israelinsider: Why has Netanya been a target?

Cynthia Yacowar-Sweeney is a Montreal-based PR communications professional and a research associate of Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR). She monitors and comments on Mideast media reports.

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Why has Netanya been a target?
By Cynthia Yacowar-Sweeney May 21, 2001

Everyday we read of yet another Palestinian terrorist attack against Israel: Bludgeoning of teenage boys, lynching of young soldiers, targeting babies, bombing buses and market places, shooting drivers on the road, firing mortars, grenades and bullets on civilian settlements. Endless assaults on law and order, most of which don't reach the news because CNN, BBC, Reuters and AP do not get "invitations" to witness these tragic events.

Just this past Friday, there was a third bombing attack this year in the seaside city of Netanya. A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a bustling shopping mall, killing five Israelis and wounding over 100, some of them critically.

Despite this grisly scene of mutilation, the bomber's older brother said, "We are happy. He has given up his soul and his body for the Palestinian people and now he will stand before God." He left his family a box of chocolates to celebrate his "martyrdom" with sweets. Hamas said it was only the fifth of 10 planned suicide attacks against Israel. Another 250 suicide bombers have reportedly been recruited.

Palestinians do not kill by accident; they always kill purposely. And that is why Israel struck back with F-16s, targeting Palestinian security installations in several cities in the West Bank and Gaza over the weekend. "Our approach is to specifically target those security services that are engaged in terrorism and violence against Israel," Dore Gold, one of Sharon's advisors, said. "Terrorism is directed against Israeli civilian targets. That makes all the difference in the world."

Why has Netanya been the target of suicide bombers? It is not part of the disputed territories where the issue of settlements has become Arafat's latest reason for this Intifada. Netanya is within the heartland of Israel, founded in 1929. So why Netanya? It's because the Palestinians want to liberate the entire "land that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea," declared the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Ikrima Sabri, last November in the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram.

The Palestinians want all of what is present-day Israel to be their country. They claim not just Ramallah, but Tel Aviv as well. "Continue on till Jaffa, Haifa, and Tel Aviv!" they chanted last year on October 6th, the day Barak temporarily handed control over Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount, to the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin declared on Al-Jazeera, a virulently anti-Israel satellite television channel beamed from Qatar to millions worldwide, that the destruction of Israel must be the objective of all Arabs, that "Hamas will continue its holy war against the Zionist occupier until we will liberate all of Palestine." Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah declared at a terrorists' conference held in Tehran in April that "we have an exceptional historic opportunity to finish off the entire cancerous Zionist project."

The Palestinians refuse to recognize the existence of a Jewish state. The PLO charter, despite Arafat's promises to change it, still calls for Israel's destruction. This is what the Friday mosque sermons preach. This is what the PA broadcasts on television and radio. This is what the PA publishes in their newspapers. And this is what the PA teaches in its anti-Jewish school textbooks. The title page of Volume 1, "Our Country Palestine", the PA's 6th grade textbook, proclaims: "There is no alternative to destroying Israel".

Had Arafat accepted a second offer to statehood last year, the first being in 1947 by the UN, the Palestinians could have refrained from marking May 15th as Al-Nakba, the catastrophe of Israel's creation in 1948. Barak reportedly offered them over 95% of the disputed territories, including Gaza, virtually the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem. Barak would have relinquished sovereignty over the Temple Mount and offered to internationalize the site under the UN Security Council. Close to one hundred settlements were to be uprooted. And thousands of refugees were to be admitted back into Israel proper. But that wasn't enough.

So when Arafat calls for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab lands, does he mean a withdrawal to the Green Lines of 1967, to the UN Partition Plan Lines of 1948, or does he really mean to the blue lines of the sea, as the Netanya bombings would indicate?