Was it only days ago that the front-page headline of The Jerusalem Post proclaimed: “Abbas vows end to attacks on all Israelis”? Today the headline declared “Five soldiers killed in Gaza, Hebron.” And in the interim we have buried victims of a double murder in Jerusalem, a young man of 27 and his 17-year-old girlfriend, bludgeoned to death with an axe and repeatedly stabbed.

For the soldiers’ murder, three terrorist groups rushed to take joint responsibility for the attack at Erez – Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Arafat’s own Aksa Martyrs Brigade. They have long fought as one group in the north of the West Bank and in Nablus and Tulkarm. In the Gaza Strip, they co-operate as “the Popular Resistance.” In the attack on the soldiers, the three terrorists disguised themselves in IDF uniforms and carried Kalashnikov rifles and grenades.

If you are not an Israeli, victims tend to become statistics; certainly foreign news channels like to compare numbers of victims with numbers of terrorists killed, as if there is some kind of moral equivalency. But living here, you see the beautiful faces looking at you from the news pages and TV screen and there is no numbers game.

As I write this today, there are four young men, two in their twenties and two in their thirties. We read of parents, siblings, a wife, children and a child unborn, who will never know his father. Another soldier has been killed in Hebron but his name, as yet, has not been released.

If we had a flicker of hope a few days ago that peace might be a possibility, only the naive continue to harbor it. We want to believe in Mahmoud Abbas as a better alternative to Arafat, despite the taint of Holocaust denial and links to the Munich Olympic massacre. Yet we know his positions on crucial issues mirror Arafat’s – the right of return for millions of Palestinians (many of whom never lived here) which would demographically ensure our demise; his
continued denial that our Temple ever existed on the Temple Mount; and his support of Arafat in 2000 when he rejected Barak’s overwhelmingly generous offer at Camp David, believing he could get even more concessions out of Israel.

And it seems that he might. When Sharon uttered the forbidden O word – “occupation” – the majority of Israelis were shocked beyond belief and traumatized by what his term “painful concessions” might foreshadow. How much confidence can Israelis place in Abbas when, despite his promise of reform, he has so far been unable to utter the words “Jewish state.” He said he “recognized” Israel in much the same way Arafat said he did a decade ago at Oslo, while continuing to feed Palestinian children an ongoing diet of hatred and anti- Semitic brainwashing from birth. Little surprise that to these children, suicide bombers remain glamorous, brave heroes.

At present I happen to be reading Jonathan Kellerman’s novel Time Bomb. His hero, psychologist Alex Delaware, is called in when a sniper at a California school is killed before she can shoot any of the children at play. But the politicians all want to get in on the act, and Dr. Delaware gives counseling to all the frightened children non-stop for days, even though neither they nor their teachers suffered any harm. 

Here in Israel, figures recently released show that 42 percent of Israeli children suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome resulting from the terrorist attacks that began in 2000. Of these children, 72% said the attacks have had a “direct impact” on their lives. This does not take into account small children too young to be surveyed. In Israel, only one psychologist is employed for every 2,000 children. We sure could use Alex Delaware!

Earlier this week Prime Minister Sharon faced heckling and booing at the Likud convention in Jerusalem. No one in his party seemed to believe his pledge to bring peace and security. Security guards were busy stopping fist-fights between his party members. Although the speakers at the podium mainly attacked the road map, not the prime minister, his credibility seemed at an all-time low.

The big question is: Can Mahmoud Abbas deliver an end to terrorist attacks on Israel? And even more important – does he really want to?