Nidra Poller’s comments:
Presuming that Israel is blamed for the failure to conclude a peace treaty based on the everyone-knows-two-state-solution, the illustration suggests that no solution can erase the sin of “killing” Mohamed al Dura.
The father is trying to explain to his son that an Arab leader makes peace with Israel over the boy’s dead body.
The images of the father and son are, curiously, Westernized. It took me a while to realize they were meant to be Jamal and Mohamed Al Dura. Then I recognized the wall. The halo of bullet holes.
But this “reconstructed” wall has something like three times more bullet holes than the original video. As if the blood libel has increased in fury over the past 16 years.
Conclusion: The Economist, a Western publication, defends a primitive, tribal notion of relations between groups and nations: unforgiving, unforgivable revenge.
But the illustrator did not think to reproduce the declaration scrawled in red over the heads of the al Duras in the original version: “What is taken by violence can only be taken back by violence.”
[RL: That is also the slogan behind of Arafat’s “No” to a negotiated settlement at Camp David 2000, and his launching of the Oslo Jihad in late 2000.]
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