Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah were said to have at their disposal
enormous quantities of weapons and explosive devices, which all
sides agreed were not assembled by the individual bombers but at
makeshift factories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hebron,
Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah became the centers and the infrastruc-
ture of this terrorist activity.
Israel asserted that from the start the PA’s stance on terrorism had
been dubious. It had condemned most terrorist attacks, but never ar-
rested the key leaders of the terrorist networks, seized their
weaponry, or even publicly denounced future violence against Is-
raelis. Operatives from the Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat, head of
the PA until his death in November 2004, and Palestinian police op-
eratives are known to have participated in many attacks themselves.
In a radical change of the PA position, it held that imprisoning mili-
tants, even those who targeted Israeli civilians, could be seen as col-
laboration with Israel.
In the spring of 2002, after terror attacks against a Passover Eve
gathering at the Park Hotel in Netanya and against restaurants in
Haifa, the IDF began the Defensive Wall Operation in the West Bank
(including the town of Jenin). The Israeli government obtained and
published thousands of pages of internal PA documents demonstrat-
ing how the PA had covertly funded and directed many of the suicide
bombings. The outcome of the operation was a return to closer Israeli
control over areas ceded to the PA under the Oslo Accords, rendering
Israel the ability the gather intelligence on Palestinian preparations
for terror acts in Israel. Hence the IDF at short notice could enter fa-
cilities where the Palestinians were producing their bombs, stop the
work, and even arrest those engaged in it. The number of terrorist at-
tacks has dropped very significantly since then.Recent Jewish Terrorism.Israel has zero tolerance toward any kind
of Jewish terrorism against Arabs. Although instances of it are few,
they arouse a great uproar. One of the worst known cases is the Jew-
ish underground activists who in 1984 attempted to kill the mayors
of four Palestinian towns in the West Bank. Then there is the case
of the U.S.-born Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein, a member of
Kach—an extremist and racist anti-Arab Jewish movement founded
by Meir Kahane, a U.S.-born rabbi, who was dismissed by his con-288 • TERRORISM06-102 (04) Q-Z.qxd 3/24/06 7:26 AM Page 288