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Chapter Eighteen

The first attack in the wave of Hamas suicide bombings destroyed a Jerusalem bus at 6:42 a.m. on February 25, 1996. It left 26 people dead, and nearly 80 injured from nails and shrapnel packed into the explosive charge. The second was near Ashkelon. The bomber, dressed in Israeli uniform, joined a group of young soldiers and blew himself up, killing one of them. A week later, a third suicide attack blasted the roof off a bus on the same Jerusalem commuter route, leaving 19 more dead. And on March 4, a 24-year-old Palestinian walked up to the entrance of Tel Aviv’s busiest shopping center, on Dizengoff Street, detonated 30 pounds of explosives, and killed 13 people. At the bomb scenes, bloodied survivors and crowds of pedestrians surveyed a hellscape of twisted metal, shards of glass and mangled body parts. While most Israelis were too shaken to worry about the immediate political repercussions – and Bibi was careful, at least in the immediate aftermath, not to try to score political points –Peres’s reelection campaign seemed to lie in tatters almost before it had begun.

The attacks were not a surprise. As I’d argued to the Washington think-tank audience before joining the government, the peace promise of Oslo had been assailed from the start by a new alliance of Islamist Palestinian violence: mainly Hamas, and Islamic Jihad on the West Bank. They saw Arafat as a traitor who had sold out to Israel. For them, the issue wasn’t just Israel’s capture of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war. It was 1948: they opposed any Jewish state, anywhere in Palestine. In a campaign of terror that made the first weeks of the intifada seem almost easy to deal with, they began sending self-styled holy warriors to murder Israeli civilians, and sacrifice their own lives, in the expectation of Allah’s rewards in the world to come. During the two years following Oslo, they’d mounted ten suicide attacks, leaving nearly 80 Israelis dead. The attacks had actually stopped since the summer of 1995. But when the election date was announced – with Peres holding a roughly 15-per-cent lead in the polls – political commentators both in Israel and abroad began speculating about a resumption of terror. For Hamas, the election presented not just an opportunity to kill innocent Israelis but, by helping defeat Peres and Labor, perhaps to kill Oslo as well.

Even before the bombings, our campaign was struggling for focus, energy and even purpose, beyond the aim of getting more votes than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite

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