For a Day, Israel Can Savor a Victory No One Questions

Israel captured the European basketball championship for the first time in 20 years Sunday, and, for a few hours, the nation forgot its bloody fight with the Palestinians as tens of thousands of fans danced in the streets and chanted, “We are the champions!”

Even as Israelis rejoiced, however, the army carried out missile strikes on Palestinian security targets in the Gaza Strip. Helicopter gunships destroyed at least eight Palestinian armored personnel carriers in a compound near Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters.

And in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinians reported that the Israelis shot dead five Palestinian policemen early this morning. An Israeli army spokeswoman said that soldiers near the village of Beitunia, outside Ramallah, “identified suspicious figures and opened fire toward them--from reports that we received, they were hit.”

But in headlines and radio and TV reports, the grim death toll took a back seat to the basketball championship.

Maccabi Tel Aviv defeated the reigning Panathinaikos Athens of Greece, 81 to 67, after losing in the finals to the same team a year ago. “Revenge! Revenge!” chanted the 8,000 delighted Israeli fans who traveled to Paris to watch the game at the Bercy arena.

Winning the title gave a much-needed morale boost to a nation that has been battered by more than seven months of fighting with the Palestinians. “We won this war, and we will win all the wars,” Maccabi Coach Pini Gershon shouted to an interviewer as pandemonium erupted in the arena with the final buzzer.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon phoned to congratulate the coach as he and the team were mobbed on the court by fans. Sharon said the win proved “what can be done when we’re united.” Within an hour of the victory, about 50,000 fans had descended on Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, named for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, to gulp champagne, hug one another and wave Israeli flags. Thousands more celebrated in the streets of other cities.

Arriel McDonald and Nate Huffman, both Americans, led the team’s effort, each scoring 21 points. Maccabi was ahead, 37 to 23, at halftime, but Panathinaikos took the lead briefly in the third quarter before being outscored by the Israelis throughout the fourth quarter.

A mass rally was planned in Tel Aviv for today to welcome the team back.

Writing in the daily newspaper Haaretz on Sunday, commentator Doron Rosenblum said the frenzied expectation leading up to the title game was evidence of how badly the violence has dented Israeli self-confidence and the hard-won sense that this is a normal country.

“At a time when investments are going belly up, and tourist traffic is dwindling, there’s satisfaction to be garnered from the fact that our delegates and supporters managed to get off the ground at Ben Gurion airport without being hit by any Palestinian missiles,” Rosenblum wrote sarcastically. “Israel once again is viewed by the world as one of those eternally cursed spectacles, one of those remote ‘holes’ on the map into which incessant violence drains. . . . Under such circumstances, renewed pining for the European cup in basketball . . . simply betrays our remote isolation.”

Indeed, the violence continued Sunday and into today. In the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli bulldozers and troops again thrust into a Palestinian-controlled area, destroying two houses on the edge of the town of Rafah. An Israeli army spokesman said the homes were destroyed after Palestinians threw grenades at troops.

The Israeli rocket attack began shortly after midnight. Abdel Razek Majaydeh, the Palestinian public security chief, said at least eight helicopters carried out the attack. He said several Palestinian police officers were wounded. The army confirmed striking at the personnel carriers and at targets in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza, and near the Jabalya refugee camp. A spokeswoman said they were in retaliation for ongoing mortar attacks on Jewish settlements.

Diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting seemed to be going nowhere Sunday. Palestinian Cabinet minister Nabil Shaath told a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah that the Palestinians will resume negotiations only if Israel freezes all construction on the land it captured from Arab states in the 1967 Middle East War. But Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres insisted that the Israelis will expand existing settlements to accommodate the growth of those communities.

Meanwhile, senior Palestinian negotiator Mahmoud Abbas headed for Washington for talks with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that the Palestinians said will be aimed at restarting peace negotiations.