Suicide Bombing In Tel Aviv

From the NY Times:

"A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up amid a crowd of young Israelis waiting to enter a nightclub near the Tel Aviv beachfront Friday night, killing at least four, wounding dozens and threatening to shatter a truce that had largely been holding.

The bombing was the first major attack since Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, called for an end to violence at a Feb. 8 summit meeting in Egypt.

The bombing presented a major challenge for Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas, and it endangered efforts to end more than four years of violence and renew peace negotiations. Each leader huddled with security officials into the early hours of Saturday."

Ha'Aretz reports:

"The Damascus-based leadership of the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad Saturday claimed responsibility for the Friday Tel Aviv suicide bombing that killed four Israelis. In a videotape made prior to the attack, the bomber, Abdullah Badran, a resident of the West Bank town of Deir al Ghusun, declared that the bombing was intended to do harm to the Palestinian Authority, which on February 8 declared a cease-fire with Israel. ...

Acting on orders from Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to track down and punish those responsible, PA security forces Saturday arrested two suspected militants in connection with the suicide bombing, Palestinian Interior Minister Nasser Yousef said."

The bombing is of course appalling. But it is also predictable: whenever progress is being made towards peace, some Palestinian group that does not want peace decides to try to destroy the peace process by doing something dreadful, hoping that the Palestinian Authority will not feel able to move against fellow Palestinians and/or that the Israelis will react harshly. Altogether too often, one or the other of these actually happens, and as a result the peace process, such as it is, gets put on hold. While both reactions are understandable, their predictability allows rejectionists among the Palestinians to destroy the peace process at will, which is a really, really bad thing. The likelihood that any imaginable peace will satisfy everyone capable of mounting a serious attack on Israel is basically zero, and allowing those people to exercise a veto over the peace process essentially means that it will never succeed.

The good news, so far, is that neither side has played into the hands of the terrorists yet: the PA has arrested people and seems, at this early stage, to be in earnest, and the Israelis, having raided the bomber's village and arrested five people, seem inclined to exercise restraint while they wait and see what the PA will do. I hope that the PA is moving seriously against those responsible, that the Israelis are giving them all the assistance they can behind the scenes, and that the Palestinian people decide not to give the PA grief about going after fellow Palestinians. This is the first serious test of the new Palestinian leadership. I really hope they pass.

Comments

[Stan LS]

Good post! Also

A senior Hezbollah operative told two top Palestinian militants in the West Bank that he recruited the suicide bomber who blew himself up outside a Tel Aviv nightclub in an attack that killed four Israelis, the militants said Saturday.

The militants, local leaders of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, said the operative, Kais Obeid, called them after the bombing and asked them to claim responsibility for the attack.

The two militants, one speaking from Ramallah and the other from the Balata refugee camp near Nablus, said they turned down the request because they feared they would be targeted by Israeli or Palestinian security forces.

Source: AP

[hilzoy]

StanLS: Yes, I saw that AP story. The Ha'Aretz story about Palestinian Islamic Jihad having claimed responsibility was later, which is why I went with it.

[blondebutbright]

Israel is just as - if not more - guilty of playing into the hands of terrorists. The terrorists acting in the name of Palestine are not a recognized part of the Palestinian authority, while Israel's frequent raids on innocent victims are officially supported. Palestine struggles to stop a concealed extremist force, and Israel coordinates terror campaigns on an approved basis. Which side has it “easier” in showing restraint when the suicide bombers continue?

[Timmy the Wonder Dog]

Israel is just as - if not more - guilty

Third post, not bad. If peace breaks out will Israel be just as, if not more, responsible.

[hilzoy]

blondebutbright: I included Israel in my post: one of the reactions that the people who do these things hope to provoke is a disproportionate response by Israel. I think that until recently, both sides were playing into this: the PA under Arafat was using the fact that the various factions were not under its control to obscure the fact that it was (in my judgment) not trying hard enough to control them; the Israelis, for their part, seemed to take every incident as a failure of the PA. This was compounded by the fact that neither side trusted the other at all, and both sides had (imho) good reason not to trust the other.

That's why the fact that neither side is doing its usual thing in response to this is so heartening. I just hope it holds.

[Edward]

Just skimming this right now (busy at the gallery), but hasn't Israel pointed the finger at Syria?

[hilzoy]

Apparently they're blaming Syria for harboring Islamic Jihad.

[Stan LS]

Palestine struggles to stop a concealed extremist force

Concealed? Hilarious! These groups hold public rallies. Very concealed!

while Israel's frequent raids on innocent victims are officially supported.

That's whom Israel raids? Innocent victims? Nice.

Which side has it “easier” in showing restraint when the suicide bombers continue?

I'll bite. Which?

blondebutbright

Heeeeeeeh.

[Stan LS]

From another AP article:

Israel blamed Syria and Islamic Jihad. Palestinian security officials said Hezbollah was to blame. Both Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah receive backing from Damascus.

In contrast to the dozens of previous suicide bombings, no celebrations were held in the West Bank on Saturday and militant groups didn't hang the customary posters of congratulations at the bomber's home.

[felixrayman]

That's whom Israel raids? Innocent victims? Nice.

Israel destroys the homes of the families of suicide bombers without any evidence that they were involved in any crime. Nice.

[naten]

I do wonder how this always seem to occur just as peace is about to beak out as always. One side declares that it's going to build a little more...other side bombs wait for outrage... crack down ,pleas for moderation and repeat

[bob mcmanus]

I remain skeptical and pessimistic.

[praktike]

"Israel destroys the homes of the families of suicide bombers without any evidence that they were involved in any crime. Nice."

