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The Dance of Death
David Horovitz

ON JANUARY 16, THE night before the Haderah killings, I listened along with a group of visiting leaders from the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby as one of the bereaved mothers from the Dolphinarium bombing told her heart-rending story. Dr. Anna Kazachkova, a pediatric surgeon, had already lost her husband when she, her daughter and son moved from Russia to Israel; also a surgeon, he had contracted hepatitis B from a patient when operating, refused to stop working and seek proper medical treatment, and eventually died of complications. But Anna had rebuilt her life, immigrated to Israel, and was requalifying to work as a doctor here when tragedy struck a second time.

Late on Friday, June 1, 2001, Anna was leafing through a photo album at home, marveling at how rapidly her daughter, Anya, had grown, promising herself to show Anya the pictures the next morning, Shabbat morning. But there was no next morning for Anya. She had been attending a friend's birthday party at the Dolphinarium and never came home. On the Sunday, which would have been Anya's 16th birthday, Anna laid her daughter to rest.

Anna, who by her own description has been "simply unable to function" since her daughter was taken from her, has been agonizing about how to mark the imminent bar mitzvah of her son, Alex. One wonders what impact the killings of January 17 � six new innocents struck down as the music played at Nina Kardashov's bat mitzvah party � will have had on her and on those bar mitzvah thoughts. Another group of immigrants exposed to murderous Palestinian gunfire. Families decimated. Celebration turned to horror. Resilience tested again far beyond all reasonable limits.

Our critics and our enemies, Yasser Arafat included, would have us believe that this is our fault, that we bring disaster on ourselves: in general, through our refusal to compromise; in particular, through the Sharon government's ongoing policy of targeted killings. Forgive the repetition, but I will write this over and over for as long as the false accusations are leveled: The overwhelming majority of Israelis have demonstrated at the ballot box their desire to negotiate a territorial settlement with the Palestinians, and have been rebuffed by Arafat, who remains committed to policies that would spell the end of the Jewish state. And the targeted killings will, it seems certain, remain government policy unless the Palestinian Authority arrests those who are plotting to murder us.

Raed Karmi, the gunman from Arafat's Fatah military wing whom Israel assassinated on January 14 � ostensibly setting in motion the latest cycle of violence � was the self-acknowledged murderer of two Israeli restaurateurs, who were dragged out of a Tulkarm caf� and shot a year ago, and was alleged by Israel to have orchestrated seven other killings. If Karmi had been in a PA jail, as the Authority had claimed he was, rather than free in PA-controlled Tul Karm and doubtless planning further attacks, there would have been no reason for Israel to target him.

And yet Arafat is entirely right about one thing: Ariel Sharon is intent on bringing him down, albeit without Israel pulling the trigger. It was wishful thinking when the government voted to brand Arafat "irrelevant" a few weeks ago; Sharon is set on making it reality. Arafat may have since become the elected head of the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, but Sharon is nevertheless replaying the expulsion of Arafat from Lebanon a generation ago. Yet Arafat, it has become ever more fatally plain, is more tenacious this time, and those around him remain reluctant to accelerate his demise.

He was eventually forced out of Beirut to Tunis; for all the recent Hebrew press speculation about his plans to relocate overseas, he will likely do everything to resist a similar path out of Palestinian territory.

Arafat's aides are right, too, when they complain that Israel could have moved toward negotiations on some kind of interim accord by capitalizing on the lull in intifada violence between mid-December and early January, after Arafat issued his cease-fire call. Sharon, they correctly point out, doesn't want interim negotiations with Arafat. His coalition will fall apart on the day such talks require him to freeze all construction at West Bank settlements. More to the point, however, he does not believe Arafat would honor any such deal. If the capture of the Karine A shocked and horrified many in the Bush Administration, with Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledging the clear evidence linking the arms shipment to the PA, it neither shocked nor horrified Sharon. It merely reinforced his determination to be rid of Arafat.

And so we Israelis remain locked together with the Palestinians in what the one-time Oslo facilitator, now U.N. envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen had bitterly described, even before the phrase took on a murderously literal meaning in Haderah, as a "dance of death." Waiting for Arafat to flee or fall. Entirely unsure of what will follow him. Gradually deepening our return to the West Bank, and our involvement in brutal and brutalizing actions � the Rafah house demolitions, the beating of illegal Palestinian workers seized in Jaffa in early January (28 required hospitalization), the intermittent, panicked killings of Palestinian civilians who turn out to have been no threat � which we hoped had ended with the first intifada in 1993. And knowing that just as the bereavement of Anna Kazachkova was no final outrage before a better dawn, neither too was the senseless killing at Nina Kardashov's bat mitzvah party.