Israeli Arab’s Attack Sets Off Shock Waves

By the twisted standards of his ilk, Mohammed Shaker Habashi was not a particularly successful suicide bomber. When the middle-aged Israeli Arab blew himself up at a busy northern train station Sunday, he claimed the lives of three others--a death toll security officials found almost miraculously low given the size of the bomb he detonated and the number of people nearby.

But few acts of murderous self-annihilation by Palestinian militants have sent shock waves through Israeli society as did Sunday’s attack, the first suicide bombing during the 11-month-old uprising committed by one of Israel’s more than 1 million Arab citizens.

Late Monday night, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers ringed the West Bank town of Jenin, where Habashi was alleged to have been trained by the militant Islamic movement Hamas. Messages were broadcast from mosques urging citizens to take to the streets to defend their city from an Israeli invasion. After a tense night, the Israeli army confirmed this morning that it was “acting in territories in full Palestinian control near Jenin while setting up command posts in the area.”

In a statement issued through its spokesman’s office, the army said Jenin was “a center for terrorists,” that the army had blocked roads to the city “to prevent the passing of terrorists into Israel” and that there were exchanges of fire between troops and gunmen.

Videotape of Bomber Broadcast on Israeli TV

The army action began hours after Israelis on Monday night saw a videotape broadcast by Israeli television that Habashi apparently made shortly before carrying out his attack in the northern coastal town of Nahariya. In the tape, the bearded Israeli citizen holds a gun and wears the green bandanna of Hamas around his head. For Israelis, it was chillingly similar to the videos young Palestinian suicide bombers have been leaving behind since the uprising began in the West Bank and Gaza Strip nearly a year ago.

He planned to carry out a suicide attack, Habashi said, to avenge the deaths of 13 Israeli Arab protesters shot by police in Israel in October. The protesters were killed during a wave of anti-government demonstrations that swept through Arab towns and villages.

Habashi’s video added fuel to the debate that raged here Monday between politicians and pundits who asked whether the Islamic militant was an anomaly or proof that the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians has dangerously radicalized Israel’s Arab citizens.

Right-wing politicians, including Public Security Minister Uzi Landau, urged the government to ban Israel’s legal Islamic movement, saying it is inciting the nation’s Arabs against the state. Analysts accused security forces of being lax in their approach to the Israeli Arab community.

“What else needs to happen for us to pull our heads out of the sand?” fumed military affairs analyst Alex Fishman in a front-page analysis for the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot. “They should stop telling us stories about errant weeds. The Israeli Islamic movement . . . has been growing fields of these weeds.”

Fishman and others pointed out that if Habashi turns out to be the tip of an iceberg of Israeli Arab suicide attackers, the nation’s already complex security situation will dramatically worsen. Though Habashi was the first Israeli Arab to carry out a suicide bombing, security forces have arrested several Israeli Arabs in recent months suspected of joining forces with militants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad or even the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement to carry out attacks in Israel.

Despite Habashi’s bombing and other attacks Sunday--a car exploded at a busy intersection in central Israel, killing only the suspected bomber, and two Israelis were killed by gunmen in the Jordan Valley--efforts to arrange a meeting today between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat continued. Late Monday, both sides said they could not agree on where to meet or on conditions for talks that are supposed to find a way to achieve a cease-fire.

Violence continued on the ground, with the army reporting this morning that two border policemen were shot and killed near their base just inside Israel’s pre-1967 border with the West Bank.

Connections between Israeli Arabs and Palestinian militants frighten Israelis because the nation’s Arab citizens--Palestinians who stayed when the Jewish state was created in 1948 and their descendants--travel freely through the country and are accorded equal protection under the law. It would be nearly impossible for Israel to separate and contain Israeli Arab towns and villages to the degree it can isolate Palestinian territories.

Israeli Arabs make up about 18% of Israel’s population of 6.5 million people. Although they have long suffered from various forms of discrimination, very few have ever attempted to carry out attacks on fellow Israelis. Instead, they have pressed for equal rights in housing, employment and land ownership.

“For much of the public, a suicide bomber from among the Israeli Arabs is a nightmare that has come true, a shahid [martyr] in the nation’s back,” wrote political analyst Hemi Shalev in the newspaper Maariv. “The appearance of a suicide bomber who is an Israeli citizen will necessarily lead to a sharp rise in the level of fear.”

Israeli Arabs denounced Habashi’s act and pleaded with the government and the Jewish majority not to condemn an entire community for the attack. Some of Habashi’s neighbors in the western Galilee village of Abu Snan urged the government to demolish his home just as the army routinely destroys the homes of alleged Palestinian attackers in the West Bank and Gaza.

But Israeli Arabs also spoke of the intolerable pressures they have felt in the past year as they have been pulled between their loyalty to the Palestinian cause and their responsibilities as Israeli citizens.

“Our situation is very bad,” said Wadia Awadeh, an Israeli Arab author and journalist. “The Arab countries accuse us of being too Israeli, and the Israelis say we are a fifth column. The Arabs ask more of us than we can do, and the Israelis say we are their worst enemies and a demographic bomb.”

Habashi’s attack is the culmination of “what I would call one of the most difficult years in the history of Israeli Arabs since the founding of the state,” said Dani Rabinowitz, a professor of anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He wants to believe that Habashi’s suicide attack was “a freak thing,” Rabinowitz said, “but I see this act as the embodiment of the stress that Palestinian citizens of Israel are experiencing.”

Crisis Began After 13 Protesters Were Killed

The community’s crisis began in October, when widespread demonstrations of support for the Palestinian revolt in the West Bank and Gaza erupted in Israeli Arab towns and villages and were violently quelled by police, leading to the deaths of the 13 protesters.

“Since then, despair and depression has set in among Palestinian citizens of Israel,” Rabinowitz said. The community has lost hope, he added, that it can ever be truly integrated into Israeli society or that their nation will make peace with the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Our community is in a deep crisis,” concurred Asad Ghanem, co-director of Sikkuy, a Jewish-Arab nonprofit organization that works to achieve equal rights for Israeli Arabs. “For many years, Arabs in Israel thought there was hope for change, but the Jewish majority is more nationalistic than ever.”

Today, Ghanem said, Israeli Arabs are split between “those who are moderate and those who do not agree that the state has the right to exist as it is.” Under the circumstances, he said, he was not surprised to learn that an Israeli Arab had joined the ranks of suicide bombers.

“Basically, the state doesn’t meet the needs of the Arabs,” Ghanem said. “Many Arabs are saying, ‘If there is no hope for peace, then let’s try to solve this conflict by other means.’ ”