too bad for you that Israel can take care of itself!
nytimes.com
December 27, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
Bombing After Lull: Israel Still Believes the Worst Is Over
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
ERUSALEM, Dec. 26 — The day after the first suicide bomb attack in Israel in almost three months, senior Israeli officials were offering what might seem a paradoxical assessment: Despite the bombing, the worst of the terrorism is already over because Israel is winning its war against the terrorists.
Of course, as with every other aspect of the tormented politics of the Middle East, that is a matter of some dispute.
The basic official position of Israel is that since the Palestinian Authority has not been able, or willing, to dismantle what Israel calls the terrorist infrastructure, the Israelis have been doing the job themselves, using two techniques. One is to step up work on the barrier they are constructing along a twisted north-south axis on the West Bank; the other is to undertake almost constant nighttime military operations in the centers of militant activity, most recently in and around the town of Nablus.
"I believe we have passed the peak of the violent confrontation," Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli Army's chief of staff, said in an interview published in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot on Friday, giving credit to those policies.
General Yaalon went on to say that Hamas, the Islamic group responsible for most of the suicide bombings that have taken place during the three years of the current Palestinian uprising, had now chosen to stop such attacks, making a cease-fire possible within a matter of weeks. At the same time, security officials, cited by The Associated Press, said Israel would stop its policy of carrying out what it has called "targeted killings" of Hamas leaders.
"It is no coincidence that a group like Hamas decides to stop attacks within Israel," the general said. "It comes from the realization that their organization is in danger." Responsibility for Thursday's bombing was claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
A senior commander in Nablus, widely seen by Israelis as the most hostile Palestinian area, put it this way in an interview just on Thursday: "We've captured a lot of terrorists in the city, so the situation is not the way it was a year ago."
"Our operations are aimed at the people who design the attacks," he said, describing a series of nightly incursions that have been taking place in Nablus for the last 10 days or so.
"We've captured a lot of labs and a lot of engineers," he continued, meaning bomb-making labs and bomb-making engineers. "Now there are almost no bombs in Nablus."
He spoke just before the suicide bombing, which claimed four Israeli lives. The bomber was from a village near Nablus.
"The fact that he came from Nablus shows that security cannot be attained by unilateral measures," Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said Friday.
Israeli officials have offered positive assessments of the barrier and their raids before, but mostly in the last two and a half months, during which there were no suicide bombings against Israelis, and Israel undertook no "targeted killings" of what it regards as terrorist leaders.
But General Yaalon's comments came with the renewal of a sadly familiar ritual, part mourning, part retaliation, that follows terrorist attacks. On Friday, there were the funerals of the victims of the bus-stop bombing in a Tel Aviv suburb, including those of three soldiers, two of them young women and the other a young man. Meanwhile, Israeli troops destroyed the home of the suicide bomber, an 18-year-old man.
If the latest bombing was a reminder to Israelis of the worst days of the recent past, some, like General Yaalon, do not believe that it portends a full resurgence of terrorism. Israel may not be able to stop every attack, the reasoning goes, but the calm of the last months took place because Israel was able to stop most of the numerous terror attempts that were made. The fact that Thursday's attack was not carried out by Hamas is in its way a hopeful sign for the Israelis, who see the group's relative inaction as a product of their policy of targeted killings and not some change of heart.
Palestinian spokesmen, by contrast, say the relative lull that had lasted until Thursday was a result of to restraint among the militant Palestinian groups, not to Israeli military operations.
"I think there were no suicide bombings because these factions are for a while trying to give a chance," Ghassan Khatib, the minister of labor in the Palestinian Authority, said in an interview on Friday. "My view is that these factions can carry out suicide bombings, unfortunately, whenever they want."
In addition, the Palestinians say, the constant Israeli pressure only intensifies the hatred that prompts the attacks in the first place.
That is the fundamental question: Will the measures taken by Israel to stop extremist attacks have long-term success, or will they, in the long term, lead to more violence?
For the Israelis, the likelihood that the measures aimed at stopping terror will produce more terror is the crux of the dilemma. An example: A few days ago, in the operation in Nablus, a 5-year-old boy, Muhammad Naim Isryda, was shot dead, and Palestinian witnesses said Israeli troops, who are commonly described as shooting indiscriminately, were responsible. The senior commander in Nablus hotly disputed the Palestinian account on Thursday.
"There are a lot of stories like this," he said, "and most of the time you can't prove it, because they bury the body before there is an investigation."
A postmortem examination of the bullet, the commander said, could determine who killed the boy.
"There were three bullets shot in this incident, and I can assure you that no Israeli soldier fired in the direction of that boy," he said.
But the boy is dead, and as long as the Israeli raids continue, there will almost certainly be more like him.
"It will add to the anger and to the desperation," Mr. Erekat warned. "And desperation will lead to desperate acts, and desperate acts will lead to more bullets, and that's very unfortunate."
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