After Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat\’s Fatah Party took credit for murdering two Israelis this week in drive-by shootings, Sharon found himself under intense pressure from his right wing to stop complying with Israel\’s end of the cease-fire and to unleash a punishing — perhaps even mortal — blow to Arafat\’s Palestinian Authority.
An Israeli infant who was seriously wounded in a Palestinian stoning attack died from his wounds Monday.
The suicide bombing last Friday night that killed 20 young Israelis outside a beach-front disco in Tel Aviv trans-formed Israel\’s international image from bully boy to victim.
Lurching wildly from disaster to miraculous salvation to more death and mayhem, emotionally drained Israelis watched with little optimism this week as a new American peace envoy tried to offer hope in the eight-months-old violence with the Palestinians.
The Bush administration has let Ariel Sharon off the hook — for now.
For the first time in the history of the state, Arabs in Israel stood up for a moment of silence — commemorating Al Nakba — Arabic for \”the catastrophe,\” which is what Palestinians call the 1948 creation of the State of Israel.
The Bush administration, this week facing its first critical Mideast crisis, is seeking a new formulation to enable it to play a role in keeping conflict from spreading without requiring intensive direct mediation.
\”During the last seven to eight years, American Jews thought that Israel\’s worst problems were over and turned their attention to domestic communal problems,\” said Kenneth Jacobson, director of international affairs for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged in Israel and the United States that we offered the Palestinians peace, and they chose bloodshed. More Jews and Arabs are killed almost daily. Clearly this situation is untenable. How to end it?
A time for peace and a time for war. Most talk, for years, has been about peace, but there\’s war talk in Israel now. At least one independent intelligence agency is predicting a regional war this spring, and nobody is offering credible deniability. The Palestinians have been smuggling weapons into the country — mortars, anti-tank weapons, heavy machine guns, who knows what else. The stuff comes into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt or sneaked past Israeli naval patrols along the coast. It\’s not Jordan they\’re gunning for, at least not to start.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.