Palestinian Bomber Injures 20 in Israel

A young Palestinian man entered a popular cafe in northern Israel on Sunday, said to a waitress, “Do you know what this is?” and then pulled out a lighter and ignited a fuse. A moment later, there was a blast and bloodied victims, the second suicide bombing to strike Israel in less than a week.

This time, only the bomber, 28-year-old Mohammed Nasr, was killed inside the Wall Street Cafe in the town of Kiryat Motzkin. Authorities said about 20 people suffered mostly light injuries. Three days earlier, at a crowded pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, 16 people died in a similar attack.

“I saw this strange-looking man enter the cafe. He was wearing a yellow shirt and looking very nervous,” Aron Rozeman, the owner of the Wall Street Cafe, told Israeli television from his hospital bed Sunday night. “He asked a waitress if she knew what ‘this’ is. I immediately understood what ‘this’ meant. He said ‘Allahu akbar’ [God is great] and blew up.”

Rozeman said that just before the blast, he threw a chair at the man and stepped behind a wall. Then he lost consciousness. He was taken to Rambam hospital in the nearby port city of Haifa along with other victims, including his daughter.

For a moment Sunday, a collective dread filled this nation as the first sketchy details were broadcast: a crowded cafe, a bomb and as many as 50 injured. The militant group Islamic Jihad took credit for the attack. But when it became clear that no innocents had been killed, the dread turned to anger and talk of payback.

“Nobody can expect Israel to sit back and watch this macabre game of Russian roulette to be played, where sometimes you are lucky and sometimes you are not,” Daniel Shek, a senior Foreign Ministry official, said in a television interview shortly after the blast.

For months, Arabs and Jews have been repeating themselves, and the reactions to Sunday’s attack proved no different: Israel called for a halt to the violence, the Palestinians called for an end to Israel’s occupation of their land. Each side said the other must act first.

The violence Sunday was all too familiar as well. A Palestinian militant blew himself up; Israeli forces fired on civilians and reportedly killed an 8-year-old girl in the West Bank city of Hebron; in one incident, Palestinian militants fired at Israeli Defense Forces, and they responded with a tank shell.

“I think this ongoing circle of violence is an inevitable outcome of the ongoing occupation,” said Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political analyst. “There is no way to break this cycle of violence with violence.”

Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in February on a promise to improve security. Instead, it seems that every step he takes--while generally popular with a weary public--fails to achieve that goal.

“He is just making things worse,” Palestinian Rasha abu Latiefa, 18, said Sunday as she waited at an Israeli army checkpoint outside the West Bank town of Alram, one of many checkpoints that Israel set up when it went on high alert after Thursday’s pizza parlor blast.

Abu Latiefa said she has been trying to focus on her schoolwork instead of the fighting. But as a result of being stuck at the checkpoint, she said, she would be unable to file her college applications.

“We all grow up knowing about this situation since we are 10. But this just makes it worse,” she said.

The checkpoints have made it nearly impossible for many Palestinians to move between their communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Erecting them may have been intended to improve security in Jerusalem, but it has also served to further radicalize the Palestinian public and bolster support for such militant groups as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“Whenever you pressure people like this, it will lead to an explosion,” said Adnan Reemwi, 54, who along with hundreds of other men, women and children was not allowed to enter Alram on Sunday. Cars and trucks waited for three hours to pass through the checkpoint, while young Israeli soldiers in full battle gear fired their weapons into the air at least once to try to disperse the crowd that had gathered.

In many ways, the back-to-back bombings underscored Sharon’s difficulties. Hours after Thursday’s attack, his government thought that it had hit upon an effective way to punish the Palestinians without bringing criticism upon itself: Armed forces took control of Orient House, the Palestinians’ headquarters in East Jerusalem. But Sharon found that this bloodless response not only failed to improve security--as evidenced by the second suicide bombing--but also earned him a heap of criticism at home and abroad for expanding the boundaries of the conflict.

“Within 48 hours of the frightful terrorist attack in the heart of Jerusalem, there was a change in international public opinion and Israel turned from tragic victim of terrorism to an aggressor using predatory diplomacy,” wrote Hemi Shalev, a political analyst for the Israeli newspaper Maariv. “As anticipated, the Palestinians are entirely satisfied.”

Though Israel continued to insist Sunday that the Orient House takeover was designed to stem the bloodletting by shifting the fight to a political battlefield, the move instead opened a new front. Although Palestinians hope to make traditionally Arab East Jerusalem the capital of a future state, those living there have been largely quiet during the 10 months the current intifada has raged. That has now changed, and Orient House has become a powerful rallying point for the community, where, for example, the Palestinians were planning to stage a work stoppage today.

“We’re ready for the Jerusalem battle imposed by Israel,” said senior Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Korei, who in 1993 helped craft peace agreements with Israel. “We will resist all attempts to Judaize our occupied city . . . and this includes political and armed resistance.”

The tension and futility of the standoff have also worn away the seams of Israel’s coalition between a moderate foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and the hawkish Sharon.

On Sunday, after heated exchanges with hard-liners in his Cabinet, Sharon gave Peres permission to open discussions with Palestinian officials--though not with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. However, Sharon also ordered that the talks not be called negotiations.

It was unclear whether this represented a change in Sharon’s policy of refusing to negotiate until all violence stops.

“Sharon is going to have to learn something from the English,” Peres was quoted as saying by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Sunday. “Even after the Irish blow up car bombs in central London, they continue to talk with them.”

The article quoted Sharon defending the Orient House takeover.

“I knew that we had to react in the wake of the awful massacre that the Palestinians perpetrated against Jews in central Jerusalem,” he said.