Israel to forgo military response to bombing

In an article published in The Jerusalem Post, the Associated Press reports that Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert arrived at the decision to forgo military reprisals against the Palestinian Authority (PA) after two hours of meetings Tuesday with Israeli officials and security chiefs.

"Israel sees the Palestinian Authority as responsible for what happened yesterday," said Gideon Meir, a senior Foreign Ministry official.

But Olmert decided against launching a large-scale military operation and blocked a proposal to declare the Palestinian Authority an "enemy entity," participants said.

Such a declaration would have paved the way for direct strikes against the Palestinian Authority. Until now, economic and political boycotts have been the main tools against the Hamas government.

Officials said the government is pleased with the strong international front against Hamas and does not want to jeopardize that through overwhelming military action.

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So far, CNN reports, Israel's primary act of reprisal against the Palestinian Authority has been to revoke the residency rights of Hamas lawmakers and Palestinian parliament members in Jerusalem. The residency rights granted Palestinian ministers in East Jerusalem all the benefits of Israeli citizens, including healthcare.

But while Israel has opted for military restraint, its security forces have not been inactive. The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli Defense Forces raided a West Bank village near Jenin Tuesday morning and arrested the father of Samir Hammad, the suicide bomber in Monday's attack. The Post noted however that while the Israeli army often demolishes the home of attackers, the army said it "was not immediately preparing to destroy the building."

"We don't like to see innocent people, including Jews, killed. But when they kill our children on a daily basis, our hearts are hardened and we try to make them drink from the same cup they have been forcing us to drink from all these years," she said, reflecting a sentiment shared by most in Burqa.

"They are killing our people on a daily basis, starving us, preventing us from work, and turning our daily life into an unbearable hell. So how are we supposed to behave under such circumstances? What are we supposed to do, kill ourselves?

"I think Israel is making each and every Palestinian a potential human bomber."

The BBC reports that this sentiment, similar to Hamas's declaration that the bombing was an act of self-defense, is the predominant view among the Palestinians.

A man selling sheets in a shop off Palestine Square said: "The world ignores us. But through [the bombing] they will know that we are still alive and resisting.

"We have to continue in the right way - the path of Jihad."

And a food stand owner, Talat Hejazi, described his reaction to the news of the blast in Tel Aviv:

"I was very happy because of all these blows on us all the time. Let them feel it for once. Let them retaliate - we will sacrifice ourselves."

Overwhelmingly people spoke in those terms.

The reaction from media in the Arab world has been decidedly more split. Ha'aretz reports that Al Gomhuria, a state-run Egyptian newspaper, wrote in an editorial that the Tel Aviv bombing was justified and that "the Palestinian people are not required ... to turn the page of struggle and stop the march of battle before achieving their goals."

However, Ha'aretz notes that Egypt's leading newspaper, al-Ahram, which is also state-run, condemned the bombing for targeting civilians and said the attack hurt the Palestinian struggle.

The headline in al-Ahram called the bombing a guerrilla operation, using the positive Arabic word "fida'i," but the editorial said the bombing gave Israel a pretext for the use of force and that violence did not serve the interests of either side.

AP reports that Lebanese papers showed a similar split over the bombing.

"The operation is condemned, and such condemnation is a duty and a must, especially by the Arab side, the Palestinians," Sahar Baassiri said in a front-page column for Lebanon's leading newspaper, An-Nahar.

An-Nahar wrote that the suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv on Monday was the last thing the Palestinians need "because it provided the West with an ideal pretext to impose a collective punishment on them to force the Hamas government to accept its conditions...."

The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir was sympathetic to suicide bombers. "The Palestinian despair was embodied in a youth less than 20 years old who blew himself up in central Tel Aviv to kill nine Israelis and provide his people with a chance to emerge from humiliation," it said.

UPI reports in an Arab press survey that Palestinian newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, while calling the attack unavoidable because of the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, said continuing the violent cycle of reprisals will not help the Palestinian people.

It warned that managing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict cannot be done through attacks and retaliations, 'especially after it became clear that Israel is heading towards mixing the cards and trying to exploit the situation to pass its unilateral measures that would wipe out all possibilities for establishing an independent Palestinian state.'

The paper called on all the Palestinian national forces to seriously review their approach to reach agreement on 'consolidating the positive and abandoning the negative aspects that are hindering the building of the national plans.'

The AP notes that the Hamas government has been largely criticized in the Palestinian media, which are loyal predominantly to Fatah, the political party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The Hamas-run PA has been regularly lambasted by the Palestinian press, and Hamas has begun to express irritation about the situation.

"The Palestinian media is clearly biased against Hamas," complained Mahmoud Ramahi of Hamas, secretary-general of the Palestinian parliament. "What they are doing is not monitoring or criticizing. What they are doing is inciting against Hamas, in the interest of Fatah."

Pro-Fatah journalists say they are giving equal treatment to all politicians and that Hamas is simply frustrated because it cannot control the media.

"It's only because they (Hamas) can't impose their agenda on us, they say we are inciting," said Mohammed al-Dawoudi, a senior official in the Broadcasting Corp., which runs the Voice of Palestine radio, Palestine TV and the official Wafa news agency.

The three main Palestinian daily newspapers – Al Ayyam, Al Quds, and Al Hayat Al Jedida – are all sympathetic to Fatah, as are the two most popular private radio stations in Gaza.

Some in the press say that they're simply expressing the concerns of the Palestinian public. Baha al Bokhari, a cartoonist for Al Ayyam, told the AP that he once drew cartoons criticizing the previous Fatah-run government. "I am doing the same now. The only difference is that in the past, the newspaper used to refuse to publish some of my drawings, and now it doesn't."

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