Monday morning wasn’t so sunny for me. I woke up with a backache and slapped my alarm silly before deciding I should consider attending class again. I eventually decided to go ahead and roll out of bed and listen to the news.

As troubled as my own life is, though, it sounds like there are some folks in the Middle East who will be facing a lot more trouble.

See, the first thing I heard on the radio was someone thought it would be a good idea to shoot three missiles at a quadriplegic leaving a religious service.

That alone sounds like a bad idea, but worse so when the someone is the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, and the quadriplegic is the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, who was widely loved and praised among Palestinians. And of course, any story that includes the phrase “witnesses reported seeing remnants of his blood-soaked wheelchair in the street” adds a touch of doom and gloom to the expected aftermath.

The first reactions to the attack came quickly as members of Hamas stated Ariel Sharon had “opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head.” Yasser Arafat called for three days of mourning, and the White House called for “calm and restraint.” In the meantime, thousands took to the streets throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

Reporters near the protest described skies black with smoke as Palestinians gave physical form to the “volcano” many believed “the state of Palestine” would become. One reporter, whose name I missed, described the burning of tires along every street so forcefully that it sounded as if factories were working overtime to create more tires to burn.

At the same time, Israeli officials reacted to these events in their own way. A spokesman for the Israeli government, Avi Pazner said, “I believe the Middle East without Sheikh Yassin, in the long run, will be a better place to live.” Other officials seemed to claim they were forced to assassinate Yassin, including Ruth Maron who spoke for the Israeli military in stating that the Israeli Defense Force took action because the Palestinian Authority failed “time and time again to do it, and we have no other choice.”

Of course, a number of Palestinians endorsed a fatalist view of their own, including members of Izzedine al Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, who stated that “whoever decided to kill Yassin decided to kill hundreds of the Zionists.”

Back and forth various statements came throughout the day, but one thing was painfully obvious: the Israeli government had created one of the strongest provocations for violence among Palestinians in recent history. Even those in the Israeli government who claimed the assassination of such a popular leader would bring greater peace decided to close the barriers between Israeli territories and the West Bank and Gaza Strip to prevent further attacks.

Clearly, figures such as Ariel Sharon, who was found by his own government to be indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in a Lebanese refugee camp in 1982 and was subsequently removed from his office in 1983, could not be na‹ve enough to believe ordering the assassination of Sheikh Yassin would bring forth peace any time soon.

Sheikh Yassin himself was far from a harbinger of peace as he led Hamas and brought ideological legitimacy to murderous acts of terrorism.

He clearly belonged in prison, finishing up his time on Earth fulfilling the life sentence from which he was released by the Israeli government only seven years ago. Why he was not captured once again by a force that could afford to launch three missiles into a busy neighborhood killing seven others and wounding at least 16 more is a question we must ask of Mr. Sharon.

The time has come for us to ask why Sheikh Yassin was recognized as a terrorist who undermined the peace process by encouraging suicide bombings at key points throughout the struggle, yet Ariel Sharon has escaped reprisals as he continues to lead his country and his troops down a dead-end course of destruction for his own people and the Palestinians.

It is far from clear how the peace process will end and whether a two-state solution will finally bring a just end to the cycle of violence.

However, it is nearly certain Ariel Sharon will not be a part of that solution.

If the Israeli people have any hope to avoid the reprisals that now appear inevitable, they must recognize, as Kofi Annan has, that the action pushed forward Monday was illegal and immoral. Then, they must elect new leaders and bring Ariel Sharon to justice under international law. In the meantime, we must do more than sit idly by and ask our leaders to push for more than restraint.

We must work, even on less than sunny mornings, to inform ourselves about these issues and find leaders of our own who will become involved with a true peace process.