Actually, I think they just ended that policy.

[felixrayman]

Actually, I think they just ended that policy.

They end it from time to time.

[Donald Johnson]

I think Hilzoy's comment "Whenever there is progress is being made towards peace, some Palestinian group that does not want peace decides to destroy the peace process by doing something appalling" is true in this case, but an appallingly inaccurate but predictable generalization about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in general. Some of the previous "ceasefires" during the past few years amounted to a period of time when the Palestinians didn't attack Israelis, but Israelis continued to attack Palestinians. The "cease-fire" ends in the press when an act of Palestinian terrorism occurs, not when Israeli troops kill Palestinians. I agree that isn't what happened here, but it is what has happened in the recent past.
And if Israel wanted a just peace (as opposed to a successful landgrab with no violence), they wouldn't have continued to build settlements.

That's the general problem with coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the US--it's generally couched in terms of Palestinian terrorism and possible Israeli over-reactions, when the reality is often (not always) the reverse. And I think that's a metaphor for the way the entire history (going back to the earliest Zionist days) is described in the US. Israeli and Zionist crimes and misdeeds are sanitized or condemned as "overreactions" to something Arab terrorists have done. And yes, I recognize that I'm going on a generalized rant here, not specifically about what hilzoy said.

The typical American liberal has spent decades whitewashing Israel's portion of blame for the conflict. You finally had general recognition last year that Israel deliberately committed an act of ethnic cleansing in at least the second half of the 1948 war, but what I found more interesting was how antiseptic the treatment of this story was. The spirit seems to have been "get this story out of the way quickly" and move on. What's really interesting is how an event so huge and clearly important was so easily concealed for decades. How would people have reacted to the conflict if they had honestly faced the fact that many of the Palestinians really had been deliberately ethnically cleansed? It started coming out with the first edition of Morris's book in 1988, but it was quickly sanitized. It's not as if the Palestinians didn't know what had happened, but what they said didn't count. And after decades of lies and misinformation in the mainstream press about the genesis of the Palestinian refugee problem, there was no soul-searching, no questioning about what this tiny little oversight might say about biases might effect how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is covered.

If you read some of the revisionist Israelis historians (Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, Meron Benvenisti, Benny Morris), I don't see how you can conclude anything other than that the leadership of both sides has been to blame from the very beginning. You've got an Israeli Zionist condemning fellow Zionists for their racist attitudes and violence towards Arabs as early as 1891. You have Palestinians reacting to Zionist plans with pogroms that slaughter Jews in the 1920's. You have Herzl and Ben Gurion and other Zionists fantasizing about "forced transfer" of Arabs, Ben Gurion defending its morality. You have Arabs launching the 1948 war, and Israelis deliberately forcing many Palestinians off their land for demographic reasons, followed by an ethnic cleansing of Jews in Arab countries. And so on up to the present. And the way the whole history is usually presented is that Israel "wants peace", but Arab fanatics keep interfering, giving Israel an excuse to over-react. From what I've read, there haven't been many true peace-seekers on either side, just leaders seizing as much as they could through any means they could successfully employ.

[Timmy the Wonder Dog]

A sea change, maybe the PA will destroy the homes now; progress comes slowly but it comes.

Palestinians expressed anger Saturday at an overnight suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed four Israelis and threatened a fragile truce, a departure from former times when they welcomed attacks on their Israeli foes. Official condemnations and denials were followed by public anger toward the perpetrators as Israeli blamed Syria and the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack. The Palestinians pointed fingers at the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah. Syria denied the allegations. ...

In contrast to the dozens of previous suicide bombings, no celebrations were held in the West Bank on Saturday and militant groups didn't hang the customary posters of congratulations at the bomber's home.

[hilzoy]

Donald Johnson: To be clear, I was just talking about this particular incident, and a broader pattern that I think it falls into. I wasn't trying to assign blame for the conflict as a whole. As regards this particular incident: it was an act of terror by a Palestinian group. Not surprisingly, if it falls into a pattern at all, as I think it does, it's a pattern of acts of terror by Palestinian groups. I think there is such a pattern, going back at least to the rejectionists' (successful) attempt to scuttle the Rogers plan in, I think, 1970 by hijacking jets to Jordan, which ended up provoking the Jordanian civil war.

Part of what gets me about this is: the only reason it works is because of the predictability of both sides' responses. That's what allows them to be played like fiddles. And that's why I was very glad that they were not reacting predictably on this occasion.

Had I been writing about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict more generally, I would of course have written about Israel's settlement policy, which I think is horrible, and various other things on both sides. My general view, for what it's worth, is that both sides have acted in ways that are understandable but still both very wrong and very much not in their own long term interests; and that trying to pick a 'side' to be on, other than the side of those Israelis and Palestinians who just want the conflict to end so that they can get on with their lives, is a losing proposition. I tend to think that the Palestinians have been particularly badly served by their leadership (i.e., more so than the Israelis) (where 'badly served' is about those leaders' doing what's best for their people; it's not a moral comment.)

[Timmy the Wonder Dog]

Israel's settlement policy, which I think is horrible

I agree with hilzoy on several counts [check pulse and pinch oneself]. :)

[Donald Johnson]

Sorry hilzoy, I overreacted. Anyway, I agree with your later statement.

Incidentally, even this latest terrorist act may fit the pattern I mentioned, one in which months of Israeli violence goes by with little condemnation by most of the US, and then a Palestinian terrorist attack occurs and it is a major threat to peace and a test for the Palestinian leadership. I agree with the latter--I just think that Israel is judged by a much easier standard in the US.