The Terror Is Back

“Terror is Back” is the headline leading Israeli newspapers the day after a bus bombing hit Jerusalem near the Beit H’Uman conference center. The response among the Israeli public is a response of nerves – as it always has been. But along with the concern is a new anger, a disbelief that this is happening again.

The anger’s source lies in the perception that there was a kind of détente between the two sides. The public had been energized and frustrated by questions about how far to go with negotiations, how much to give, and whether enough or too much, was being done.

When the bomb hit it was as if a memo had been delivered, in booming terms, telling us that the conversation we were having – which hoped,in the very least, for progress – was a conversation we were having with ourselves. The bus bombing was a reminder that the progress we saw was, in fact, only a truce, a break in the ceaseless war declared in the foundational documents of Hamas, as well as the PLO.

How could we have been surprised? The bombing had been preceded by an increase in mortar and rocket shells from Gaza into civilian-dense regions of Israel. In fact, the increase was only a minor uptick in a steady stream of missile attacks from Gaza, and was underscored by the ruthlessness of the mass-murder of a Jewish family (including an 8 month old baby) in Itamar.

But in those cases, we were able to marginalize the attacks by compartmentalizing them. We did not live in or around Itamar, so we could think that it was something that could not occur to us. The mortar and rockets launched from Gaza have, thankfully, not killed anyone – so we can carry on for another day believing that we are safe from them as well.

The bus bombing, however, recalls a kind of danger that reverberates through the entire society. It quite literally recalls our own terror.

Looking at the Israeli public response we see a society that is under considerable strain. The general public is fed up. They feel disbelief that everything – from Oslo, to Camp David, to Wye River, to the separation barrier, to costly West Bank economic development, to the easing of restrictions on Gaza – has all been in vain. Worse, they see that the other side has been not just unrelenting, but insistently cunning, using the false symbol of an “aid flotilla” to strike at Israel’s legitimacy; forming a ring of declared enemy states to encircle the country; and brazenly pursuing what would amount to a doomsday weapon for Israel.

At the same time, the “international community” – a term that has come to denote a collection of states which violently oppose full, natural sovereignty for the Israel – are pressing for concessions in exchange for nothing more than this barrage, not even its cessation.

It’s no wonder that the country feels backed into a corner. Even the most vitriolic, anti-Israel Israelis -- most often found in the shadows of Haaretz’s opinion columns -- are showing signs of the strain, with editorials that are not just ideologically and analytically misguided (the norm at Haaretz), but quite literally incomprehensible jumbles of conflicting ideas, rage, self-pity, and despair.

Among the mainstream public there are open calls for the end of “restraint” and, farther on the right, even for a large scale operation, “Operation Cast Lead II,” some have said, as if the original version had been successful. Though perhaps that’s the point: after doing the same thing for so long and expecting different results, it seems that while Israel might not fully comprehend the folly of its approach, it seems to be directly feeling the effects of it.

But all of this might be moot. There is a reason that the bus bombing occurred after the mass-murder of the family, which came on the heels of the ramped-up rocket attacks, which have been staged in the context of a heightened campaign of delegitimization against Israel.

While two connected events form a relationship, three make a pattern. But we are well beyond patterns. We are staring at a strategy. Just as Western powers begin a war effort with what’s now called “non-kinetic” action such as sanctions, the formation of diplomatic coalitions, the freezing of state bank accounts, and the stockpiling of relevant weaponry, non-Western (or “non-aligned”) states have their own way of going about war preparations.

Thus, the UN, which was founded as a place where right could be established and justice delivered, has been contorted into a place where Israel’s rights are brazenly diminished and injustice served. The Iranian Axis is not just newly fused, but bristling with arms and anti-Semitic hatred. The Europeans have been deftly gulled and the Russians have been masterfully bribed onto the side of fanaticism, intolerance, and conquest.

There is war on the horizon. The latest round of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, for which the Palestinian side patently refused to even show up, are only one more effort in the preparations. They provide the pretext, the show of causus belli. Through these negotiations Israel has been made to look intractable and unreasonable. The negotiations have allowed the other side to sing the familiar overture of war: “There is no other way but violence.” It’s no coincidence that violence has indeed followed.