damaging message about terrorism. There is no such thing as morally unequal terror attacks. Upon reflection, Prime Minister Netanyahu will no doubt realize that, with his emotionally understandable but invalid perspective, he undermines his own steady, severe stance against all terrorism.
None of this means that if arsonists are caught and convicted, they should not face the full measure of the law. None of this means that if anti-Israel hatred caused or exacerbated some of these fires, there should not be severe political consequences.
At the same time, there is room for hope that, to some extent, the Palestinian Authority seems to have condemned these fires and volunteered to help put them out.
As the required interval passes, Israel will replant, re-green and revive these blackened areas.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
