Last week’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, which killed nine and wounded eighty, was the ninth suicide bombing in Israel since Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas declared a truce on February 8, 2005. It was also the sixth in the last six months, which is, roughly, the period since Israel completed the disengagement from Gaza and northern Samaria.
If in the last half-year there had been six suicide bombings in Denmark, which has a similar population size to Israel’s, the reaction would be a sense of calamity and emergency. The murder of a single individual, Theo van Gogh, by a jihadist in Holland profoundly rocked that country and caused a mood of crisis.
Last week’s attack in Tel Aviv was also the eighty-second Palestinian suicide bombing against Israel since the signing of the Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles on September 13, 1993. In 2006 alone, Israeli forces have captured over ninety Palestinians who were on their way to commit bombings or in the planning stages—more than half the number for all of 2005.
Another analogy: in parts of New Hampshire, which is about the same physical size as Israel, an alien ethnic group clamors for independence. New Hampshire grants them a high degree of autonomy just short of independence, based on a signed agreement that says further claims will be worked out in negotiations while completely eschewing violence. But suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and even rocket attacks against New Hampshire from the autonomous areas become the norm; twelve years later, security forces are working round the clock in defensive mode but citizens are still being killed and injured and the population is in constant peril.
The above scenario is, of course, inconceivable; rather than let the situation continue for a dozen years with no end in sight, New Hampshire, or any other political entity, would long ago have reconquered the autonomous areas out of the sheer imperative of protecting its citizens from violent death and maiming.
Any other political entity in the world, that is, except Israel.
The reason for Israel’s bizarre restraint is not a mystery: it’s that the entity attacking it, the Palestinian Authority, is the apple of the world’s eye. Even—indeed, particularly—in the most postmodern, relativist, morally blasé Western countries, the existence of this entity is considered such a moral absolute, its dismantlement so inconceivable, that the notion of Israel doing the one thing that would save the lives of the next group of Israelis who will inevitably be blown to bits does not even exist as a political possibility—nor even, any longer, for much of “the Right” in Israel itself.
Dismantling the Authority would not entail a permanent Israeli reoccupation of the Palestinian population centers, just as the dismantlement of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes did not entail permanent foreign occupation of those countries. It would mean acknowledging that the belief that the PLO and the Palestinians in general were ready for a peaceful compromise was mistaken, and that attempting to solve the problem based on that wrong assumption proved far too costly.
Since the current mood among the Palestinians and the Arab and Muslim worlds in general is not one of peacemaking with Israel, Israel’s reoccupation of the territories would likely be lengthy and would entail costs. The cost of not dismantling the Palestinian Authority is its continued existence: continued attacks, carnage, and endangerment of Israel.
It is also clear by now that all of Israel’s attempts to square the circle—to maintain the Palestinian Authority while achieving its own security—have failed. Offers of statehood, limited military incursions, building a fence, and partial territorial withdrawals have all had the same result—continued terrorism. The one thing that has, so far, substantially reduced the success rate of the terrorism—the stepped-up Israeli military activity since 2002—has come nowhere near ending it.
The attempt to pressure the Hamas regime into collapsing, even were it to succeed, offers no solution since all other internal groups now wielding political-military power in the PA—Fatah and its offshoots, the Popular Front, the Popular Resistance Committees, Islamic Jihad, and so on—share the same terroristic nature and aim of attacking and eventually destroying Israel. Any Hamas replacement would also maintain the educational system that indoctrinates generations of Palestinians in anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic hatred.
Some also believe the eventual completion of Israel’s security fence is the answer. But while the incomparably shorter and more manageable fence between Gaza and Israel has so far stopped infiltrations, attempts at infiltration, including by tunnel, occur constantly. Even if completed, the West Bank fence will be vastly more lengthy, convoluted, and difficult to defend, while offering no solution at all to missile attacks.
The real choice, then, is clear-cut: either to let the slaughter of Israelis continue, working to reduce it but not to end it, or to take the only military action that can end it. Anyone who believes Israelis have the same right to life as Danes, Dutch, Americans, or anyone else should favor the second alternative. The fact that tired, bewildered Israelis themselves have now elected a dovish government, and no longer insist on their own right to life as they still did in the early years of the Oslo era, does not mean others should applaud their suicide.
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