Israel's Tactics Thwart Attacks, With Trade-Off

By ISABEL KERSHNER

NETANYA, Israel -- Suicide bombings in Israel have dropped off so significantly that the nation's security officials now dare to speak openly of success. But the very steps they are taking to thwart bombers appear to collide head-on with the government's agenda of achieving peace with the Palestinians.

It is a classic military-political dilemma. The progress in stopping suicide bombers, the vast majority of whom cross into Israel from the West Bank, has brought enough quiet for Israel to resume peace talks with the Palestinian leadership there.

I fail to see any dilemma. Any nation's first obligation is to protect it's citizens from harm. Not much purpose in having an organized govt if they cannot offer physical safety to their citizens.

But the current calm is fragile, and to maintain it Israeli security officials say they must continue their nightly arrests and sometimes deadly raids in the heart of the West Bank -- tactics at odds with a peace effort that envisions a separate Palestinian state, an eventual Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank and, in the meantime, a gradual transfer of authority to the Palestinian police.

Of course if the purpose of the Palestinians is to LIVE WITH Israel, there will be, in the end, NO PROBLEM. But we see quite plainly that the purpose of 100% of Palestinian, Arab, Persian and all Muslim efforts since 1919 has been to eliminate the Jews as an organized entity of any kind in the middle east, preferably in the manner of Khaibar.

"The price of staying out" of the West Bank, said one senior Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of military restrictions, "might be one that we don't want to pay."

The military's faith in its efforts comes across in its charts showing a steep decline in suicide bombings -- from a high of 59 in 2002 to only one in 2007, and one so far this year.

"It is far from a coincidence," said Col. Herzi Halevi, commander of the Israeli Army's Paratroops Brigade, which is at the forefront of the military campaign in the West Bank, where the borders are longer and more permeable than those in the Gaza Strip, the other Palestinian territory. "It is not that the terrorists did not try enough. They did. We know."

The military's change in policy came after a particularly bloody spring in 2002, when a Palestinian from the West Bank traveled nine short miles across Israel and walked into the modest Park Hotel here in Netanya, a coastal resort town, blowing himself up in the dining hall during a Passover seder.

The Park Hotel massacre, as it became known, was the climax of a bloody month in which 130 Israelis died in suicide bombings and other attacks. Within days Israeli forces invaded most of the Palestinian cities of the West Bank in an operation named Defensive Shield, wresting back control from the Palestinian Authority security forces who were supposed to be laying the foundations for a nascent Palestinian state.

Six years later, the glass doors at the entrance of the Park Hotel were flung wide open to catch the slightest breeze. In the lobby, a teenager casually played a video game while a tourist collected a hair dryer from the reception desk. Scores of guests were booked for the Passover meal.

The sad fact, as it has been lamented many times here, is that there is little to discuss between EITHER pairs of warring parties, Israel-FATAH, and the Holocaust minimizer, Abbas, and Israel-HAMAS where the ultimate Quranic solution is the only one HAMAS CAN admit to.

It is a war of the peoples, and it will have to end with the complete breaking of one population's will or the other, as it was in 1865.

Harsh, but unavoidable.