Jerusalem bomb seeds gathering
conflict By Victor Kotsev
JERUSALEM - A gruesome terror attack on
Wednesday shattered what little was left of an
illusion of tranquility in Israel. A powerful bomb
exploded at a busy bus station in Jerusalem,
killing one woman, injuring around 50 people, and
sent shock waves throughout the country.
Shortly following other escalations such
as a barrage of mortars containing white
phosphorus on communities neighboring the Gaza
Strip and Grad Katyusha strikes on yet another
major southern city, Beersheba, the incident
threatens to send spinning out of control the
already dangerous levels of violence between
Israelis and Palestinians.
It appears,
moreover, that the crisis could be tightly related
to an unfolding diplomatic intrigue that could
result in a Palestinian
declaration of independence
as early as next month.
In the words of
residents, the blast that damaged two buses and
created havoc in Jerusalem could be heard in many
parts of the Israeli capital. The bomb was planted
in a bag in a telephone booth next to the bus
stop, and experts say it was relatively small (1-2
kilograms) but professionally constructed.
According to reports, the sole fatality in the
attack so far is a female tourist around the age
of 60 whose nationality has been reported as
British. Meanwhile, several of the wounded remain
in a serious condition; altogether, around 35
people were hospitalized.
"I saw two women
lying on the ground, unconscious and covered in
blood," a medic told Israeli Channel Two. "I can't
say what sort of injuries they suffered. They were
completely covered in blood." Meanwhile, Jerusalem
mayor Nir Barkat revealed that one of the wounded
had telephoned the police to inform them of a
suspicious package just prior to the explosion.
In response, police went on the highest
level of alert in the entire country on Wednesday.
Access to Jerusalem was restricted for most of the
afternoon, as police officers set up roadblocks on
access points to the city. According to some
reports, witnesses saw the man who left the bag
with the bomb.
This is the first major
terrorist attack in Jerusalem since 2008, and the
first bombing of a bus since 2004. At the height
of the second intifada (Palestinian uprising),
which started in 2000 and gradually died out over
a period of several years, bus bombings in
Jerusalem had become so common that, residents
recall, cars would get into accidents in an effort
to avoid stopping next to a bus on a red light.
The attack came on the heels of other
alarming developments. Earlier on Wednesday, a man
was also wounded in Beersheba when two Grad
Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza hit the southern
city. Mortar rounds exploded in other southern
Israeli communities, and sappers who examined them
testified that some of them contained white
phosphorus, a material prohibited from most
military use by international law.
All
these incidents come as additional escalations of
the recent wave of violence between Israelis and
Palestinians - a crisis I outlined in my previous
article, Fighting
drowns out talking (Asia Times Online, March
23, 2011). As talk of a new operation in Gaza went
up a notch, and Israeli leaders vowed a firm
response, analysts struggled to establish the
exact relationship between these developments and
to interpret them correctly in the context of the
incredibly complex political situation in the
region.
Nobody has claimed responsibility
for the Jerusalem attack so far, but according to
most experts, Hamas is unlikely to be behind
either of the incidents. Respected Israeli
journalist Ron Ben-Yishai claims that Islamic
Jihad, the second most powerful militant
organization in Gaza whose commanders went into
hiding on Wednesday for fear of Israeli
retaliation, is the most likely perpetrator.
Islamic Jihad, which is regarded as even closer to
Iran than is Hamas, has been involved heavily with
the recent rocket barrage on Israel, and a number
of its operatives were killed in retaliatory
strikes.
In light of the newly surfaced
information, an update is due to my previous
analysis. First, a minor correction: the "Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades of Imad Mughniyeh," which claimed
responsibility for the terrorist attack in the
Israeli settlement of Itamar on March 11, is
unlikely to be affiliated with Hamas. It is even
more unlikely that it is a cell of the Lebanese
Hezbollah, the name of whose assassinated
commander it has adopted. It is said to be linked
with Fatah, but given the realities in the
Palestinian territories, it could be one of
numerous small Palestinian factions whose
affiliation is murky. For a more detailed analysis
of groups that have used the name of Imad
Mughniyeh in the past see here.
