In Kibbutz Negba, a dozen Israeli teenagers attending a summer camp in the guesthouses of this Negev kibbutz were asked to model small trees, and then decorate them with photographs of themselves.
If there is one thing Israelis have learned — from the two and a half years of the present intifada and from all the battles that preceded it over 54 years — it is that there are no surgical wars.
The maverick Irish writer-politician Connor Cruise O\’Brien once celebrated Abba Eban, who died in Tel-Aviv Sunday at the age of 87, as \”the most brilliant diplomat of the second half of the 20th century.\”
David Kosak, a 35-year-old rabbinical student from the University of Judaism, was lunching with classmates at Hebrew University\’s Frank Sinatra cafeteria on Wednesday when the bomber struck.
In the reoccupied West Bank town of Hebron, an activist in Yasser Arafat\’s Al Fatah, a graduate of Israeli prisons, lamented the other day: \”I gave up my dream of the whole of Palestine for the sake of the Oslo accord. And what did I get? Corruption, no democracy, security services abusing and blackmailing our people. And now I\’m getting Israeli soldiers invading my town and the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing to protect me.\”
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.
It was meant to be the \”not Wagner\” concert: Daniel Barenboim, the pride of Israeli music-lovers, conducting his Berlin orchestra, the Staatskapelle, on the last night of this year\’s Israel Festival. Little did we know.
The Palestinian intifada, which began as a civil uprising against the Israeli occupation, is rapidly becoming a low-intensity war between armed forces. And the low intensity is getting higher and higher by the day.
There were more police than customers in Jerusalem\’s Mahane Yehuda market last Friday morning, when Jewish families would normally stock up for the weekend. Downtown, the strolling, shopping and coffee-bar crowds had deserted the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall for the fashionable German Colony.
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