First ever suicide bombing done by a israeli
"Almost every day we hear comments such as "The Oslo Accords are responsible for the bus bombings", "Because of the Oslo Accords over a thousand citizens have been murdered," and so on. Is this in fact the case? Exactly ten years ago, on Purim of 1994, early in the morning, Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs and murdered 29 praying Arabs and injured many more. From the date of the signing of the Oslo Accords, on the previous September 13, until the massacre perpetrated by Goldstein on February 25, 22 Israelis were killed, ten of them within the Green Line. A similar number to those killed during the years of the first Intifada. During this period there was not a single mass attack and there were no suicide bombers with explosive belts blowing themselves up in buses.
Moreover, until 40 days after the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, self-detonating terrorists were an unknown phenomenon in Israel. Two weeks after Goldstein's attack, the following appeared in the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot : "Hamas yesterday distributed a special proclamation in the territories threatening to perpetrate five large attacks in retaliation for the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs. This was issued by the operations room of the Iz a-Din al-Kassam Brigade, the military arm of the Hamas". According to the Muslim religion, the first day of remembrance for the dead is marked on the 40th day after death. Indeed, the first suicide bombing in Israel took place in Afula on 6.4.94, exactly 40 days after Goldstein's murderous attack in the mosque. The Afula massacre, in which 8 Israelis were murdered, was the first retaliatory attack perpetrated by the Hamas. On 7.4.94, a day after the suicide attack in Afula, Tommy Lapid wrote the following in Maariv: "The murderous attack in Afula will first and foremost go down in history as revenge for the attack in Hebron. The victims of the attack in Afula are victims of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, just as were those Moslems worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs." The second revenge attack took place a week later, on the Day of Remembrance for IDF Fallen Soldiers, April 13 on a bus in Hadera,. These two suicide attacks occurred while the IDF was still in control of all Palestinian cities and while Arafat was still in Tunisia. They were followed by suicide attacks in Tel Aviv (Bus No. 5), Beit Lid, Ramat Gan and Jerusalem. After several months of quiet, it seemed as if the suicide attacks had come to an end. Then the bomb "engineer" – Yihyah Ayash, was "taken out". This was followed by another spate of suicide attacks, the first of which occurred in Jerusalem (Bus No. 18) -- two years to the day after the murders perpetrated by Goldstein.
Goldstein's intention was to sabotage the Oslo Accords and to prevent the transfer of Hebron to Palestinian Authority control together with the other large Palestinian cities in the West Bank. A week after his deed, Goldstein's widow was quoted as saying, "Baruch was not a psychopath. He knew exactly what he was doing. He planned it in order to halt the peace talks. He did it for the Jewish People". The problem of suicide bombers, one that Israel has yet not found a solution for, is the result of the massacre in the Cave of the Patriarchs. Presumably, the murder of 29 worshippers who were shot in the back would have resulted in a bombed bus in the heart of Israel whenever it happened, regardless of time and of who headed the government. The murders committed by Goldstein and the consequent blowing up of buses undermined the trust between the two sides, caused a decline of support for the accords by both sides and was the main cause of Netanyahu's ascent to power in the 1996 elections, which marked the final fatal blow to the Oslo Agreements and the final collapse of the peace process."
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