Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor, reports on Israel's growing mood for full-scale hostilities in the aftermath of 17 deaths in a nightclub suicide bomb attack

[The Observer, UK - Sunday, 3 June 2001]: Even before Friday's devastating suicide bombing of a nightclub queue in Tel Aviv - the worst such outrage against Jews in five years - the mood among hawks in the Cabinet of Ariel Sharon had been turning to thoughts of all-out war.

Four car bombs in the past week and a series of shootings of Israeli settlers had marked an upsurge in Palestinian violence in the worst month for Israeli fatalities in the Occupied Territories since November.

It was on the mind of Brigadier-General Yisrael Ziv when he called in the defence correspondents of Israel's press for a briefing at the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv early last week.

Within the heavily guarded complex off one of Tel Aviv's main streets, Ziv - senior officer in charge of Israel's infantry and paratroop brigades - told the journalists that Israel was 'not so far removed' from full-scale war.

He was not, he assured them, making a prediction. It was simply his job to 'prepare for that eventuality'. It may have come sooner than even Ziv expected.

The bombing outside the Pacha nightclub killed 17 people, all but one of them recent Russian immigrants, and wounded scores of others. It could not have come at a worse time, in the middle of an urgent debate in Sharon's Cabinet over whether the time had come to reject international calls for restraint and prepare for a proper war.

Within 24 hours of Ziv's briefing - and still before Friday's bomb - Israel's Defence Minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, had announced that the Israel Defence Force's presence on the West Bank would be strengthened by special ambush units to protect the bypasses used by Jewish settlers.

To add to the febrile mood of crisis, Shin Bet - the Israeli security service - also weighed in, summoning correspondents for a briefing that purported to demonstrate how senior figures in Arafat's police were involved in the manufacture, arming and use of mortars being fired into Jewish areas.

Other senior army officers were briefing off the record too. Israel's two-week-old unilateral ceasefire, they said, was an 'operational halt' in an 'ongoing war', a chance for its soldiers to draw breath and prepare for the task ahead.

They added that they were waiting for the political green light from Sharon - who came to power in January promising to guarantee Israelis a new security - for a new offensive in the Territories if the Palestinians did not respond with their own cessation of violence.

What that offensive might entail has been spelled out in recent days by members of Sharon's security Cabinet, including the hardline Housing Minister Natan Sharansky. He said last week: 'We are in a war where we are not using our strength. I am not saying reconquer Gaza, but we need to fight with all the strength we have against the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian Authority.'

Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu - Sharon's rival for leadership of the Right - has been hardly less equivocal. 'Israel,' he told the Jerusalem Post last week, 'should concentrate its might to eliminate terror infrastructure - to strike radio, television, media, transportation, gas, and weapons reserves, and the PA's economic infrastructure.

'We have not yet used 1 per cent of the power of the IDF. If Arafat continues the terror we will make sure that his terrorist regime will collapse. It is to this end that a unity gov ernment was formed, and it will receive tremendous backing for its actions.'

Yesterday the hardliners appeared to have won the day. After a seven-hour emergency Cabinet meeting - remarkable for being held on the Sabbath - leading Cabinet members indicated that Israel was about to end its policy of restraint.

And whatever group was ultimately behind the Pacha bombing, one thing is certain: it has played into the hands of those like Sharansky who only supported the Sharon ceasefire for the most cynical of reasons: that it would 'reveal to the world who was really responsible for the violence'.

The key question now is whether the international community can persuade Sharon to stay his hand and prevent more carnage.

The new Bush administration has already fumbled the issue of its engagement in the Middle East, notably failing to persuade Arafat to respond to the Israeli ceasefire with his own truce, despite the intervention of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In Britain, Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook - in common with other EU leaders - have called for restraint. There is little evidence of any meaningful intervention.

The immediate response of Arafat, under intense pressure from the Americans and also from the visiting German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, was to condemn the bombing and commit Palestinians to do their utmost to implement a ceasefire in the conflict with Israel.

His offer was rejected by Israeli Cabinet Ministers, who said they would not take it seriously unless Arafat arrested Islamic militants.

While Sharon and others on the right blame Arafat for orchestrating the violence, the truth is that both sides may have now gone too far to turn back.

