As Israelis read about the outbreak of “mad cow” disease and other stories unrelated to the Palestinian conflict on the front pages of their Wednesday morning papers, their radios and TV sets were describing the carnage and devastation at the Megiddo junction on the Afula-Hadera road, where a car bomb was detonated next to a bus.
There were over 40 casualties, at least 17 of them fatal. Massive question marks immediately loomed over the impact of this latest attack on the future of the American-led efforts to get a peace process going.
In the only front-page item on the conflict in either Tel Aviv mass-circulation newspaper, Yediot Ahronot quotes the chief of Israel’s Military Intelligence as saying that the militants who carried out the March 27 Passover bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya had planned to use cyanide to maximize the number of fatal casualties, but had failed because of a technical hitch.
Briefing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Major General Aharon Zeevi reported that both Hamas and Fatah were planning “mega attacks” aimed at causing as much loss of life as possible, and that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) were doing nothing to stop them.
Maariv’s whole front page is given over to the mad cow scare, and features a photograph of Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon tucking into a giant steak. The caption quotes him as saying that both his ministry and the Health Ministry “can be trusted, and the danger of contracting the disease is zero.”
Yediot Ahronot devotes an entire inside page to comment on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hastily arranged visit to Washington for talks with President George W. Bush Monday.
The paper’s Washington correspondent, Orly Azulai-Katz, says it was Sharon who initiated the visit, and Bush agreed to see him at such short notice because it suits his domestic interest.
“With official Washington digging into the details of alleged Sept. 11 security and intelligence lapses, Bush has a supreme interest in moving the spotlight away. He will work for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and present himself to the world as a peacemaker,” she writes.
Katz notes that Bush will host Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak this week and says that “the two see almost eye to eye on the formula for a solution ­ an international conference at the end of July, based on a declaration of a Palestinian state in part of the West Bank and Gaza without getting into the issues of final borders, Jerusalem and settlements.”
“In Cairo and Washington there is general agreement on an improved version of the Peres/Abu-Alaa document, based on the Saudi peace initiative. Bush will present this package to Sharon at their meeting next Monday and will send the invitations through Secretary of State Colin Powell.”
Katz says that White House officials believe Sharon will try to put constraints on the mooted conference. But, she writes, “at a time that Congress is examining possible intelligence lapses by organizations subordinate to the president, Bush has no time for games. He wants a political achievement here and now, and therefore Sharon can expect a pat on the back accompanied by pressure to join the American-Arab-European consensus. Sharon may have time on his hands, but in the White House the clock is ticking away.”
Yediot Ahronot diplomatic analyst Shimon Schiffer says: “It is important to remember that the Bush administration does not want a confrontation with Sharon. In the White House they know a thing or two about internal politics and are well aware of the importance of the Jewish vote in America. That’s why Sharon chose
to begin his visit by meeting with Jewish leaders in New York. ‘In this campaign,
we must not give up the Jewish front.’”
According to Schiffer, Sharon’s immediate goal will be to remove from the agenda Mubarak’s proposal for the establishment of a Palestinian state under Arafat. But he writes that “at this point, there are no takers among the Arab states for Sharon’s regional conference ideas. The Arabs want to set a hard and fast agenda for the conference’s deliberations in advance.”
 “The name of the game for Sharon,” Schiffer says, “is playing for time, until Arafat and his cronies leave the stage. And then? God
is great. Who knows what will happen.”
Yediot Ahronot’s Arab affairs analyst, Samadar Peri, predicts that “Mubarak will present Bush with an unequivocal Egyptian condition for participation in the regional peace conference
in July: a declaration in
principle on the establishment of a Palestinian state, with the agreement of Bush and Sharon.”
Peri quotes Egypt’s deputy information minister, Nabil Othman, as saying: “Without such a declaration, there is no point in convening the peace conference. Immediately after the declaration, we will discuss a timetable for turning the declaration in principle into a practical decision.”
Peri asserts that “a second condition Mubarak will present in his talks with Bush
is a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank,” and again she quotes Othman to back up her assumption: “Those who want democratic reform and elections in the territories,” he said, “must give the Palestinians freedom of movement between the cities.”
On Maariv’s opinion page, veteran commentator Yosef Harif writes that “Sharon is always reiterating the importance of credibility. At his meeting with Bush, his credibility obligates Sharon to make it clear that while he is ready to enable the Palestinians to establish a state, it must by no means be a state that could threaten Israeli airspace, import shiploads of weaponry like the Karine A, or to enter pacts with Iran and Iraq. Sharon is entitled and obliged to demand that his host in the White House makes it clear what kind of Palestinian state he is talking about.”
In another piece on Maariv’s opinion page, Arab-Israeli columnist Zuhair Andraos explains why he and many other members of his community support the Italians in the World Cup football championship. “It is the Italian flag and not that of fellow-Arab lands Saudi Arabia or Tunisia that is most conspicuous in Arab-Israeli villages. This is because, for one thing, the Arabs see a similarity between the Palestinian and the Italian flag. They also recall the Italian football association’s gesture in dedicating their World Cup in 1982 to the Palestinian people and are aware of the Italian people’s unreserved sympathy for the Palestinians.”
“What’s more, the fact that no one wants to fly the Saudi flag, which symbolizes Islam more than any other flag, shows that Arab-Israelis are inclined to be secular and are firmly opposed to fundamentalism.”
And while on the subject of flags, Andraos points out that no Arab-Israeli flies the Israeli flag on Independence Day, “because they do not feel that Israel is their country and that the Jewish state doesn’t even want them to feel that they belong.”

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