A bloody stabbing spree by a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip that left two Jews dead has once again brought home to Israelis the bitter conclusion that they are limited in what they can do to combat terrorism.
Hours after the attack Monday in a busy commercial neighborhood of southern Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appeared before a Knesset committee and promised to take action. But Rabin also conceded there is little one could do as long as the present political stalemate in the administered territories continues.
The Israeli army announced it was sealing off the Gaza Strip temporarily, but Rabin said a permanent ban on Palestinian laborers entering Israel proper would only fuel more unrest in the Gaza Strip.
The Arab attacker, identified as Ziad Salame, 18, of Gaza, came to Tel Aviv on Monday morning in a car bringing laborers to the city. He emerged from the vehicle brandishing two knives, then ran down a street and stabbed nine pedestrians, two of them fatally.
Salame was chased and beaten up by incensed witnesses before being taken into custody.
A spokesman for the militant Islamic Jihad group in Damascus claimed Salame acted as a member of that organization. But Israeli police said he appeared to have been acting on his own, without any political affiliation.
However, police did say Salame was an Islamic fundamentalist and that his brother had been imprisoned for a year on account of membership in Islamic Jihad, an illegal terrorist organization.
Police said Salame had no previous police record and had a valid police permit to enter Israel proper to seek work.
HAD DECIDED TO ‘KILL JEWS’
Salame told police that he had entered Israel proper from Gaza to seek work and had decided to “kill Jews” because he had not been able to find work despite daily trips to Tel Aviv.
Police said Salame told them under interrogation he had bought a commando knife in Gaza on Sunday and also brought with him a kitchen knife from home.
The two killed in Salame’s attack were Gregory Abramov, 27, of Tel Aviv, an unemployed recent immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and Natan Azariya, 28, of Holon, who was killed outside the barber shop he owned.
Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital reported that four other victims of the attack were being operated on for deep stab wounds, with one of them in serious but stable condition. Three others had been sent home after treatment for minor wounds.
In the last two weeks, Israel has seen a fatal stabbing in a residential neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem and rockets launched by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon landing in a kibbutz in northern Israel.
In his address to the Knesset committee, Rabin said the only lesson to be learned from the new cycle of violence was the need to intensify the peace efforts, while continuing to take all possible measures against terrorism.
“But in the end, without coming to a political solution,” Rabin said, the reality of mixing Palestinians from the territories with Jews inside Israel proper “has within it the potential that a murderous madman like this will rise up.”
MAKES FURTHER GESTURES DIFFICULT
Rabin rejected demands from several Knesset members to bar all Palestinians from entering Israel.
Banning the Palestinians for anything longer than a short period of time would only leave residents without work and a source of income, he argued. Such a move would not solve the security problem, but would actually inflame passions, Rabin said.
Whether or not Monday’s attack was organized by militant organizations directed from outside Israel or taken at Salame’s private initiative, it clashed sharply with renewed hopes here that the peace process would once again take off.
Those hopes were encouraged by last week’s visit of U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the surprise visit Sunday by Osama el-Baz, senior political adviser to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
There were even unconfirmed reports from Cairo that Mubarak may soon visit Israel, but government officials here said they knew nothing about it.
Rabin is now being forced to face challenges on two fronts the external front of Arab terrorism and the internal front of the right-wing opposition, which is demanding Israel take tougher measures against the Palestinians and Hezbollah, even at the cost of stalling the peace talks.
In the atmosphere resulting from the after math of the Tel Aviv attack, it will be more difficult for the government to make further gestures toward the Palestinians deported to Lebanon. The deportees remain a stumbling block to resumption of the peace talks.
(Contributing to this report was JTA correspondent Hugh Orgel in Tel Aviv.)
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
