I was reminded of a comment made by Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilani that Palestinians risked a “shoah,” the Hebrew word for a big disaster and for the Nazi Holocaust. While his colleagues insisted to the international media that he had not meant “genocide” the events of the past few weeks would lead us to believe otherwise.

In a fantastic article today on the Huffington Post website, David Bromwich puts forward a fantastic argument to the, as he calls it, “Bush-Sharon doctrine” of “if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction.”

What prompts the fantasy that you can “kill all the terrorists” without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed. They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are people in the world — not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions — who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers.

“Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” In every culture and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper’s nest are understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse than not killing the one.

Yet to put it like that brings up the revaluation of state terror that entered our language with the Sharon-Bush doctrine, first propounded in 2001-02. According to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction. This, no matter what the impediments on your freedom of movement, no matter how unconscious you may be of the existence of the terrorist, no matter how much your toleration of him may have been driven by fear.

On this reasoning, a one-ton bomb that kills a Hamas leader in an apartment complex and kills twelve other persons, half of them children — that bomb is not guilty of the deaths of the other victims. If, because of that bomb and those deaths, a certain number of Arab teenagers in Palestine and elsewhere resolve to become suicide bombers, that is not the fault of the country that dropped the bomb. The new terrorists whom the destruction brought forth, like the old ones it disposed of, worked with too narrow a conception of necessity. The world itself is wrong, according to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, when it says that you can’t literally kill all the terrorists without killing an unendurable number of others in the process. If that is the way the world thinks, Sharon and Bush and their followers maintain, there is nothing to be done about it. What if the world is full of raving anti-Semites and anti-Americans? We must get on with our work in spite of them. Strength lies in keeping to the plan with supreme resoluteness.

Humanity is the only possible answer to this kind of injustice. Look beyond the religion that they practice and ask yourselves:

If my city was under someone else’s control and my freedom could be taken away at any moment.

If I was unable to travel to a doctor to get medical care or send my children to school for an education because the schools and hospitals keep being blown up.

If the only people that I could count on to provide safety were called terrorists by others and thereby unable to get any assistance from the world.

And whenever I raise my voice, I am either jailed or beaten.

Tell me if you would only be throwing rocks at the people that did that to you?