Word: arab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Israel has, with good reason, always been an anxious nation. It has had to contend with neighbors at times so viciously hostile that the young country's existence was constantly threatened. Now, paradoxically, Israel is physically more secure than ever: of its four Arab neighbors, only Syria is a military menace. Yet that has not translated into psychological security. Three dozen years after its birth, Israel faces problems never imagined by Yaacov Zvieli and other founders. "We now disagree among ourselves on everything," says Major General Israel Tal, the father of his country's tank industry...
...planning and execution of a 1980 bombing attack that crippled the Arab mayors of two cities in the occupied West Bank. Three others have already pleaded guilty, and two army officers of the West Bank military government are being tried separately. Israelis have been shocked not only to learn that an underground Jewish terrorist movement exists but by the list of those accused of taking part. Most of the suspects belong to Gush Emunim, the nationalistic religious group that has spearheaded the Jewish settlement movement in the occupied West Bank. Some are reserve paratroopers and tank commanders in the armed...
...trial points up the emergence of a new kind of zealot: the West Bank settler who feels that the best way to fight Arab violence is with Jewish violence. The vengeful cycle began in May 1980, when Arabs ambushed and killed six Jewish settlers in the city of Hebron. One month later, two car bombs went off on the same morning, severing both legs of Mayor Bassam Shaka'a of Nablus and blowing off part of the left foot of Ramallah Mayor Karim Khalaf. Every few months fresh blood was shed: a settler would die after being knifed...
Israelis did not know how extensive the network was until April, when it was announced that 27 people had been arrested in a plot to plant bombs under five Arab buses in the West Bank. Shin Bet agents had infiltrated the group to the point where they even videotaped clandestine strategy sessions. Because the deadly devices were timed to explode at the height of rush hour, casualties would have gone into the hundreds. As the probe continued, officials concluded that they had arrested not just the men who had planned the bus infernos but those responsible for the attacks...
...under certain circumstances and grave events, organized to defend our brothers." Paul Eidelberg, a professor at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv, argues that there is a difference between Israeli and Arab terrorism: "Arab violence against Jews is ultimately against the very existence of the Jewish state. In contrast, when Jews resort to violence against Arabs, they are not denying Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state." That sentiment reaches right into the government. Science and Technology Minister Yuval Ne'eman said in May that while he condemned "blind terror," the assaults on the mayors had "positive results...