A long, hot summer?

Jerusalemites gather outside the Mercaz HaRav religious school after a gunmen opened fire, killing eight.

(Dion Nissenbaum)

After what has seemed like an exceptionally cold winter, warm weather returned to Jerusalem this week.

The wildflowers are in bloom throughout the terraced hillsides. The surrounding valleys are coated in different shades of green. The long, dark, heavy coats and boots are slowly being replaced by spaghetti strap tops and sandals.

But the warm weather could be a herald for something far less charming: A deadly new chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No one really knows if last night's attack on a prominent Jewish religious school was the start of something new or an isolated incident.

But the trend line is certainly negative. And, in the past few years at least, warm weather has brought along dramatic news around here.

In the summer of 2005, Israel pulled its settlements and soldiers out of Gaza.

In the summer of 2006, the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in Gaza led to a major Israeli military campaign that was quickly overshadowed by the capture of two Israeli soldiers on the northern border with Lebanon, a bold attack by Hezbollah that sparked Israel's 34-day war with Hassan Nasrallah and his forces.

Last summer, Hamas militants seized military control of Gaza and routed their Fatah rivals in a swift, deadly, effective showdown.

What will this summer bring?

Let's see...

Nasrallah has already vowed to retaliate forcefully against Israel for the assassination in Damascus of Imad Mughnieyh, Hezbollah's longtime military mastermind. (Israel has distanced itself from the killing, but that's really irrelevant since Nasrallah has already assigned blame and pledged to respond.)

Despite months of suffocating economic and political isolation, Hamas still holds solid control of Gaza. They have tested the Egyptians to the south by blowing up the border walls. They are testing Israel to the north after launching the first-ever concentrated barrage of advanced rockets on Israel's largest, southernmost coastal city.

Last weekend, Israel conducted what it called a limited operation in Gaza that included the single-deadliest day in Gaza in years. More than 100 Palestinians, including about 25 Gazans under the age of 18, were killed.

In protest, PA President Mahmoud Abbas temporarily suspended peace talks. Which might matter more if the talks had produced anything more than threats from Israeli PM Ehud Olmert's conservative coalition partners to bring down the government for even contemplating the idea of making significant concessions.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's 32-hour visit this week seemed to do little more than remind people just how unlikely a peace deal is by year's end.

After being rebuffed for a half-day, Rice persuaded Abbas to publicly agree to resume talks with Israel, though he didn't say exactly when things would get back on track.

Outrage over Gaza spread to Jerusalem and Hebron and Bethlehem where stone-throwing demonstrators clashed with Israeli soldiers.

And now Jerusalemites are reeling from the most deadly such attack in more than four years.

It was something I could see in the faces of my Israeli colleagues who had to cover the dispiriting second Palestinian uprising where, at its height, they were rushing to at least one suicide bombing a week.

The shooting seemed to rattle even these guys, the ones who have seen much worse in their time.

But you could tell what they were thinking: Not this again.

Maybe the shooting won't feed into the deteriorating political climate.

Maybe it won't be a long, hot summer.

And maybe the Bush administration will broker a peace deal by year's end.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Comments

[William deB. Mills]

We need to remember that Hamas really has no choice - it is being undercut and ostracized even when it plays by democratic rules (recall it did win a free election only to have Israel declare economic war on it). The people of Gaza also have no choice - they are imprisoned no matter what they do. But Israel DOES have a choice - it could accept the very moderate and reasonable offer of an immediate truce that Hamas has made. Israel chooses not to do so.

[Carlos Townsend]

mother nature seems to be the only way out of this crazyness. then again, maybe a chilly wind will blow in the form of a new u.s. president.

excellent post.

godspeed.

[Edie]

This is stupidity - plain and simple. This was not a military target even if the school was a supporter of the settlement movement. These were religious students - at study; the majority only teen-agers.

When I heard the story breaking, it reminded me of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 entered the Cave of the patriarchs masjid and opened fire on those in prayer. Close to 30 Muslims were murdered and up to 150 wounded.

People now go to Baruch's gravesite and worship - hailing him as a hero.

Stupidity.

[Todd]

Levy:

From Mercaz Harav emerged the rabbis that led the vilest move in Zionist history. Most of the delusional right-wing perpetrators and the mongers of hate for Arabs came from this flagship. Religious leaders such as Rabbis Moshe Levinger, Haim Druckman, Avraham Shapira, Yaakov Ariel, Zefania Drori, Shlomo Aviner and Dov Lior, all idolized by their students, raised generations of nationalist youths within those walls.

Rabbi Lior, for example, head of the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria, ruled in 2004 that the Israel Defense Forces was allowed to kill innocent people. How do these words sound now, after the attack in Jerusalem? Is the permission ours alone? Back then, Lior ruled that, "There should be no feeling of guilt at the morality of foreigners." He decreed that the Knesset could not decide to evacuate settlements, and that soldiers were allowed to refuse the order to evacuate settlers. Rabbi Druckman made a similar ruling.

In 2002, Rabbi Aviner, another graduate of the yeshiva, called for the execution of Israelis who refused to serve in the military. Back then the refusal came from left-wingers, of course. Aviner also ruled that war casualties are no cause for national grief, and he called for the abolition of Yom Hazikaron, the annual day of remembrance for fallen Israeli soldiers. He compared the road map peace plan to the appeasement of Hitler and considers the evacuation of settlements an "illegal crime."