ISRAEL: To Israelis, the very concept of a "peace process" seems irrelevant given the recent bloodshed, writes David Horovitz, in Jerusalem
The Israeli government was always wary of the "hudna" - the intifada ceasefire declared by most Palestinian factions less than two months ago, which was summarily curtailed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad yesterday. The very name hardly inspired confidence: the term "hudna" had been used by ancient Islamic regimes for a short-term truce against a stronger enemy, to be employed as a tactic to build up forces in order to subsequently vanquish the foe.
While ordinary Israelis packed the restaurants, sent their kids into the streets to play and shopped without too much fear through July and into August - for the first time in almost three years of intifada confrontation - the politicians and the defence establishment watched and worried. Their concern: that the Islamic extremists were using their "time-out" - and the corresponding Israeli time-out from attempts to assassinate them - to regroup, re-arm and prepare for further attacks.
Following the Israeli air strike on a white station-wagon in Gaza City's Rimal neighbourhood yesterday, which killed the Hamas leader Ismail Abu Shanab and two of his bodyguards, the people of Israel, it seems certain, are about to find out how accurate those government fears have been. Hamas, and its smaller sister organisation, Islamic Jihad, along with the extremist offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, the Al-Aqsa Brigades (which never joined the ceasefire in the first place), say they are determined to revive their campaign of suicide bombings and shootings with, if anything, still more intensity than during the bloody 33 months that preceded the collapsed ceasefire. "The people of Israel will pay the price," Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader and effective patriarch of the suicide bombers, warned chillingly yesterday.
Israeli officials said last night that they were braced for such an onslaught, and that it was factored into their decision to kill Mr Abu Shanab. Israel could no longer afford to exercise restraint, they said. Not after the suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem on Tuesday that killed 20 Israelis and injured 100, more than 30 of whom were still in hospital yesterday, seven in serious condition. Not when the Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, had failed over the seven or so weeks of ceasefire to honour his commitment, under the US-backed "road-map", to put the extremists out of business - by arresting the bombers and closing down their weapons factories.
Hamas has been asserting that Tuesday's bombing was a revenge attack - retaliation for the killing by the Israeli army of Mohammad Sidr, an Islamic Jihad leader, in Hebron a week ago - and that, as such, it somehow did not constitute a breach of the ceasefire. The Israeli government rejects the reasoning: Sidr, it claims, had organised attacks in which more than 20 people were killed in recent months, and was holed up in his bomb-factory in the process of preparing further killings. Since the PA was plainly disinclined to arrest him, the Israelis say, they had an obligation to do so. At the same time, they add, Israel had been attempting to bolster support for Mr Abbas among ordinary Palestinians, by negotiating an imminent military withdrawal from the West Bank cities of Kalkilya, Jericho, Nablus and Ramallah - talks that were, inevitably, put on hold after the bus bombing.
Just a few hours before the Israeli helicopters were despatched to Gaza City, after a long and frequently bitter meeting, Mr Abbas had won what appeared to be a degree of support from the PA President, Yasser Arafat, for precisely the kind of crackdown on the extremists that Israel, and the United States, had been demanding - and that Mr Arafat had hitherto been rejecting.
Key figures were to have been arrested, weapons confiscated, and mosques and schools closed or more closely supervised, according to a plan drawn up by the PA's Security Minister, Mohammad Dahlan. Mr Abbas had threatened to resign if Mr Arafat did not give him the necessary backing. Mr Dahlan's spokesman predicted "a campaign that, even in the worst nightmares, Hamas and Islamic Jihad never imagined." Now that Mr Shanab is dead, however, the likelihood of this kind of intra-Palestinian confrontation is minimal. The crowds of Hamas supporters who converged on the scene of yesterday's missile strike and on Mr Shanab's home were not only threatening "Death to Israel." They were warning Mr Abbas that he would not live long if he took them on.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday the "road-map" was not dead. Maybe that was how things looked from Washington. From here, with the tide of bloodshed rising again, the very concept of a "peace process" seemed irrelevant, outdated words from another world.