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This Week

ONE
BO M B
TOO

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In the logic of
regional violence,
terror attack leads
to cease-fire.

DAVID LANDAU

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Jerusalem

elY4

6/8
2001

24

he vicious minds that planned the June 1 suicide
bombing outside a Tel Aviv disco may have been
too primitive — or too filled with hate — to
understand the logic of counterproductivity.
The bombing, which ripped through the crowd of mainly
Russian immigrant teen-agers gathered outside the Dolphin
Club, killing 20 Israelis, was part of an eight-month-old
Palestinian onslaught against the Jewish state.
But as it turned out, the attack created a train of events
that finally prompted the Palestinian Authority to call for
a cease-fire.
Every hour that passed this week without another bomb
or another fatal shooting added hope that this time, per-
haps because of the very enormity of the Tel Aviv outrage,
the cease-fire would hold.
The international community, led by the United States,
watched closely for the right moment to throw its full
weight behind the cease-fire.
World leaders were reluctant to move too soon for fear of
being tarnished by the u"favorable fall-out of a failed diplo-
matic initiative and a return to further bloodletting.
On Tuesday, the Bush administration announced it was
sending CIA Director George Tenet to facilitate security
talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials. During a

Related editorial: page 35

asaiemlITA
()Bowing is a timeline o f

strategy session the previous day, administration officials
had decided it was not yet the right time for U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell to visit the region.
If the calm holds, there is talk in world capitals of creating a
machinery, perhaps in the form of unarmed observers, to help
implement the cease-fire.

major attacks that Palestinian
terrorists carried out after
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
declared a unilateral cease-fire on
May 21. It does not include numer-
ous attacks of lesser scope during
the same period.
Sharon rescinded the ceasefire
orn
t biy n , g a adtaay Tel
eardai tn Saturday,
de
adcla
deadly su icide
Aviv disco, but has yet to order any
military retaliation.

ks

May 23 — An Israeli motorist is
killed and another wounded by
Palestinian gunfire near the West
Bank settlement of Ariel.

Targeting P.A.

If this cease-fire does prove to be a turning point, coming
just as the two sides were poised at the edge of an abyss, it
will have been thanks to a combination of factors:
First, Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat realized, at
the very last moment, that a grieving and infuriated Israel was
about to deliver a military blow ofsuch proportions that the
P.A. might never recover.
There was serious talk in some Israeli government circles
— though this was not government policy at any stage —
of deposing Arafat and his coterie and forcibly transporting
them back to Tunisia, from where they came at the begin-
ning of the Oslo process.
But Israel's inner cabinet had approved air and land bom-
bardment of a long list of Palestinian Authority targets
which, had it been carried out, would have left much of the
P.A.'s government infrastructure a smoldering ruin.
It is not known whether Israel's retribution would have
included army incursion into areas under Palestinian control.
Arafat may have been indifferent to the suffering
endured by his people during the past eight months of
violence. But there is no reason to suppose that he is

PePP
c' .

•

ePt's

--- Two car bombings
ace in the ears of western
Jerusalem. The Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine claims
responsibility for the first blast,
which explodes shortly after mid-
night, causing no injuries. The
second car bombing, coming
hours before the start of the
Shavuot holiday, is packed with

p

mortar shells. The Islamic Jihad ter-
ror group claims responsibility for
the blast, which injures 30 people.