Those who were responsible for latest bombing in Tel Aviv, in which 22 people were slain, have once again played into the hands of Israel’s hard-liners. Among other things, it has provided Israel with the excuse to withdraw permission for Palestinian officials to go to Tony Blair’s London peace conference.
Torpedoing any possibility of a peaceful end to the confrontation is the core of Israel’s long-term strategy. In the Zionist scheme of things, we are in the end game. The authority and capability of the Palestinian Authority has been destroyed. Yasser Arafat is shut up in his headquarters. The nascent infrastructure of a Palestinian state has been crushed by the tracks of Israeli tanks. Humiliated and violated on a daily basis, every Palestinian has been turned into an indomitable enemy of Zionism. From the ranks of the despairing, extremists groups draw a steady supply of those willing to sacrifice their own lives to blast apart the lives of others. Each new attack leaves dead bodies on both sides. However, to the Zionist-managed gallery of world opinion, it is the Israeli dead who are counting more. Every new human bomb adds to the Zionist fiction of a savage Palestinian population who must be treated like wild animals and caged up in their homes.
Of course, the last thing that Sharon and his hawkish government want is an end to these attacks. If peace broke out, if reason were to raise its head above the parapet, if moderation were even considered, then the Zionists would be forced to concede ground that they have plundered steadily over the years, both moral and physical, in the shape of the string of settlements that have been strung like minefields throughout Palestine. The Zionists need to keep on provoking an otherwise impotent Palestinian community into ever-greater extremism, until Sharon judges the moment right to announce that the only solution, the final solution indeed, for the Palestinians, is to expel them completely from the territory that has always formed part of the Zionist’s scheme for a Greater Israel.
The last thing that the Israeli authorities want is a reformed Palestinian Authority, able to command respect in the world. They simply cannot afford to let Palestinian aspirations toward statehood take any positive steps at all. Therefore the Tel Aviv bombing was just what they needed to take a knotted rope to the caged-up Palestinian negotiators waiting to travel to Tony Blair’s conference.
There is a sense in which Hamas and the other extremist groups are actually playing the Israeli game. They may even be driven by agent provocateurs within their midst. The Zionists want more bombs, not peace. However even if tomorrow, the hard men in the Palestinian community brought an end to their suicide bombing campaign, the Israelis know just what to do. After a very public international sigh of relief, they would recommence their needling campaign of humiliation to provoke just a few extremists to renewed attacks. And then the whole awful bloodstained circus could start over again, and the Zionists could turn to the world with a despairing shrug and say "We tried, but look how they rewarded us!"
