On Aug. 9, the \”Tel Aviv Serial Rapist,\” who has the city\’s women looking over their shoulders in fear, evidently tried to commit his 10th rape in the last six months, but police say he let his pleading victim go, and ran off. On the same day, Police Minister Avigdor Kahalani advised Israelis to do two patrol shifts a month with the volunteer Civil Guard in their towns and cities.
Binyamin Netanyahu recently suffered the most wounding parliamentary defeat of his two-year premiership. It left the Likud leader more dependent than ever on the pro-settler right, which has threatened to bring him down if he hands any more of the occupied West Bank to Yasser Arafat.
For Arafat, it was an admission of unmitigated weakness, a move that was clearly borne out of dire necessity.
The prime minister also seems to have underestimated the degree to which the United States, the European Union and other interested bystanders are watching every move in his contorted quest for \”peace with security\” — and increasingly concluding that the Palestinians are right to suspect him.
On Salah a-Din Street, the main street on the Arab side of thecapital, the spirit was very different. People kept their heads down,aware that they were being watched, aware that the Jews weren\’t toofond of them these days.
Regarding the domestic political pressures thatBinyamin Netanyahu faces in his decision-making on the peace process,the prime minister himself probably summed it up best in the \”Israelat 50\” interview he gave to Newsweek: \”I am a coalition ofone.\”
Israel signed the Oslo peace agreement with itsold enemy, Yasser Arafat, because by 1993 the alternatives had becomeinsufferable. The Palestinian intifada, a revolt of thestreet, was sapping the morale of the Israeli army, fighting a futilesix-year battle with one hand tied behind its back. Nightlytelevision footage of soldiers in combat fatigues, chasing teenageboys wielding slingshots and petrol bombs, was undermining Israel\’sdeterrent credibility in its confrontation with the Arab states aswell as its international moral case.
Palestinians have an official term for whathappened to them when Israel gained its independence 50 years ago:\”Nakba,\” or, in English, \”Calamity.\” In the failed Arab attack on theJews in 1948, some 600,000 Arabs fled the land or, in tens ofthousands of cases, were expelled.
\”The Oslo agreement took Yasser Arafat out of the dustbin of history and gave him the tools to destroy Israel. If we accept that, then they should put a fence around Israel and declare it an insane asylum.\”
Over the past two years, Jerusalem alone has beenshaken by two bus bombings and by explosions in the Mahane Yehudamarket and the Ben-Yehuda shopping precinct.
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