On the 28th of April, Israel fired missiles at targets in Beit Hanoun. In the process, a woman and four of her children were killed. The case has garnered considerable media coverage.

Israel was quick to respond, claiming that their missiles killed only the militants. The civilians, as their preliminary investigation finds, were killed by a "secondary" explosion when material carried by the militants detonated. Al Jazeera reported a different account from Palestinians on the ground and the leading human rights group B'Tselem has questioned the IDF's account. They suggest the "secondary" explosion also came from an IDF missile.

This has become a familiar sight: civilians are killed, guilt is asserted, investigations are demanded. You may recall similar cases. A family's death on the beach in Gaza in the summer of 2006 became a momentary firestorm as Palestinians sought to pin it on Israeli artillery and Israelis claimed it was Palestinian explosives buried in the sand. Mohammed Al-Dura, killed in Gaza in 2000, has become an enduring symbol of Israeli aggression for some and of Palestinian deception for others.

In both cases -- and again with the recent attack in Beit Hanoun -- establishing the truth has become a battleground over the nature of the conflict and its actors. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert blamed the deaths on irresponsible Palestinian militants operating in urban areas:

"our sorrow is sincere and more real than the fake remorse of the terrorist organizations that expose their citizens to such injuries." (Ha'aretz)

In this frame, responsibility has little to do with what happened on April 28th. Olmert is evoking a narrative of the conflict in which these events merely express the character of Israel and Palestinian militants -- the former benevolent and remorseful, the latter vicious. An event that could open the ground for an examination of the conflict becomes an opportunity to reinscribe old myths.

This is a well-established pattern. The family on the beach in Gaza was supposed to be killed, as the IDF claimed, by explosives set by Palestinian militants who had no respect for the lives of the civilians who might be using the beach. Likewise, it would be claimed that Mohammad Al-Dura was not killed in fire from IDF positions, but was deliberately killed by Palestinians in a callous attempt to "make" a martyr for their cause.

I'm not trying to make an argument about what actually happened in these events. What I'm trying to get at is the subtext, the way these cases become moments of articulation separated from the events from which they arise. For those who don't follow the conflict regularly -- and even for many who do -- its character is often defined in these moments. They become a kind of shorthand that embodies vast narratives of aggression and persecution, justice and injustice. What struck me about Olmert's statement is the way in which it sought to speak around the events, to connect to this shorthand within which the problems appear already resolved.

What's at work, here, is not the establishment of right by truth, but the assertion of truth by right. An appeal is not made to truth as a value, but to value as truth. We -- that is, the West, civilization -- are supposed to connect to the essence of this truth, posited as a shared narrative. An assumption is made that our shared values can suspend the questions of right and wrong. I say "suspend" because the questions are not resolved through interrogation or examination. They are resolved simply by claiming the position of right.

In this respect, it's important to call for investigations, to demand that truth be established through investigation and not merely asserted by recourse to mythical right. But I wonder if somehow we'll still miss the point. Even if an investigation is called, it will likely end inconclusively. In the process, another marginal case will have been placed in the unfortunate position of speaking for the conflict, invested with narratives which suspend more questions than they answer.