Stardate 20020331.2012

(On Screen): Another day, another suicide bombing. This time it was in Haifa, and the target was a restaurant in an area where Palestinians and Israelis have generally coexisted quite well. The owner of the restaurant happened to be down the street when the bomb went off and destroyed his place, and he rushed back and tried to help rescue victims some of whom were actually Palestinian.

The owner is Israeli; his manager, who was wounded in the blast, is Palestinian. The owner was mystified; why did they attack him?

Matza said that his eatery in this northern port city drew both Arab and Jewish customers and was not an obvious target for attackers seeking vengeance for Israel's recent drive into Palestinian areas. The blast killed 14 people and injured 40.

Matza couldn't believe politics was at the root of the attack. "We had good relations here," he said. "There were no political arguments."

Actually, there were two reasons. First, the fact that his restaurant permitted both Arabs and Israelis meant that a Palestinian could get into it easily; these days in a lot of targets they assume any lone Palestinian is a bomber until they prove otherwise. While it's true that there have been a lot of successful bombings lately, there have been a lot more which didn't succeed because the bombers were detected before they could reach their targets. They mostly haven't been getting the headlines, though you occasionally read about a Palestinian blowing up at a roadblock because he had been detected. This restaurant was more open; its security was worse.

But the other reason is that his good relations, of which he is justly proud, are a threat to the cause. If Palestinians and Israelis live in close proximity and get to know each other, it becomes that much more difficult to demonize and dehumanize the other side, to treat them like symbols or icons instead of like people. The Palestinian activists need to have all Israelis be thought of as monsters, not of as Ilan down the block or Joshua who lives upstairs with whom I had a beer last night. (Or the local cultural equivalent.)

Fact is, the Arabs are getting desperate. The Palestinians are feeling abandoned by nearly everyone; they've largely given up on support from Europe or particularly the US, but now they also feel like the rest of the Arabs are not really supporting them. (Getting snubbed in Beirut didn't help that any.) The Arab and Muslim nations are worried that they are getting a reputation for not being peaceful and kind and tolerant and friendly. (Wonder how they got that impression...)

Of course, if you can't change the reality, then you work to change the impression. Obviously the solution isn't to actually become peaceful and kind and tolerant and so on, but to talk about doing so in hopes you'll fool everyone. But even they realize now that this is unlikely to work.

Meanwhile, the "Arab Street" is frustrated by impotence. Israel has Arafat surrounded and is moving heavy forces into Palestinian areas, and there doesn't seem to be a damned thing they can do about it. (Which was obvious all along to anyone willing to look at the situation realistically, but it's also been obvious that the "Arab Street" has been selectively blind for a long time.)

Whose fault is it? Ours, of course. (Everything is the fault of the US. Always.) The Palestinian Authority's official mouthpiece says that we (the US) should have ordered the Israelis to not make the attack. Once it began, we should have ordered them to stop it. It is by no means clear that we could actually have done that; but it's also by no means clear that we really had any vested interest in doing so. In the meantime, US envoy Zinni is an Israeli stooge; the US is Israel's godfather, and they're gonna put a big hurting on us if we don't reform. Hizbollah has promised international terrorism against targets, unspecified, if Arafat is harmed.

The media is helping out. It's always helpful to use words carefully to disguise reality. Five Palestinian "policemen" were killed in a firefight with the IDF. Maybe they were surrendering, maybe they were not; that will emerge later. The problem is that word policemen. To Western ears this creates certain images: peace officers armed with nothing more than a pistol (if that) who patrol the local area preventing petty thefts and occasionally writing a parking ticket. There isn't anything like that in the Palestinian territories. What you're really talking about is the Palestinian armed force when you mention "policemen". The reason they've been called that is because the Palestinians aren't permitted an army under previous treaties, so they've created one and called it "police" instead. But they're armed with AK-47's and what they're doing is much more like martial law or a military occupation than what we would think of as policing. So to hear that the Israeli army was fighting with Palestinian police conjures an image of a truly uneven fight. A m