By the end of the week no one yet knew who the two suicide bombers were - or, more important, who had sent them. That, of course, makes the terror even harder to stop. Counterterrorism experts speculate that the attack was prompted by the Israelis’ earlier announcement that they were ready to reopen peace talks with the Palestinians. (Those negotiations were broken off by Yasir Arafat in March after construction began on a controversial Jewish housing settlement on the outskirts of traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.) But the marketplace explosion came only 48 hours after the announcement. To plan and carry out a major terrorist attack on such short notice is almost unheard of. By comparison, after Yitzhak Rabin’s historic 1993 handshake with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, Palestinian radicals needed seven months of preparation to stage the first-ever suicide bombing inside Israel.
The marketplace massacre was the worst bombing since Netanyahu, promising an end to such mayhem, came to power. The prime minister didn’t hesitate to lay the blame on Arafat. When the president of the Palestinian Authority phoned Netanyahu to express condolences after the bombing, Netanyahu flew into a rage. ““You have encouraged the violence and incitement, you have not fought the terrorist infrastructure,’’ he fumed. ““I demand that you take immediate action against the terror organizations.''
The armed wing of the radical Palestinian group Hamas is always the chief suspect in terrorist attacks in Israel. Leaflets distributed right after the bombing claimed that Hamas was responsible. But one of the Hamas officials named in the leaflet, Sheik Abdul Aziz Rantizzi, denied all knowledge of the attack. ““This is probably the work of some small splinter of Hamas,’’ said Ghassan Khatib of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. ““Hamas had made the decision that this was not a good time for such actions.''
That raises the question of whether Arafat could be reasonably expected to uncover every freelance terrorist cell in the West Bank. In the end, the bombing is likely to leave both Netanyahu and Arafat weaker. The Israeli prime minister ““will get some very searching questions about why he isn’t able to provide a more effective response than the government he replaced,’’ says Mark Heller of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. And Netanyahu’s plight is rosy next to Arafat’s. An anti-corruption panel from the Palestinian Legislative Council last week recommended the dismissal of Arafat’s entire cabinet, along with the filing of criminal indictments against two of his ministers. More ominously, a Palestinian opinion survey taken in early July found that strong public support for the Oslo peace accords had sunk to 8 percent. After last week’s carnage, peace looks disappointing all around.
