Still Life with Bombers by David Horovitz

Author:David Horovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307427960
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

In the same vein, many’s the Palestinian who has assured me that if only the assassinations of key Intifada orchestrators were to stop, so, too, would the attacks on Israelis. (I wasn’t persuaded.) To quote the same academic, “If Israel ends the assassination policy, even Islamic Jihad would end the suicide bombs inside Israel for at least a truce period. Assassinations breed a desire for revenge, and revenge against soldiers doesn’t hurt,” he asserted contentiously, “so they want revenge against civilians.” This man said he had himself witnessed one such Israeli hit—the killing in Ramallah in August 2002 of Muhammad Saadat, brother of Abu Ali Mustafa’s successor as chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “I am still traumatized by it. I’m not saying Muhammad wasn’t involved in stuff, but he definitely never injured or killed an Israeli. He ran a small shop. I remember his smile. . . . I heard the shots and ran to look. I couldn’t approach him for twenty minutes, the red laser was on my forehead”—presumably the sights of an Israeli gun. “There were five bullets in his body. I was so angry. Today it is impossible to write as I did against the militarization. Because if we decide to stop, then Sharon wins, and the people don’t want that. They don’t want to surrender.”

Many’s the Palestinian, moreover, who has insisted that Sharon deliberately ordered the killing of high-profile Intifada activists, terrorists, precisely to ensure “revenge attacks” on Israel and a rapid end to any period of calm, to dash any hint of optimism, to ensure he was never dragged back to a peace table. And Sharon could not go back to the peace table, they went on, because he would immediately be exposed as one of two things: as a hawk with no readiness to compromise, to be reviled by the international community and rejected by those Israelis he had hitherto fooled; or as a dove with real willingness to compromise, to be ousted by the rightist camp and its supporters, who had sustained him in power. That was an assertion that mounting evidence rendered rather harder to dismiss.

To cite the most dramatic instance, I remember going to bed one Monday night in July 2002 feeling mildly and most unusually optimistic. After a brief lull in violence, Shimon Peres, still the Israeli foreign minister at the time, had been meeting with various Palestinian ministers, notably Arafat’s two American-urged recent appointees, Finance Minister Salam Fayyad and Interior Minister Abdel Razak Yehiyeh. The former is an ex–International Monetary Fund official, who was trying to centralize all PA funding into one transparent account. And the latter is a septuagenarian ex-guerrilla, who nobody believed would possibly be allowed by Arafat to fulfill his declared goal of reforming and streamlining a dozen-plus security networks into a lean, mean antiterror hierarchy (and who, it turned out, survived in the job for only a few months). But Peres was nevertheless telling the nation how impressed he was

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