Shaken Israelis Wonder: Was Peace A Mirage? Vision Of Peace Between Israel And Arabs Has Cracked Under Wave Of Bombings

Reeling from four devastating suicide bombings in little more than a week that dimmed their hopes for peace, Israelis tried to pull themselves together on Tuesday, going about daily routines that have become tests of courage.

Commuters and drivers sat in tense silence on city buses in Jerusalem, casting anxious glances at passengers getting on. In Tel Aviv, shoppers filled the sidewalks, burdened with heightened concern that disaster might confront them at the next street corner.

But beyond the grief and anxiety that gripped the country, many in Israel seemed to be stopping for the first time to take a hard look at the government’s effort to make peace with the Palestinians.

As the latest bomb victims, several of them teenagers, were laid to rest in yet another series of heart-rending funerals, the question for many people was whether peace had been a mirage.

“This is the new Middle East?” someone had scrawled on a makeshift sign hung at the corner of Dizengoff and King George Streets in Tel Aviv, the site of the latest attack on Monday. The sign referred to a term coined by Prime Minister Shimon Peres to describe his vision of peaceful cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

The skepticism sown by the bombings was evident among the hundreds of people who visited the site of the Tel Aviv attack. Like other bombing scenes in recent days, it had been converted into a pilgrimage shrine of memorial candles and graffiti, marked with black banners and Israeli flags.

Although the exact bases of the suicide bombers are unknown, many Israelis accuse the Palestinian Authority, headed by Yasser Arafat, of failing to crack down on Muslim militants in Palestinian self-rule areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“When these attacks happened, they completely undermined the basic assumptions of the peace process,” said a law student who identified himself only as Eyal. “The dialogue has to be stopped. We have to reassess the situation and take time out to deal with the problem of terrorism. It’s been proven that we can’t rely on cooperation with the Palestinian Authority.”

Moshe Danino, a telephone technician, gazed silently at the intersection that a day earlier had been littered with dead and wounded and on Tuesday was bustling with traffic and workers repairing damaged shops.

“Until now I was more or less for the peace process, but now I’m having second thoughts,” Danino said. “We depended on Arafat, and now we are paying the price. It looks like we have to back up a little and think about how to restore security to Israeli citizens. I was for the process, and I think we should make peace. The question is whether the other side really wants to.”