Israel’s Sense of Isolation Deepens as Terrorists’ Toll Mounts

A recent wave of Mideast violence--including the slayings of seven Israeli vacationers by a berserk Egyptian policeman in the Sinai Peninsula and the murder of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old American Jew by Palestinian hijackers on an Italian cruise ship--has visibly deepened an ever-present Israeli sense of persecution and isolation.

Since the Jewish New Year on Sept. 16, violent events have seemed to come one after the other with such speed that there’s been no time in between for people to regain their perspective.

First came the Yom Kippur murders of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus, by pro-Palestinian terrorists. Then four children and three adults died on a Sinai sand dune; most of them, according to doctors here, bled to death after what eyewitnesses said were unconscionable Egyptian delays in getting medical help for them.

Three days later, a Tunisian security guard on duty outside a synagogue on the island of Jerba opened fire on worshipers, killing five Tunisian Jews. He was also said to have gone berserk, under the influence of calls to revenge Israel’s Oct. 1 air raid against Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis, which killed at least 60 people.

Then came this week’s killing of American passenger Leon Kling-hoffer on the liner Achille Lauro. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said Thursday that Klinghoffer’s murder was part of “a new wave of racism in which Jews are differentiated from non-Jews and an old man in a wheelchair is killed in cold blood because his name sounded Jewish.”

Peres warned that “the Jewish people . . . have a state, and that state has the means to protect the lives of innocent people, and we will do this.”

On Thursday, deepening the despondency here, the government announced that two Israeli seamen had been found bound, beaten, and stabbed to death in an apartment in Barcelona, Spain, that had been rented by a Palestinian.

In a telephone call to a news agency in Madrid, a man claiming to represent the PLO took responsibility for the Barcelona incident.

The caller said the two seamen were killed by commandos from the PLO’s elite Force 17 as part of a “fight against Zionists everywhere.”

West Bank Killings

And in the midst of all that, three more Israelis died here as the toll mounted in what has already become the worst surge of terrorism in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1979.

“If this is a sign of what the year is going to be like, we’re in trouble,” said an Israeli secretary and mother Thursday. “I’m afraid,” she added. “My daughter went on an overnight outing with the Girl Scouts a few days ago, and I didn’t have a moment of peace until that girl got back.”

Israel has long been considered a pariah state, not only by the Arabs but by most of the Communist Bloc and many Third World countries as well. It was born in blood, and five wars in 37 years have given it an almost permanent sense of being a country besieged.

But it’s not only the actions of Israel’s avowed enemies that have triggered the current sense of fear, anger and alarm here. Rightly or wrongly, Israelis are deeply outraged by the actions of their supposed friends, as well.

They were genuinely astonished at the reaction to the Tunis raid by top Italian government officials, who harshly condemned the attack as “terrorist violence” inappropriate to a “civilized state” while remaining silent on the Larnaca killings, which Israel said prompted the retaliatory air strike.

“I can’t be happy about something like this,” said Raya Harnick, an activist in the leftist Peace Now organization, about the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship this week. “But if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened to the Italians. Maybe now they’ll understand terrorism a little better.”

The sequence of events has also deepened Israeli bitterness over Egypt, the only Arab nation with which it has signed a peace treaty.

The Sinai killings alone would have been more than enough to confirm the worst suspicions of those who feel Israel was badly shortchanged in the deal. But even those who have defended Egypt were angered by President Hosni Mubarak’s statement dismissing the affair as a “small accident,” perpetrated by a madman, which could have occurred anywhere.

“This last week showed that we continue to be isolated and left to our own devices, as we have been since the early 1970s,” lamented a columnist in the independent newspaper, Haaretz.

“Today’s Jewish population is devoid of rational faith in a better future,” wrote columnist Avraham Schweitzer on Tuesday, even before Klinghoffer’s death. “Disappointed, gripped by a sense of isolation, the public has seized on superstitions, violent religiosity, and a mad nationalism. . . . “

Critics say Israel has only made matters worse by its own harsh measures, such as the Tunis raid. Most of the recent attacks on Israelis in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have been perpetrated by local Palestinians who have lived most of their lives under harsh Israeli military rule. They are inspired by home-grown hatred, not outside agitation, many say.

Israel’s Wounded Psyche

But former government spokesman and writer Zev Chafets contends that the terrorists responsible for the recent rise in Middle East violence are again miscalculating the Israeli psyche.

“They look and see a modern, European-type society, but it’s not,” Chafets said. “They don’t understand that they’re dealing with people who are crazier than they are.

“Israel is a society crazed by the murder of millions of Jews in this century,” Chafets explained. Six million were killed in a Nazi Holocaust that became the foundation of the state, and whose memory is kept almost as fresh here as if it had happened yesterday.

“They’re dealing with a country that had a battered childhood,” Chafets said of the terrorists, and rather than softening Israel’s stand on reaching a territorial compromise with the Palestinians, terrorist activity can only have the opposite effect.

If those who advocate Israeli territorial concessions in return for peace are right, “that’s fine,” the former government spokesman said. “But if they’re wrong, (giving up territory) is a disaster.”

Chafets predicted even sterner measures of collective punishment in the occupied territories, such as expulsions of entire families, unless the surge of attacks against Israelis there subsides. Such measures would surely be condemned abroad, but, as Chafets describes it, the emotions behind them are strong and basic.

Speaking of his young son and an imaginary Palestinian Arab child from the occupied territories, he commented: “If somebody has to be afraid of somebody, I want Mohammed to be afraid of Shmuelik rather than the other way around.”

Translated into politics, Chafets said, that means that “any government that wants to survive politically will have to be sure that the balance of fear is greater on their side than on our side.”