Israel's weekend of terror
Outside editorial
The following editorial appeared in today's Washington Post:
The horrific terrorist attacks by Palestinian extremists against Israelis over the weekend were as terrible as any the country has seen. The deliberate massacre of children who gathered on a pedestrian mall Saturday night in Jerusalem, as well as of the Israeli Jews and Arabs who sat side-by-side Sunday morning on a Haifa bus, offered gratuitous and grisly proof of the implacable inhumanity of terrorism, and the necessity of concerted action by civilized countries to eradicate it. The vicious attacks also perpetuated one of the most destructive patterns in Israeli-Arab affairs: Almost every time an effort is made to advance peace negotiations, extremists respond with crimes meant to shock and freeze the process and more often than not, their primitive strategy succeeds. In this case the Palestinian terrorist groups clearly intended to destroy the mission of U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni, who arrived in the region a week ago to press home a cease-fire plan that depended on a crackdown on the extremists by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. This time, the terrorists should not be allowed to achieve their aims.
As it has following every terrorist attack since Sept. 11, Mr. Arafat's Palestinian Authority issued statements of condemnation, scurried to emergency meetings and solemnly vowed to round up those responsible. His security forces claim a few arrests already have been made; that has happened before, too. What Mr. Arafat never has been willing to do is unequivocally break with Hamas the author of the weekend attacks and its terrorist partner Islamic Jihad and use his security forces to uproot their terrorist networks. His spokesmen say he could not do that without touching off a Palestinian civil war and they may be right. But surely Mr. Arafat now must accept that the latest Hamas bombings were as much a declaration of war against him as they were a continuation of war against Israel. The Palestinian leader has been weakening fast in recent weeks; probably his only hope for survival lies in an all-out confrontation with the extremists.
For a leader who has survived for decades by ducking at fateful moments, such decisive action may not be possible. But Mr. Arafat must be given a chance if only because all the alternatives are so much worse, both for the Palestinians and for Israel. Mr. Sharon has consistently replied to Palestinian terrorism with measures aimed at Mr. Arafat and now members of his cabinet are once again calling for the destruction of the Palestinian Authority. But the past few months have demonstrated that tactics such as the invasion of Palestinian cities and the assassination of Palestinian militants, while weakening Mr. Arafat, do not stop terrorism or make Israelis more secure. Of course, nothing Mr. Sharon has done can justify or even explain the deliberate explosion of nails into as many teen-agers as possible. Hamas has no defense. Israel does, however, and is entitled to act and act decisively. The challenge for Mr. Sharon and Mr. Zinni is to find the formula for action, militarily as well as politically, that most likely will defeat and destroy those terrorists.