Analysts are dubious about the amount of control Arafat can actually exert over the suicide bombers of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, whose leaders he released from his prisons at the beginning of the intifada

'When he released Islamic extremists from the Palestinian prisons,' said one Western diplomat, 'he opened a Pandora's box. He may find it impossible to close it.'

[The Observer, UK - Sunday, 3 June 2001]: Jewish mobs yesterday laid siege to a mosque near the site of Friday night's horrific bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub, in a demonstration of the pressures on the Israeli government to exact revenge.

The Sabbath eve explosion which killed 19 people - 18 of them Israelis, who were mainly teenagers from the former Soviet Union, and the suicide bomber - was the deadliest attack on Israelis since the Palestinian uprising began eight months ago.

Yesterday crowds chanting: 'Death to Arabs' collected outside the Hassan Beq mosque, hurling stones and bottles at the handful of Muslim men trapped inside. One of the protesters, asked why he was there, said: 'To see the riot, to see the kill. I want the Arabs dead, dead, dead.'

While police chased away the stone throwers, others chanted: 'Don't throw stones at the Arabs. Shoot them.'

Late last night, Palestinian security chiefs ordered their forces to implement a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank. The action followed a promise by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

As the security cabinet held a rare Sabbath emergency session, Arafat, uttered the words Israel and the international community have waited to hear since last October: that he will try to rein in the men from his Fatah militias who have been shooting at soldiers and Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

After huddling with the visiting German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and the United Nations envoy to the region, Terje Roed-Larsen, the Palestinian leader condemned the bombing, and offered the ceasefire.

'We exerted and we will now exert our utmost efforts to stop the bloodshed of our people and the Israeli people and to do all that is needed to achieve an immediate and unconditional, real and effective ceasefire,' Arafat told a press conference in Ramallah.

But the Israeli government responded with an ultimatum: the violence must stop within hours or the Arabs must face the consequences.

It was the first time Arafat has appeared on television to condemn an act of violence. Last October, when Bill Clinton, first appealed to him to call for a ceasefire, it would have been seen as an extraordinary concession.

Eight months later, with some 600 now dead as a result of the intifada, Israeli government officials said yesterday they were not impressed by words alone. It also remains very far from certain whether Arafat has the power to control his own Fatah militias. A statement after the seven-hour cabinet session accused Arafat of presiding over a 'coalition of terror' - the government's harshest condemnation yet.

In Washington, US Secretary of State Colin Powell cancelled a trip to Central America, and urged restraint on both sides. There was no definitive withdrawal of the limited ceasefire offered by the hardline Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, 11 days ago, but senior officials made it clear their patience was exhausted.

Sharon has cancelled his visit to Europe, and aides said he wanted to calibrate Israel's reaction so as to inflict maximum punishment on the Palestinians without provoking a backlash from the international community.

'The government decided that we have the right to act in any way and at any time we choose against those who carry out terrorism, and against the Palestinian Authority,' the Justice Minister, Meir Shetreet, said. Meanwhile, the Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, laid out a series of conditions before the government would take Arafat's offer seriously.

'The real and only test will be the cessation of terrorism, the arrest of the involved persons, the inciters, the perpetrators and those behind them,' he said.

Israel has so far announced just two retaliatory measures: an intensification of the siege of Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza, and the closure of the airport in the territory, which effectively strands Arafat in Ramallah.

But anticipating the harshest retaliation so far by the Israeli military, Palestinian officials in the West Bank ordered tens of thousands of employees to leave government buildings. The UN evacuated international staff from the Gaza Strip, as did consulates and embassies in Israel.

In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, the beachfront promenade was taken over by the mob. Several people in the crowd accused the local Arab community in nearby Jaffa of giving shelter to the bomber in the mosque, though there is no evidence this was the case.

In ugly confrontations, the crowds rounded on a few Israeli Arab men who tried to make a break from the mosque, smashing the windscreens of their cars with wooden planks.

Others turned on the police, injuring at least five. Their fury was magnified by the young age of the victims, and the fact that all but one of the 18 dead and 90 injured were immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

'All these children, new immigrants, fresh blood for our country,' said Rachel Zakar, a furniture maker from Rishon LeZion. 'The Arabs did not want these young children to immigrate here. That is why they killed them.'

Friday was ladies night at the Dolphinarium disco on the Tel Aviv promenade. It was packed with young people who headed to the clubs from all over the country because it played their kind of music: Russian pop songs.