JP Editorial: Car "Accident" Last Week

Below is an editorial from the Jerusalem Post which discusses a terrorist incident last Monday in Jerusalem. The event was often misreported in the world media, and we hope this editorial clarifies the matter. It is reprinted with permission. Views expressed are not necessarily those of IRIS or its staff.

Jason and Leiah Elbaum

IRIS

Editorial

(March 3) -- Before the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, when anti-government demonstrations were as prevalent as they were rowdy, the police were often accused of being "political." Protesters charged that the police used excessive force, and that protest leaders were subjected to particularly rough treatment on orders from "above."

Whether the roughness and brutality were indeed politically motivated or simply a symptom of police nervousness and inability to manage large crowds in a non-violent manner is a matter of dispute. But there seems no disputing the political character of the way the police tried to manage the news following last week's incident at the French Hill junction in Jerusalem, in which a driver ploughed into a crowd, killing a woman and wounding 20.

At first there seemed to be no question about the nature of the incident. All eyewitnesses on the spot saw the driver deliberately turning his car almost 90 degrees from the road to hit people on the sidewalk waiting for rides or buses. Nor was there any disputing the fact that the driver emerged from the car yelling "Allahu Akbar," and that he appeared threatening enough to prompt two civilians to shoot him.

In fact, when the police arrived they were so certain it was a terrorist incident that they assumed the car was booby trapped. They isolated the vehicle and had sappers inspect it. On searching the car, they found an Islamic Jihad leaflet, a dead giveaway of the driver's affiliation.

True, the identity of the killer was not what one would expect. He was a Palestinian with an American passport, and possessors of American passports do not fit the profile of suicide killers. But the police also knew that several Arab-Americans have been arrested for Hamas and Islamic Jihad activities, mostly having to do with supplying funds for the local organizations.

They must have also known that in the past six years there have been at least 25 certified terrorist incidents (many others could not be proved), in which vehicles were used as weapons. In some, the drivers managed to get away. In a March 1993 incident, for example, the driver did indeed escape after killing two Israelis, and the killing was declared an accident, until the driver was blown up in an attempted suicide bombing a month later.

What happened next in the French Hill case is almost beyond comprehension. Suddenly, the police announced that the crash was "not a deliberate attack but an accident," as Jerusalem police chief Aryeh Amit put it. He said something about skid marks on the road which presumably evinced an attempt to brake the vehicle. Moreover, he said, there were bags of food in the car. It could only mean that the driver had no intention to kill. He must have just gone shopping, lost control of the car and involuntarily caused death and injury, said the police. "And there seemed to be inconsistencies in the testimonies of the two who had shot the driver," they added. "They are being interrogated."

Only a story the next day in the Hebrew daily Ha'aretz made the police change their version of the event. The paper's reporters found friends of the killer Ahmed Hamideh who testified that Hamideh was an Islamic fanatic who had shown special interest in the pictures of the bus bombing on Sunday, and boasted that he would be seen on television by Monday evening.

But even then, and even after it was determined that the skid marks on the road did not belong to the killer's car, the police sent a memorandum to foreign correspondents telling them that they should not conclude the incident was definitely a terrorist strike. They suggested that at most the reporters should use the phrase "in all probability." It was only after Hamas in Damascus claimed responsibility for the killing that official doubts seemed to be dispelled.

Charitably, such disregard for the facts, such eagerness to give the event a benign interpretation, should be deemed no worse than the phenomenon psychologists call "denial." It is perhaps the same unwillingness to face unpleasant facts, which prompted Prime Minister Shimon Peres, US ambassador Martin Indyk and numerous editorial writers and reporters to state that there have been no major terrorist incidents in six or seven months.

The fact is that between the killing of Islamic Jihad chief Fathi Shkaki in Malta and the assassination of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a complex, coordinated terrorist attack involving two explosives-laden cars driven by suicide bombers was mounted in the Gaza District against Israeli civilians and soldiers. That the attack failed was due to quick thinking on the part of the security men and a large dose of sheer luck. Had the attackers managed to execute their plan, scores would have been killed. Similarly, yesterday's attack on Gush Katif launched from Gaza, in which seven Hamas terrorists were involved, cannot be dismissed simply because it was fortunately foiled.

Whether continued terrorism is an indication that the Oslo process is a failure - as the opposition believes - or nothing more than the sputterings of a dying, old-fashioned movement - as the government maintains - should be the subject of a legitimate, momentous public debate. But to deny the facts of terrorism, and to try to whitewash incidents because they might tend to reinforce one set of arguments or another is to endanger the nation's morale and its faith in government more than all the acts of terrorism can ever hope to do. (C) Jerusalem Post

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