Israel may have to face “thousands of years” of terrorism, according to Premier Yitzhak Shamir who made this bleak assessment in a Passover interview with Maariv today.
But he added that terrorist attacks were not a serious factor affecting Israel’s life and development within the present reality of the country. He said that following the destruction of the terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon, the capability of the Palestine Liberation Organization to strike against Israel is now severely restricted.
Shamir stated: “One must know how to fight terrorism just as one must know how to fight all the sorts of crime from which we suffer. We may have thousands, or even scores of thousands, of years of terrorism before us. Jews must know how to live with the enemies and defend themselves against them. Even when we have peace with all our Arab neighbors, I don’t know if terrorism against us will disappear from the world.”
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.
