Quotes of the Day

The blast came on Monday morning. We were already in the office when the familiar sound of sirens started to fold over the neighborhood. Then came the noisy motors of a helicopter, and then one of our colleagues stepped in, announcing that she heard an explosion on her way to the office. There was no room for mistakes: something bad had been happening. Fifteen minutes later, the radio and the online editions of the big papers confirmed: a bomb had set off in the nearby Yitzhak Sadeh St. It's about 200 meters from our office, just on my daily route to work.

There was no surprise whatsoever. Not in our office — inhabited by left-wingers, politically aware and politically active — not on the mainstream radio channels' news flashes and not on the internet sites. Everybody expected something like this. It had already been clear, for more than a while, that the hudna [ceasefire] was about to be over.

But we were all wrong: Yes, a demolition charge went off in an office building, causing death and destruction. But this time no terrorists were involved. An innocent woman lost her life due to an underworld settling of accounts. This is a serious matter. Violence in the Israeli street has sharply sprouted in the last few years. And it would be blindness not to connect it to the growing violence in the region. Yet, despite all the anger and frustration it had made, this event was not the one that would set the region alight again.

Not yet. It took another day before THAT happened. The explosion of bus number 2 in an Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem brought the horror of horrors back to our life. And this time, the pictures from the site evoked the greatest fears from the greatest trauma of the Jewish people. The sight of Orthodox children covered with blood, crying silently, looking for their parents, brought one connotation to mind. The list of the dead victims' names, with their Yiddish sound, touched an immensely sore nerve. The collective memory of the Israeli psyche could not avoid wandering back to the sights and frights of the Holocaust.

Orthodox Israelis are often blamed for leaning on the state's treasury, while avoiding work and compulsory army service. But all those feelings vanished the moment the Israeli public was exposed to the sights from the attack scene.

This great feeling of rage and frustration took two forms. One, as always, was the government decision to "fight the terror," since the Palestinian Authority has failed to do it. Thus, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) was sent back into the Palestinian cities and its helicopters back to the "targeted killings". A reaction that will renew the circle of blood and distrust.

The other reaction, least expected (but no less practical, logical and in many ways even emotional), reminded the Israelis that only two weeks earlier an IDF combat force had raided a house in Nablus, an operation that cost the lives of four Palestinians and one Israeli soldier. Hamas denounced it as a violation of the hudna and promised "a huge revenge". Hence, this blood circle had actually never stopped, and some of the blame for violating agreements might fall on Israeli shoulders too. This weekend, a senior Labour member of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, published a sharp attack on Israeli behavior during the hudna, blaming the government as well as IDF — both supported by Labour's silence — for ruining any chance for agreement and any chance for a Palestinian state.

Other voices — even those who call for stark action against the Palestinian terror groups — admit that such an action could bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. What would happen in such a case? We can try and guess, but we can also learn from the bloody Lebanese experience. We can also learn something from a slight glimpse at the current events in Iraq. This is the last thing needed in the Israel-Palestinian conflict: a chaos in which only the extremists will gain power. The others — the majority — will pay the price. And that will be (or already is) a very heavy one; maybe too heavy to bear.

• MICHAL LEVERTOV
• Israeli over-action against terrorism threatens to push the region into more blood letting