Another piece of information that sheds
light on the situation is an unannounced meeting
that was apparently planned between Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas in Moscow on Thursday. It
is hardly a coincidence that a visit to the
Russian capital by Abbas, who arrived there on
Tuesday, overlaps by a day with a visit by
Netanyahu, who arrived on Wednesday evening.
"I have no objection to meet with
Netanyahu, and the proof is that we met three
times last September in Washington, Sharm al-
Sheikh and in his house in West Jerusalem," Abbas
commented from Moscow on Wednesday, quoted by the
Palestinian news agency WAFA.
This
meeting, moreover, appears to be of high
significance - so important that Netanyahu did not
postpone his trip in the wake of the terrorist
attack, despite speculations that he might do so.
We can infer more about its significance from the
rest of the WAFA report:
"President
Mahmoud Abbas asserted on Wednesday, the need of
including the recognition of a Palestinian State
within the 1967 borders, the full halt of
settlement activities during negotiations and the
security issues which could be applied after the
declaration of independence in the Quartet's
statement after its meeting in April 15."
Abbas' statement suggests that the
Palestinian Authority has been preparing to
declare independence much earlier than previously
assumed (September). This would explain the
"urgent" need for unity talks with Hamas that has
served as another background subplot of the
crisis. There are several other indications that
such an initiative is shaping up, including the
talk by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak of a
"diplomatic tsunami" threatening his country.
Recent statements by international officials also
support this hypothesis. According to a Ha'aretz
report from 17 March:
Growing pessimism about the
prospects of a breakthrough in
Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations is
prompting new international calls for the
unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state.
Representatives of the Middle East
Quartet - the United States, Russia, the
European Union and the United Nations - who
attended talks held in Tel Aviv and Ramallah
last week with Israeli and Palestinian
negotiators emerged without much hope for the
resumption of peace negotiations in the near
future, according to senior Israeli officials
and European diplomats. The representatives said
that the differences between the two sides were
far too wide to get negotiations back on
track.
Such remarks from
representatives of the normally overoptimistic
Quartet are enough to raise eyebrows; moreover,
they come on top of Israeli fears that the fiasco
in Libya - a situation that simply goes from bad
to worse for the "alliance"[1] - will force
Western leaders to accommodate the Arab world by
increasing the pressure on Israel. According to a
recent analysis by Israeli journalist Herb Keinon:
Although no rational person could
lay that decision - soon to be much more
controversial as the situation in Libya gets
"messy" - on Israel's doorstep, the decision to
drop bombs in Libya will certainly impact policy
toward Jerusalem, if not from Washington, then
certainly from Paris and London…. With key EU
countries flying sorties over Libya, it is not
unimaginable that they will try to soften the
impact, for example, by lobbying inside the EU
for a tougher stand against Israel in the next
Quartet statement expected in a couple of week's
time.
According to another Israeli
analyst, Akiva Eldar, United States President
Barack Obama will also have a hard time resisting
Palestinian independence. "The day after the
military operation in Libya, US President Barack
Obama will have a hard time explaining to the
Arabs why he is a big hero regarding an Arab
leader who oppresses his people, at a time when he
is helping a Jewish leader who is stealing land
from members of the Arab people and is thumbing
his nose at America," writes Eldar.
If
indeed the Palestinians are preparing to declare
independence very soon, then Netanyahu has a
fateful and imminent choice to make: to bargain
with them in hopes of mitigating the damage, or to
oppose the initiative in any way possible. The
terrorist attack and the escalation in Gaza make
that choice even more urgent.
There is
contradictory evidence about what Netanyahu
intends to do. Israeli journalists Avi Isaacharoff
and Amos Harel consider the terrorist attack as
separate from the Gaza escalation, and blame much
of the latter on the Israeli government:
Despite the escalation, Hamas does
not seem to want large-scale clashes yet. The
organization actually has good reasons to
believe that Israel is the one heating up the
southern front. It began with a bombardment a
few weeks ago that disrupted the transfer of a
large amount of money from Egypt to the Gaza
Strip, continued with the interrogation of
engineer and Hamas member Dirar Abu Sisi in
Israel, and ended with last week's bombing of a
Hamas training base in which two Hamas militants
were killed.
