March 5, 2002

Fighting those who are prepared to die

By _{Ze'ev Schiff}

The suicide bombers who blow themselves up in Israel's population centers are the Palestinians' ultimate weapon. Many Palestinians, including some intellectuals, view the bombers as heroes. On the other hand, by conventional definition, and not just in the West, they are terrorists, because their sole purpose is to deliberately attack civilians, including women and children.

The fact that the suicidal terrorists appeared long before the outbreak of the current military confrontation with the Palestinians is being ignored in the fruitless ongoing political debate in Israel, and also in the coverage of the phenomenon in the international press. During the period between the signing of the Oslo accords and September 2000, no fewer than 36 terrorists blew themselves up. In other words, they operated even during the period Arafat calls "the peace of the brave."

Since the outbreak of the current military confrontation, 55 suicide bombers have managed to blow themselves up. Another 11 were caught and are being held in Israel. Almost all of them chose their civilian targets inside Israel, within the Green Line, not in the settlements. This is also evident in the casualty figures. Some 49 percent of the Israelis killed so far in the intifada have died in terrorist attacks inside the Green Line (17 percent of them in Jerusalem); over 70 percent of the wounded were injured inside Israel proper.

When the suicide operations were carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it was clear that they were setting their sights on all of Israel and that they had hardly any interest in the settlements. Now the Tanzim have joined the trend of carrying out attacks inside Israel. The cooperation between the Tanzim and Hamas has reached new heights, not only in attacks and in the preparation of explosive charges for suicide bombers, but also in the development of the Kassam rockets.

Familiar figures from the past have suddenly appeared on the scene. Mohammed Deif, who played a key role in the suicide bombings during the period when the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were prime ministers, has come out of hiding in Gaza and is planning operations against Israel from there.

When Hamas led the terrorist activities of the suicide bombers, preparing a bomber took several weeks and also involved preparing the people who would assist the bomber to reach the target of the operation. Now that the Tanzim have entered the suicide-bombing picture, the preparation time has become a lot shorter. The latest bombers have also been indoctrinated with the Islamic religious belief in the orgy with virgins that Allah is preparing for them in heaven. They are also told that all the sins of their family members will disappear and that their relatives will also reach paradise.

The possibility of being killed will not deter someone who is willing to die in order to kill Israelis and Jews. It is also doubtful that he will cringe at the idea, raised recently, of his remains being put into a pig skin for burial, when all the while his spiritual leader is promising him that in any event he will enter paradise as a martyr. If there is anything at all that will deter him, it is the knowledge that his family, which he cares about and which he is certain will benefit from his self-sacrifice, will be harmed.

It seems that the day is approaching in the terrible war that is developing here, when anyone who comes to destroy Israeli families, including children and babies, will have to consider that Israel will harm his family, and not only his property.

It is already clear that damaging property is not enough, because those who would not build one house for their refugee brothers are willing to build a new house for the martyr's family after he kills Israelis.

Now, with Palestinian terror cutting down entire families, perhaps the voices calling for physically harming the families of the suicide terrorists will drown out the voices that reject this idea out of hand as unethical. The terrorists, those who send them, and their families are liable to find out that a terror-battered Israel is being drawn into merciless responses.