As Holiday Celebration Turns Deadly, Survivors Ponder Who Is to Blame

Cafe Apropos was alive with the Purim holiday spirit Friday afternoon when a young man walked in, carrying a duffel bag past children in costume and waiters in brightly colored masks.

The man seemed nervous as he made his way through the sun-warmed terrace into the restaurant, then back outside again to select a table in the middle of the crowd. Host Tal Zrihal went to get him a menu.

“When I turned around, there was an explosion. Glass shards fell like rain. Everything was black with soot,” a trembling Zrihal said. “There was a baby right there on the ground. I looked at myself, and I was the only one standing. Everyone else was on the floor.”

Zrihal had dressed for the festive day in a black shirt and red tie decorated with the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry. Now, he clenched his nervous stomach and pulled at his left ear, deafened by the blast.

“Again in Purim. Every holiday, every day the Jewish people want to celebrate, they don’t want us to be happy. They want to destroy us,” Zrihal said.

Nearby, his fellow workers hugged each other and cried, aware how few Israelis stand next to a suicide bomber and live to tell about it. One waitress recounted in shock how she had gone inside to fetch a salad for a handicapped woman seated on the terrace. When she returned after the blast, the woman was lying on the floor by her wheelchair.

“It was Purim, and I was happy,” said Benny Eran, who was busing tables when the restaurant exploded. “I had on a mask. Once a year we should be able to have fun. . . . But there was an explosion. I came out, and people were running. There was a little girl in costume, and her face was full of blood. We tried to help.”

Apropos is on a tree-lined boulevard in one of Tel Aviv’s upscale neighborhoods, where most of the dogs are pedigreed and many of the cafe clients are Israeli celebrities. The menu offers soups and salads, vegetarian and Thai food; it is kosher cooking without a kosher certificate of approval because the restaurant is open for the secular crowd on the Jewish Sabbath.

The explosion blew out the restaurant’s windows in daggers and splintered many chairs and tables. But other tables were still set with garnished salads and soda glasses with straws.

The crowd gathering in the glass- and ash-littered streets included children in fading face paint and teenagers with pierced body parts. Like the rest of the country, they had been expecting a terrorist attack. They just didn’t know when it would hit, or where. They were stunned that it had been in their neighborhood.

As rabbis soaked up spilled blood from the cafe with paper towels--collecting it for burial in keeping with religious law--fear quickly turned to anger and to screaming matches over politics.

Some neighbors blamed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for unleashing the attack by Hamas extremists. Others pointed a shaking finger at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for launching a new Jewish housing project in East Jerusalem on a hill that Israelis call Har Homa and Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghneim. Still others faulted both leaders.

“I think Bibi [Netanyahu] has made a lot of mistakes, and Arafat is playing with us,” said Moshe Soroker, 30, who lives across the street from the cafe.

“The whole deal with Har Homa right now wasn’t smart. Netanyahu could have postponed it. But Arafat, he has this beast in a box--Hamas. Every time he wants to prove his power, he lets the beast out a little bit. It’s not his fault, he condemns it, then takes the beast back in and says, ‘Want to talk now?’ ” Soroker said.