Bill Would Segregate Israelis
If Israel\’s friends and diplomats have a harder time this week convincing the world that Israel is not a racist state, they have only their own government to blame.
If Israel\’s friends and diplomats have a harder time this week convincing the world that Israel is not a racist state, they have only their own government to blame.
Last Sunday\’s cabinet decision to pull back the tanks from Yasser Arafat\’s Ramallah headquarters, but keep the Palestinian leader quarantined in that West Bank city, was a classic vindication of the former secretary of state\’s wit and wisdom.
It sounds confused, if not downright contrary. Most Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip applaud violence against Israelis, yet they are eager for a cease-fire and for their political leaders to get back to the negotiating table.
"They are like mice," said Yeheskel Abu-Zwilli, a 74-year-old Iraqi-born Israeli, surveying the wreckage of the photography shop he has run in Jerusalem\’s Jaffa Street for 45 years. "Wherever there\’s a hole, they sneak in."
For Israel and the Palestinians, 2001 was a year of failure, collapse and escalating violence. Failure of international diplomacy, collapse of mutual trust, violence that claimed 200 Israeli lives and 574 Palestinian.
Palestinian suicide bombers killed a total of 28 bus passengers and young people in a four-day orgy of blood and vengeance that stretched from Haifa and Hadera in the North to Jerusalem in the South.
George W. Bush\’s gritty message to Saddam Hussein this week that any nation that develops weapons of mass destruction for terrorist purposes \”will be held accountable\” flashed a warning light to Israel.
It takes a pretty sophisticated politician to stand in front of a roomful of intifada-hardened reporters and announce that he is "politically naive."
To the end, Rechavam Ze\’evi, murdered at the age of 75 by a Palestinian gunman on Wednesday, was a soldier in mufti. Alone among the Israeli generals who went into politics, he continued to sport his army identity disk around his neck. It was a statement: the battle for the Jewish State was not over, and one of its most aggressive commanders was still fighting.
Israel is on high alert to meet any reprisal attacks by Palestinian or Lebanese supporters of Osama bin Laden.