Diary of the 'Situation' Part 4
Created | Updated Jun 22, 2003
Shattered Hopes
Last Week
Yesterday morning I thought about finally entering an optimistic entry to this journal. For 48 hours there was a sense of a real improvement. For the first time Yasser Arafat has issued a personal statement limiting Palestinian shootings; the volume of incidents in Israel and the territories have declined significantly, and there was a hope of returning for normalcy. Two minutes after I started editing the entry there was news of a big bomb which was exploded against a Jewish school bus in the Gaza Strip. Any thoughts of normalcy were far too premature.
The bomb killed two adults, and wounded 9 more people, most of them children. This was not the first bomb activated against a school bus in the Gaza Strip, but it was the first that succeeded in causing casualties. The public pressure on Prime Minister Barak to retaliate was enormous, and he did order an attack. The Israeli attack on Gaza from the air and the sea killed at least one man and many were wounded (CNN reports 35, the Palestinians claim more then a hundred).
I am mixed in my feeling about the Israeli retaliation. We can not allow the bomb attack to go unnoticed. There is a feeling that Arafat is trying to play it both ways, on one hand negotiating and on the other allowing unofficial groups to continue with small-scale warfare. But maybe we should have allowed him the benefit of the doubt, that he did not order that attack. Maybe he can not control all Palestinian actions. At some time or the other we will have to sit down to negotiate with the Arabs. After almost two month we should try to limit the level of distrust between the two people even if this will seem to some observers as weakness of the Israeli side.
Other articles from this author:
Temple Mount article in the Post
Temple Mount article at Tana's homepage
How not to get killed in Jerusalem article in the Post
Diary of the 'Situation' Part 1 article in the Post
Diary of the 'Situation' Part 2 article in the Post
Diary of the 'Situation' Part 3 article in the Post
