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Israel blasts back
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, JERUSALEM -- As Israel draped itself in mourning for its latest terrorism victims, senior Israeli officials vowed Friday to keep control of important Palestinian offices that the army and the police had seized overnight. Hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 people and himself Thursday in a crowded pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, Israel responded with a direct blow to the heart of Palestinian nationalism. Its forces took over nine buildings in East Jerusalem and its outskirts, most significantly Orient House, a squat stone building on Abu Ubaida Street that had come to symbolize Palestinian yearnings for a state, with Jerusalem as its capital. Foreign leaders and diplomats routinely made pilgrimages there, affirming a sense among Palestinians that it was, in effect, their government house. That changed early Friday when dozens of Israeli officers rushed into the building, taking seven or eight guards into custody, reportedly confiscating weapons, removing documents and shutting off access from surrounding streets. Down came the Palestinian flag that flew above. Up went the Israeli flag, for several hours anyway. The Israelis' message was plain: They remained in control of all of Jerusalem, no matter how many terrorist attacks take place and regardless of Palestinian national aspirations. A similar point was made overnight when Israeli soldiers took charge of a Palestinian governor's compound in Abu Dis, a village on Jerusalem's eastern fringe that was under Palestinian civil rule but Israeli security authority. In retaliation for the Thursday bombing, the army also rolled tanks into Palestinian-controlled areas of the Gaza Strip. Fighter planes fired missiles that destroyed a police headquarters in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem. No one was injured, though. The building had been evacuated hours earlier. But it was the seizure of Orient House that caused the greatest political reverberations. Uzi Landau, Israel's minister for internal security, called the takeover "permanent" and said the building had been "challenging Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem." Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said that the police and army actions sent "a very clear signal to Yasser Arafat: Not only are you not getting anything through violence and terror but you'll actually pay a price -- you'll lose assets." But Gissin stopped short of echoing Landau's claim to a permanent occupation. "I don't know about the future," he said. "It depends on the situation. We haven't impounded the buildings. We're simply holding them." For Palestinians, the Israeli move was intolerable. Senior officials in Arafat's Palestinian Authority used words like "dangerous" and "provocative" to describe the overnight raids. In Gaza City, an Arafat adviser, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said that they were "the equivalent of a unilateral renunciation of all agreements" reached by Israel and the Palestinians since 1993. Another Arafat aide, Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, told Reuters that the Palestinian uprising of the last 10 months would intensify to "liberate holy Jerusalem and regain Orient House and other Palestinian institutions occupied by Israel." In response, Israeli officials said the Palestinians were the ones who had broken agreements, having used their Jerusalem offices not only for social and educational programs but also, in Gissin's words, as "safe houses for incitement." On the East Jerusalem streets near Orient House, several dozen people -- Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners -- scuffled with police officers Friday as they tried to push their way past barricades. Six people were arrested. Across town, in Jerusalem's Jewish neighborhoods, the politics of the seemingly limitless conflict played a distant second to grief. It came in a flood a day after the Palestinian bomber blew himself up at a Sbarro restaurant at Jaffa and King George streets, the city's most famous intersection. The authorities raised the death toll Friday to 15, plus the terrorist. At least one victim was said to remain in critical condition. In all, about 130 were treated for wounds suffered when the nail-packed bomb sprayed shrapnel across a restaurant filled with young families and tourists. Six of the dead were children. Some of the injured were infants in strollers. Jerusalem was uncommonly still, even for a summer Friday when many residents were on vacation and those who stayed behind were preparing for the Jewish Sabbath. If they could, people avoided downtown. No place in Jerusalem was sadder Friday than Har ha-Menuhot, a cemetery in the northwestern part of the city where funerals for the victims were held every couple of hours. Among those mourned was Judith Greenbaum, 31, of Plainview, N.J. She had married here a year and a half ago. Now she was being buried here with the unborn child she carried. Pain overflowed at the funeral for five members of one family -- Mordechai and Tzira Schijveschuurder and three of their eight children. The dead children were ages 14, 4 and 2. Two daughters, 8 and 7, were wounded, one too severely to leave the hospital Friday. The other had to be taken to Har ha-Menuhot in a wheelchair, hooked up to an IV drip. The Schijveschuurders were Orthodox Jews who had come to Israel years ago from the Netherlands, where relatives on both sides of the family had survived the Holocaust. In the 1990s they moved to Talmon, a West Bank settlement northwest of Ramallah. "The macabre joke is that they were living in a most dangerous settlement," said a Talmon neighbor, Shlomo Wiener. "They were wanting to get away for a day. They thought in Jerusalem it would be safe. The angel of death is finding you any way he can." It was a family funeral. But it was also, in a sense, a national event. Perhaps 1,000 people turned out, a quorum of despair following shrouded bodies down a hill to graves beneath cypress trees. "Watch over us, so that we can continue to be together," the Schijveschuurders' 20-year-old son, Meir, cried out to his dead relatives. "What's left of us." "We've been punished in the heavens," he said between sobs. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi, had performed the wedding ceremony for Mordechai and Tzira Schijveschuurder. He, too, could not hold back tears in his eulogy. "I don't ask why," Lau said. "But I ask, how long? O Lord, until when? They call themselves martyrs, but they are murderers." He said nothing about wanting to seek vengeance. Neither did any of the family members.
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