Contrary to this
assessment stands the fact that rockets have been
raining steadily (although in much lower numbers)
at Israel over the past months, and numerous other
attacks have taken place from Gaza. In December,
militants fired a state of the art Russian
anti-tank missile at an Israeli tank stationed
near the strip, which penetrated the armor but
failed to explode inside. Subsequently, Israel
deployed tanks with a new anti-missile system
known as Windbreaker, and had several
opportunities to test it in battle.
Also
contrary to the hypothesis that Israel is stirring
trouble in Gaza comes the assessment that Islamic
Jihad, rather than Hamas, is the primary culprit
for the violence. The two organizations sometimes
act in tandem, yet Islamic Jihad is considered
much more of an Iranian proxy than is Hamas.
According to the report by Avi Isaacharoff
and Amos Harel cited above, "Hamas Prime Minister
Ismail Haniyeh's office said yesterday that
Haniyeh had phoned the secretary general of
Islamic Jihad, Abdallah Ramadan Salah, in
Damascus. Pundits in Gaza said Haniyeh asked Salah
to stop the escalation, for which Islamic Jihad is
mainly responsible."
As I argued in my
March 23 article, Iran may well have an interest
in provoking a crisis in Gaza in the context of
the Saudi Arabian invasion of Bahrain. This is
even more true if a major breakthrough on the
Israeli-Palestinian and intra-Palestinian fronts
seems in the works; such a breakthrough would most
likely entail a sharp decrease of Iranian
influence in the strip.
As for Netanyahu,
he may indeed be tempted to escalate the crisis in
order to hamper the thrust to statehood by the
Palestinian Authority. It is unclear, however,
that this would be beneficial for Israel, either
in the short or in the long term. It would lead to
condemnation and increase the international
isolation of the country; moreover, it might
revive the possibility that the Palestinians
abandon their commitment to the two-state solution
and embark on a civil rights struggle to integrate
into the Israel. This is a nightmare scenario for
many Israeli analysts, as it could threaten
demographically the Jewish majority and thus the
Jewish character of the state.
Moreover,
there are some major potential benefits to
bargaining. According to Israeli journalist Yaakov
Katz, the violence could strengthen the Israeli
position. "If [Netanyahu] wants to move forward
with the peace talks with the PA leadership in the
West Bank then he can use the recent spate of
attacks as proof of Israel's need for security
assurances before any future concessions, a topic
that will be discussed on Thursday in talks Barak
will hold with visiting US Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates," writes Katz.
There could be
some major financial benefits, too. It is
near-certain that the United States will be
desperate to prevent escalation. This could make
it generous. When in the wake of the Arab
uprisings Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak
announced his intentions to ask for $20 billion in
additional security aid, designed to turn Israel
as a "stabilizer in such a turbulent region," [2]
most analysts rolled their eyes.
Today,
the sum may still appear a bit outlandish, but we
should remember that just a few months ago, Obama
came remarkably close to offering Netanyahu $3
billion of stealth fighters in exchange for a
settlement construction freeze extension of three
months [3]. There has been some bad blood between
the two leaders since the offer, but as the saying
goes, in the Middle East, anything is possible.
Thus, while there is still a great danger
that the situation might escalate - and if more
attacks with multiple Israeli victims happen,
Netanyahu might come under massive domestic
pressure to escalate it himself - but we can also
expect efforts to calm it down accompanied by
intense bargaining behind the scenes. As Netanyahu
put it, "We will act vigorously, responsibly and
prudently in order to maintain the quiet and the
security that have prevailed here over the past
two years."
The Israeli leader is
currently in Moscow, and likely to meet with Abbas
on Thursday; this meeting might prove crucial to
what “vigorously, responsibly and prudently”
means.
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