I had been planning for some time to ignore the fact that I have many things to do and very little time in which to do them and, finally, post something more to my blog.
Today, after a month without a post, I have no choice but to write.
For those who are unaware, today a terrorist suicide-homicide bomber exploded himself and others in a bakery in the Israeli tourist town of Eilat.
This is the second time I've been in Israel furing such an attack, the previous time being just over 4 years ago, in early January 2003. That was in the middle of the "intifada", the terrorist war waged on behalf of the Palestinian Authority by a variety of Palestinian paramilitary groups; this campaign, apparently, resulted from the failure of talks at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and the apparent inability of the Palestinians to establish statehood, despite being offered just that. Oh yes, and of course "the occupation"
At the risk of sounding callous, that attack (which killed over 20 and injured over 120) was expected. This one wasn't.
We are now at a different point in history, politics isn't as it was 4 years ago.
We are now in the post-Gaza era, in which left-wing policy was instituted by one of the long-time champions of the Israeli right - that is, the withdrawal from Gaza without arguing about the terms and conditions which the Palestinians would have to meet beforehand.
That's right: it was a freebie, a giveaway. Israel acting on the world's calls to "end the occupation"
And then something like today's event happens.
The bomber, claimed by Islamic Jihad, was a young Gazan man. Whatever "occupation" it was that Israel was supposed to be responsible for hasn't been present in Gaza for some time now, since the withdrawal. That should be clear from the interfactional murder that is daily news in Gaza which could never have occurred while the Israeli Defence Forces maintained a presence on the streets.
Islamic Jihad said that, in effect, this bombing was unavoidable; that this murderous act was to be a wakeup call to Hamas and Fatah, the main Palestinian factions currently embroiled in civil strife in Gaza - a wakeup call intending to remind them of their common enemy and the goal they should be persuing together. That is, the destruction of the Jewish State.
As mentioned, Islamic Jihad is not even one of the parties involved in the current factional disputes, so the "desperation" and having "no choice", as we've heard previously for the justification of such unjustifiable crimes against humanity (yep, check with Amnesty), do not really explain the situation now either. There is always another option, something that doesn't involve in the intentional targeting of innocent civilians in pizzerias, nightclubs, buses, or bakeries. This is not desperation, this is not an accident; this is the conscious, premeditated targeting of innocents.
The only true explanation is as it always was - that indeed terrorist bombings such as today's are indeed the result of an occupation, however not "the occupation" that Israel is daily blamed for.
The occuption that is to blame here is the occupation of the minds of the Palestinian people, particularly the youth, with ideologies of Islamist expansion or of a Nasserist view of the Arab world.
This is the occupation that exists that threatens the future of the region and, until this is recognised by the world at large, there will be no sustainable solution to the problems that have developed over the last half-century.
Regardless, todays events are now the reality of the world and my day and, for some reason, it's had a much greater impact on me than the last time I was here when a bomb went off, despite the prior having been a much a larger bomb. For the first time in many years I recited Psalm 20 and would request, whatever you believe and whomever you are, that you do something equivalent.
Wherever we are in the world, and whatever we believe, may our thoughts and prayers be with the people of the region and Am Yisrael for a peaceful future for all of us.
