Attack Hits Place Where Jews and Arabs Mixed

HAIFA, Israel —  There wasn’t any guard outside Matza’s restaurant Sunday when dozens of diners piled in for an afternoon meal. Matza’s is run by an Israeli Arab, so no one ever thought it would be targeted for a terrorist attack.

“I am an Arab, and I should get a guard?” Ali Adawi, 57, said to his Jewish friend Yakov Nachmani, dismissing the suggestion as absurd.

But the ordinary and the unthinkable have switched places in Israel these days. Adawi was cooking meat and potatoes on a grill in the kitchen, listening to the laughter filling the dining room, when a man walked into Matza’s and blew himself up. The explosion tore through the roof, shattered windows and chairs, blasted patrons with shrapnel and killed at least 15 people besides the bomber while wounding as many as 41.

Witnesses said the restaurant appeared to fly into the air.

Adawi crashed to the floor, the meat and potatoes toppling over him. The explosion destroyed the restaurant and obliterated one tiny corner of this troubled land where Arabs and Israelis had found some common ground, by themselves, without the help of government mediators. They did it by getting to know one another, sitting together, drinking coffee, sharing meals.

Now their small sanctuary was gone, and many were dead--Jews and Arabs, men, women and children.

“I am looking forward to the day when Jews and Arabs will live next to each other in peace and love,” Adawi said later from a hospital bed as two of his Jewish friends stood by his side. “That is what I want.”

That dream was as far away Sunday as it has ever been. This country of 6 million people lived through another day of terror attacks--one in this picturesque port city on the Mediterranean, another in the Efrat settlement in the West Bank, which killed the bomber and left four medics wounded. With each blast, each civilian casualty, Israelis came closer to full acceptance that, once again, their nation was at war. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon didn’t need to say the words.

People here feel it.

“The political arguments don’t any longer exist,” said Effi Batzia, 38, a financial manager and self-described liberal who was called up for military service Sunday. “We don’t see any ot1751478816happy to go to war, to settle things with force. We are not. I now believe it is the only thing left to do.”

All over Israel on Sunday, men and women stepped out of their private lives, left families and jobs, and answered the call to report for active military duty. The call-up of 20,000 reservists is the largest in the Jewish state since 1982, when the IDF--the Israel Defense Forces--invaded Lebanon. But that invasion ultimately proved unpopular. It was viewed as a war of choice, not necessity.

The circumstances this time are different. One social scientist said recent events had quieted the peace community and silenced a growing chorus of conscientious objectors, hundreds of soldiers who had refused to serve in the Palestinian territories. Israelis, it seems, are now caught in the same psychological force field that Palestinians have pointed to as the motivation for their attacks: They feel desperate, with no choice but to lash out.

“It is a real war now, and in a time of war, we have never experienced people saying they did not want to take part,” said Tamar Hermann, managing director of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research in Tel Aviv. “It is as if all the rules of the game have been broken. It is a real war, though not a conventional war.”

Israel’s large-scale military call-up is an indication that it is planning an intense and sustained operation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Infantry brigades, tank units and support forces are all headed for the Palestinian territories.

Many of the reservists, from all walks of life, parked their cars in a dirt field at the edge of Pisgat Zeev, a Jewish neighborhood adjacent to Jerusalem on land occupied by Israel in 1967. They put on their uniforms, slung automatic weapons over their shoulders and climbed into buses for the ride to their camps.

“First of all, we are going to defend our homeland,” said Mordechai Pereta, 47, who as a father of seven is exempt from service but nevertheless volunteered. “I completely support this. Anyone who thinks it will get better by itself is dreaming.”

Elazar Zur, 30, left his job as a truck driver to take up arms against the Palestinians.

“If we don’t do this now, it will only get worse. At least we can dismantle the terror infrastructure and it will get better,” Zur said.

For months, Israel has waged military operations against the Palestinians. The army tightened its grip Sunday on the West Bank city of Ramallah, declaring the area a closed military zone and sealing off Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and whoever else was in the city.

And the bombings continued.

Jerusalem was hit by a suicide bomber Friday. Tel Aviv was hit Saturday. Haifa was targeted Sunday. Those are Israel’s three largest cities.

Jerusalem’s streets and shops were already vacant before the Friday blast. But residents of Haifa and Tel Aviv were shaken, their remaining sense of security badly undermined. In Haifa, Mayor Amram Mitzna canceled a children’s festival and cautioned people to stay out of places without security guards, including elementary schools and kindergartens.

“I think we don’t have to wait for threats when it’s obvious we are in the midst of a terror wave, and since the event of the [Passover] holiday, we have had an attack per day,” said Israeli Police Chief Shlomo Aharonishky.

Matza’s restaurant is on Rupin Street, a road that curves up the towering hills of Haifa. The city feels like San Francisco, where even a gas station can offer a breathtaking view of the metropolis and the sea below. Matza’s was a broad Quonset-style hut with a metal roof and plastic signs--but an amazing vista.

The locals loved it, Adawi said. For 16 years, he worked the kitchen, seated customers and, when time permitted, sat, drank coffee and chatted. Adawi hails from Touran, a village in the Galilee. No one was more surprised by how close he grew to the community in Haifa than he was. Except maybe his customers.

“This is perhaps the only place where there was true friendship,” said Ayal Batsir, 33, a Jewish resident of Haifa who spent hours Sunday trying to comfort his friend from the restaurant. “It was the perfect relationship. There was no hypocrisy.”

The Palestinian militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the destruction and deaths atMatza’s; the fatalities included one of Adawi’s cousins. A Hamas official in the northern West Bank town of Jenin identified the attacker as Shadi Zakariya Toubasi, 22, a resident of the Jenin refugee camp.

Lena Mionis, 23, was working at a gas station not 50 yards away when the bomb went off. Shrapnel hit her leg. She said she ran to a man at the gas pump and asked if he would drive her away. But he refused, shoved her back and drove off. She suspects that he was an accomplice. Police were looking for a man who might have driven the bomber to his target.

“I heard a huge boom,” Mionis said from a bed in the emergency room of Bnai Zion hospital. “I saw the whole restaurant flying up in the air.”

The victims with relatively minor injuries were taken to Bnai Zion. The serious cases were rushed to the regional trauma facility at the Rambam Medical Center. Nine patients were brought in, and two died on the operating table. One was a teenage girl, another an elderly woman. Hospital spokesman Zvi Ben-Yishai said the medical center had treated many war casualties from Lebanon but that he had never seen a victim so completely riddled with shrapnel as were some of the diners from Matza’s.

“These were very heavy shrapnel injuries, from head to toe,” he said.

In the hospital lobby, an all too familiar scene was playing out: anxious relatives rushing in for word of their loved ones, a young woman breaking down and sobbing. A woman on a gurney was wheeled in. She knew that her husband was dead but didn’t know where her two children were. Bodies still needed to be identified.

At the remains of the restaurant, work crews swept up the glass and cleaned away debris as forensic teams picked through the mess searching for evidence. A small crowd gathered to watch. One man held a large Israeli flag.

Someone taped a poster to a fence. It said: “Let the IDF win.”