A murderous bombing capped a wave of anti-Israeli violence that threatens peace in the Middle East -- and the political fortunes of its own main protagonists.
by Todd Shields; David Makovsky; Khaled Abu Toameh; Tim Cooper
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Arab tradition holds that families serve sour coffee to mourners come to lament the dead. But in East Jerusalem last week, Yassin Bader served sweet coffee to visitors who stopped by to pay their respects to Yassin's son, Abdel, who was killed while carrying out a kidnapping operation for the militant fundamentalist group Hamas. "This is indeed a very happy occasion for all of us," explained one family member. "Abdel Karim is now a martyr."
Days later, on the streets of Tel Aviv, after a Hamas suicide bomber had killed 22 and wounded nearly four dozen, Israeli mourners laid candles and chanted prayers even as bits of human hair and flesh were scraped off nearby walls. Many blamed the deaths on the peace process, and on their prime minister. "Yitzhak Rabin is guilty of this bombing. It is he who is to blame," said Chaim Levy, a marketing manager from a suburb of Tel Aviv. "We wanted a real peace, not this bloody peace."
But a bloody peace, for the moment, is precisely what obtains. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, is the reason. Born in 1987 out of the strife of the intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Hamas is pledged to destroy Israel and create an Islamic state based on Koranic law. With more than 35 murders in Israel to its credit after last week's bombing, Hamas's military wing, the Qassam Brigades, seems intent on killing however many people it takes until Israel gives up its push for peace. Hamas would also like to see Israel renounce or embarrass Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yassir Arafat. Violence, many Hamas supporters say, is the only way left to kill the peace.
And yet the peace goes on in spite of Hamas. In one of those bizarre juxtapositions that characterize the Middle East, last week's violence came on the heels of a historic peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. This week, President Clinton, buoyed by successes in Haiti, Iraq and North Korea and newly confident in his foreign-policy management (article, Page 51), will travel to a desolate stretch of desert borderland to witness the signing of a peace treaty between Jordan's King Hussein and Israel's Rabin, "as staggering in its implications," says an analyst based in Jordan, "as the fall of the Berlin Wall."
Besides attending the signing ceremony, the president will take a victory lap through the region, visiting U.S. troops in Kuwait, stopping in to accept the thanks of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, touching base with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and speaking to the Jordanian and Israeli parliaments before venturing on to Damascus for a sit-down with Syrian President Hafez Assad. The Damascus stop, which the White House hopes will build on an earlier Clinton-Assad visit in Geneva, is the diciest entry on the president's itinerary. Assad is toying with the idea of peace with Israel, but negotiations have made little progress. Clinton hopes to get something going, but with Assad there are no guarantees. In any event, the sudden tide of violence in Israel - - and the threat of more to come -- create a kind of eerie backdrop for the Clinton trip.
Leading the way. On the ground, the violence has also created a devilish political dynamic of its own. For Rabin and Arafat, the stakes are highest. In his own mind, Rabin, a former chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, believes he is the only person who can deliver peace to his country. In forging ahead with discussions with Syria, for instance, Rabin is far ahead of most Israelis, who loathe and distrust the dictator in Damascus. For a genuine peace, however, many Israelis had been willing to follow Rabin's lead. The bus bombing in central Tel Aviv last week badly undercut Rabin's authority.
For Arafat, the questions are more complex. His biggest achievement to date is the Israeli relinquishment of governing authority in Jericho, on the West Bank, and in Gaza. That's just the first phase of Palestinian self-rule, however; the violence sponsored by Hamas throws into serious jeopardy the next. Under the peace accord signed in Oslo last year, the second phase of Palestinian self-rule calls for Israeli Defense Forces to redeploy to positions outside every Palestinian population center in the West Bank. This will be a much bigger pullback than the withdrawal from the miserable Gaza Strip and from Jericho. If the violence continues, it will also prove politically and logistically impossible for the Israelis. That's because if Arafat cannot, or will not, contain the killers of Hamas, Rabin will be forced to. That would mean not only no redeployment away from population centers -- it would mean Israeli security forces making arrests in the Gaza streets they so recently deserted.
The dilemma for Arafat is that if he does crack down on Hamas, he will be seen by many Palestinians as operating as Rabin's enforcer and undercutting his own authority. The Gordian knot is an image that comes to us from legend. For Arafat and Rabin today, it is also a matter of hard fact.
With epochal change on the one hand but renewed violence and fanaticism on the other, everyone with a stake in the Middle East peace process may be forgiven for wondering if it can move ahead. For now, the principal parties are making the right noises. Israeli leaders vow to proceed. So does Arafat. With his visit to the region this week, Clinton is adding America's own considerable heft to the hard next steps forward.
Deadly series. Many Israelis will not take those steps willingly. The intensity of the recent attacks by Hamas -- the Tel Aviv bombing was the third in a deadly series in recent weeks -- raised apprehension in the very place where negotiation was supposed to quiet it. Israelis see personal security as the sine qua non of the peace process that was begun three years ago in Madrid and accelerated by last year's Oslo accords with the PLO. Years of Palestinian street uprisings and decades of terrorist attacks long ago convinced Rabin that military solutions had failed and political accommodation was needed. Two years ago, Rabin won his greatest support among voters in the middle-class enclaves along Israel's narrow coastal heartland in and around Tel Aviv. He promised voters he would take "Gaza out of Tel Aviv," meaning that violence, should it occur, would be confined to the territories.
That was also the promise behind the agreement with the PLO, which Rabin had sold as something that would reduce terror. With last week's bombing, his calculation was called grievously into question. Enthusiasm for peace negotiations "is highly dependent on Israelis' sense of personal security," says Joseph Alpher, director of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. "If they do not feel secure, the peace process will fail." A Clinton administration official closely following events in the Middle East puts the situation this way: "What you've got are images of the past -- terrorism -- and images of the future - - peace -- competing with one another for the hearts and minds of Rabin's constituency." For now, this official says, it appears the promise of a peaceful future is prevailing, if narrowly.
But for how long? According to a poll published last week in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's largest newspaper, 85 percent of those surveyed wanted an indefinite prohibition on Palestinians entering Israel from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. An additional 71 percent called upon the Israeli Army to enter Gaza -- autonomous under Arafat's Palestinian Authority since May --in a bid to root out the Hamas cells that thrive there.
Border closings. Rabin got the message. Within hours of the bombing, he ordered the border crossings to the West Bank and Gaza closed. His cabinet voted to make the closings indefinite and
