The bombing of Sbarro and why Oslo failed
[ad_1]
(August 10, 2021 / JNS) Next month Americans will mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The trauma lasts in the memory of all who were alive then. But while this day of terror will never be forgotten, as an event that informs foreign and defense policy, it quickly becomes as irrelevant as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The last US troops withdraw from Afghanistan as Washington reacts with indifference to evidence that the Taliban – the group that harbored and allowed the 9/11 attackers – will soon regain power in Kabul, two decades after US troops left them. routed as part of a response to the terrorist attack.
But just over a month before September 11, Israel suffered a terrorist attack which, although on a smaller scale than the attack on New York and Washington, was also traumatic. And, unlike the US reaction to Al Qaeda’s efforts, what happened on August 9, 2001 is still crucial to understanding not only Israeli attitudes toward the notion of a peace process with the Palestinians, but the the Jewish state needs defensive measures to ensure that the events of that day do not happen again.
A year after the start of the Palestinian war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, Palestinian operatives attached a device including explosives, nails, and nuts and bolts to a suicide bomber. Their target was a branch of the Sbarro pizzeria chain in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, at the busy intersection of King George Street and Jaffa Road.
The crime was planned by Ahmad Ahlam al-Tamimi, a then 20-year-old Palestinian who chose the attack site and drove the bomber to the pizzeria. She thought the restaurant was a good target as it was a popular spot for families feeding children on Friday afternoons during the pre-Shabbat rush.
Along with the killer, 15 Israelis and tourists, including seven children, in the restaurant were killed by the explosion. 130 others were injured, many horribly maimed by a bomb designed to inflict not only death but horrific injuries.
In an interview broadcast on Palestinian television in 2012, Tamimi remained proud of what she had done – and, in fact, reveled in the memory of being on a Jerusalem bus when news of the bombing in the bomb was released and to hear the other Arab passengers celebrating as the rising death toll became known.
Of course, 20 years is a long time ago. Thanks to the construction of the security fence between much of the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank and Israel, events like the bombing of Sbarro, which had become commonplace during an intifada focused on such atrocities, now belong to the pass. Later Palestinian “resistance” efforts in which massacre of Jews is the goal are limited to random stabbing, as well as largely futile missile and rocket fire at Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. (although most are intercepted by the Iron Dome and Arrow Air Defense Systems with many projectiles often below their targets), more Arabs than Jews can be injured.
Why then still remember the Sbarro attack, if not to honor the victims?
There is more to this sad chapter than just a tragedy to remember. There is a problem with so much of what passes for informed commentary on the conflict in the mainstream media. Those recklessly demanding Israeli concessions and territorial withdrawals, including from Jerusalem, have apparently forgotten the Sbarro massacre, as well as other terrorist attacks that ultimately claimed more than 1,000 Israeli lives. They also forgot what preceded the unnecessary, if not bloody, five-year Palestinian campaign, and why there is a broad consensus among Israelis stretching from center-left to right-wing who rightly understands that it does not. There is no plausible partner for peace of any kind to be found among the Palestinians and their leaders.
In July 2000, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak visited Camp David where, along with host President Bill Clinton, the two men offered PLO leader Yasser Arafat the fulfillment of the promise. of the 1993 Oslo Accord formula of âland for peaceâ. Arafat was presented with a deal that would have given Palestinian independence to most of the West Bank, Gaza and parts of the city of Jerusalem. In return, all he had to do was agree to end the conflict forever. Arafat’s answer was ânoâ. It was still ‘no’ a few months later when Barak softened the offer during talks in the Egyptian border town of Taba. Contrary to the expectations of many Israelis and most foreign observers, the goal of the Palestinian nationalist movement he led was not an independent state alongside Israel, but a Palestinian state instead of the sole Jew in the country. planet.
But by the time Arafat turned down Barak for the second time, he had given a more definitive response to Israeli peace offers by launching the orgy of terrorist killings that was sanitized by the neutral sounding term “Second Intifada”.
In the years that followed, subsequent US administrations retried the same “land for peace” formula with the same failure because Mahmoud Abbas – the allegedly more “moderate” successor of Arafat – was no longer able to make peace. even if he was inclined to do so. So.
The same kind of incitement to murder Jews by the official Palestinian media and educational institutions that led to massacres like Sbarro’s continues. And in a touch of cruel irony, Tamimi is now free as a bird in Jordan following former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision in 2011 to release more than 1,000 terrorists, including those with blood on them. hands like her, in order to gain the freedom of Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped by Hamas in 2005.
Equally bad, President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team still acts as if the assumptions about “land for peace” and a two-state solution are as valid as they were when Bill Clinton thought he was. was on the verge of winning a Nobel Peace Prize in the summer of 2000. For them, it’s as if Camp David’s peace offer and the bloodshed that followed never happened . They and the grassroots of the Democratic Party who would prefer an even more hostile stance towards Israel, still act as if Israeli security control over otherwise autonomously ruled Palestinian areas in the West Bank is an act of oppression rather than necessary self-defense. .
Palestinians and their leaders can understand that these Israeli efforts prevent a return to Intifada-type bombing. But they, too, always act and speak as if recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state – no matter where its borders might be drawn – is something they will never do. The Israelis know that withdrawing from the West Bank and uprooting hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Jerusalem and the territories will not bring peace. This would, like the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, only make their country less secure.
Sbarro still counts not so much because of his horror, but because the madness that sparked the chain of events towards this episode of terrorism is still alive and well in the unrealistic demands for an end to the “occupation” and for support. to BDS campaigns. inspired by the anti-Semitism of those who claim to only defend peace and human rights. Honest people should not only keep the memory of the victims of 8/9/01 as a blessing, but also never let the lessons of the Oslo failure be forgotten.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor of JNS â Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
[ad_2]