The scene is so horribly familiar. A sunny afternoon. Shoppers crowding a city street. Then the deadly blast of a bomb, carnage and chaos. Neither the former peacemaking Labor government nor the present security-minded Likud government has figured out a way to stop it.
This time the bombers came well dressed, one in a dark suit, one in a light suit. A car dropped them off just outside Jerusalem's main food market, and they walked into the crowded center of the bazaar, carrying attache cases. At 1:10 p.m., positioned 100 ft. apart and apparently in eye contact, one of them, standing in a covered lane, detonated a lethal parcel containing about 20 lbs. of TNT packed with rusty screws and nails. Three seconds later, the second man exploded his suitcase bomb along an open street crammed with lunchtime shoppers. "This is madness," cried an anguished onlooker amid the tangle of human limbs, blackened flesh, crushed fruit and building rubble. The blasts also blew away the lower portions of the bombers' bodies, leaving their still unidentified faces gruesomely intact.
The suicide bombers killed 13 and wounded 170 in the attack, which was claimed by the radical Islamist group Hamas. The bloodshed scotched the latest attempts at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians and set back U.S. plans to reinvigorate the comatose peace process. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has suffered yet another blow to his fragile authority, cornered dangerously between militant Islamists and enraged Israelis. Also in political trouble within his ruling coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now probably faces more pressure to move further to the right.
The terror strike last Wednesday was the worst since Netanyahu came to office 13 months ago, vowing he could deliver progress toward peace together with the security Israelis crave. While he has borne much of the criticism for stalling peace negotiations, he laid the blame for the bombing squarely on Arafat, who has lately made vigilance against Islamist militants a low priority. Within hours of the blast, Netanyahu responded with a program of unprecedentedly tough retaliatory measures. These amounted, in Arafat's view, to "a declaration of war," a characterization Netanyahu didn't even bother to dispute. "You can't have peace," he declared, "when people are blown to smithereens."
In Washington, President Clinton was equally tough on the Palestinians. "There is no excuse and there must be no tolerance for this kind of inhumanity," he said, demanding "concrete steps" by the Palestinians to fight terror. But fearful that violence could beget more violence, Administration officials began to think something bolder was required. The President postponed for only a week a planned mission by Middle East mediator Dennis Ross--his first since last April--to regenerate confidence, and huddled with his security advisers to consider what else Washington could do to repair the diplomatic damage. "It's pretty clear," said a U.S. official, "that it will be hard to get this on track unless there is a high degree of security cooperation."