Via The Times of Israel:
Precisely 10 years ago Tuesday evening, a 25-year-old man walked up a short flight of stairs and crossed through the lobby of a modest hotel near the beach in Netanya, a city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast.It was the first night of Passover, and the hotel’s dining hall was packed with guests celebrating the Seder meal at tables set up among the room’s six round pillars. The man, Abdel-Basset Odeh, who grew up in a Palestinian city a short drive away and had been dispatched by Hamas terrorists, detonated the powerful bomb he carried among the diners, killing 30 of them and himself and wounding 140 others.Palestinians carried out hundreds of attacks against Israelis in the onslaught of violence generally known in Israel as the Second Intifada. But the Park Hotel bombing stands out both as the deadliest of them all and as the turning point in the violence of those years.On Tuesday, the tenth anniversary of the attack, survivors of the bombing and relatives of the dead gathered in the hotel’s dining hall for a memorial service.
Every time you hear one of your local campus Israel-bashers complain about the “Apartheid Wall,” point out that they are referring to the security barrier built in response to suicide bombings like the one at the Park Hotel.
From my post in 2009, Mr. Netanyahu, Tear Down That Wall For Our Suicide Bombers:
In fact, the barrier built by Israel was a direct reaction to Palestinian suicide bombings commenced as part of the Second Intifada in 2000, which took almost a thousand Israeli lives. Suicide bombers slipped past the unprotected border to blow themselves up in Pizza restaurants, buses, supermarkets, hotels, and anywhere else they could find civilians.The barrier was built to keep suicide bombers out, and it worked, much to the chagrin of the Palestinians. In 2002 452 Israelis were killed; that number dropped by half in 2003, and now almost no suicide bombers get through, although they still try. Ironically, the barrier also saved Palestinian lives by lessening the need for Israeli military actions in the West Bank to prevent suicide bombers.
What the Israel-bashers really want, whether they will admit it or not, is to free up a path for the next wave of suicide bombers.
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