The front pages of Israel’s newspapers are devoted to Wednesday night’s suicide bombing in Rishon Letzion and the fact that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon went through with the sacking of ultra-Orthodox Shas ministers from his government.
Yediot Ahronot writes that the bombing, in which two Israelis were killed and about 40 injured, was the second in Rishon Letzion within two weeks. “The terrorist,” says Yediot Ahronot, “put peroxide in his hair and went out to commit suicide in the heart of the city.”
“The terrorist with the peroxide hair blew himself up near the chess players,” writes Maariv.
Both mass circulation Tel Aviv tabloids state that the Fatah Movement’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility, and that hours before the Rishon Letzion attack, the Israeli Army liquidated Mahmoud Titi, one of the most wanted Fatah-Tanzeem leaders, in a targeted killing near Nablus.
Yediot Ahronot and Maariv highlight the fact that, after the ejection of Shas from the governing coalition, Sharon can count on the support of only 60 of the Knesset’s 120 members. Yediot Ahronot reports that the prime minister ignored a last-minute appeal, conveyed in an emotional letter from Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and the sacking of the Shas ministers went ahead.
Maariv quotes Sharon saying: “If they support us in the upcoming votes, I will consider taking them back.” It also quotes Shas political leader Eli Yishai as saying, “Sharon demanded conditions of surrender, and we refused.”
Maariv says the prime minister has already initiated contacts with the seven-member right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu faction in an effort to broaden his coalition.
Commenting on the Rishon Letzion bombing, Sever Plotzker writes in Yediot Ahronot’s leader: “The suicide-terrorist war against Israel has never actually stopped. The brief lulls were the result of successful operations by our defense forces in pinpointing the perpetrators and foiling their plans. There is no lack of cannon fodder ­ hundreds of Palestinian youngsters are lining up for the privilege of committing a crime against humanity and blowing themselves up in the midst of crowds of Israeli civilians, with the encouragement of the frenzied Muslim masses.”
“As successful as ‘Operation Rampart’ may have been militarily and strategically,” Plotzker continues, “it failed to alter the harsh reality. The hundreds of Palestinians killed, the thousand-odd prisoners, the innumerable buildings destroyed and weapons captured, all of these only temporarily impaired the terrorists’ operational capability. The operation could not weaken the nationalistic, religious motivation or the burning hatred of the Palestinian terrorists ­ it may even have strengthened them.”
Military victory is a necessary condition for crushing terror. But, Plotzker says, it is not enough. “Also essential are political and economic incentives to induce the population from which the terrorists are recruited to renounce them; a sharp condemnation from the international community without ifs and buts; and an unequivocal negation of terror by the Palestinian leadership. In the absence of these conditions ­ and they are all currently absent ­ the best we can achieve is a stepped up effort to thwart individual attacks.”
In a front-page analysis, Yediot Ahronot military commentator Alex Fishman calls the 30,000-50,000 Palestinians who live and work illegally in Israel “the infrastructure and the springboard for terror attacks within the (1967) Green Line. It is from this human reservoir that the suicide bombers get intelligence about the targets and assistance in reaching them.”
Fishman says the orders for the operations probably come from Gaza, though the bombers are recruited and equipped with explosives manufactured in the West Bank and abetted by the “illegal” residents in Israel. He stresses that the “seam” line between Israel and the West Bank is virtually unguarded and unfenced, and “all of these elements combine to make up a sure-fire recipe for terrorist attacks on Israel’s soft underbelly.”
“This is not a situation we can live with for long,” Fishman writes. “It is the price we are paying for the fact that since Operation Rampart no progress has been made on the diplomatic front to allay Palestinian motives for sending in their human bombs. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has not been offered any incentive to act. Israel’s offensive military operations against the perpetrators are not enough to stop the bloody game of ping-pong.”
Maariv’s editorial says the Rishon Letzion bombing “came as a reminder that, after a diverting 48 hours of political shenanigans, the real problems of the Israeli people remain as far from a solution as ever.”
The paper says that after dismissing the ultra-Orthodox parties and winning the re-vote on the emergency economic program, Sharon “had good reason to be pleased with himself, having turned defeat into victory, reached new heights of public popularity and achieved the status of a leader rather than a mere politician.”
Maariv’s editorial writer finds reasons for and against “the mood of jubilation among secular Israelis” at the ejection of the Shas from the government coalition. “Sharon in their eyes is Clint Eastwood, clearing out all the bad guys who had been extorting the honest citizens. In this, he succeeded where all his predecessors had failed. He has set a new standard. But, at the end of the day, governance is not gunplay. In practical terms, Sharon’s achievements are meager, to say the least. In the security sphere, we sustained hundreds of fatal casualties before Operation Rampart, which helped reduce terror but did not eliminate it. In the diplomatic sphere, we are stuck with the same Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. And in the economic sphere, we have sunk into an unprecedented economic crisis.”
On Maariv’s opinion pages, Yael Paz-Melamed assumes that Shas will find its way back into the government, but she says the ultra-Orthodox party will never be the same. “They wanted too much and they lost out big time. The general public is fed up with their greed and extortion, and even if they still have many supporters, the myth of Shas’ invincibility has been shattered. They are through with threatening everyone in power. From now on, they can only bark; no one fears their bite. When the tap is turned away, they are like Samson shorn of his locks.”
On Yediot Ahronot’s opinion page, Guy Bichor takes up the issue of what he calls the “back-door right of return,” by which about 100,000 Palestinians and Jordanians have become Israeli citizens through family reunions or marriages since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
“In this period,” Bichor writes, “we paid these Palestinian families 3.3 billion shekels ($675 million) in child allowances. Last week, the Interior Ministry announced the total freezing of the family unification process. Less than an hour went by and the Civil Rights Association appealed to the High Court of Justice. Again the Association showed how it adheres blindly to a liberal fundamentalism and sees civil rights in absolute, automatic terms, without taking into account questions of demography, security, religion, history and collective future.”
Bichor maintains that the Knesset could put an end to this “crawling return” by making a simple amendment to the law of citizenship, “to deny Israeli citizenship to citizens of Arab countries or the Palestinian territories. That would immediately stop the phenomenon of ‘marriages for blue (Israeli) ID cards’ as it is dubbed in Ramallah, Gaza and Amman.
“But somehow, I have the feeling that the Association for Civil Rights would immediately appeal to the High Court against this legislation too.”

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