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May 24, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Close Call Israel narrowly avoids the worst attack yet. By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

terrorist attack potentially as destructive as September 11 was averted Thursday when an explosive device destroyed the cabin of a fuel truck as it was being filled with diesel at Israel's largest fuel depot, Pi Glilot, in Herzliya. Firemen on site managed to extinguish the fire within minutes, but the target was clearly the flammable fuels stored at the facility. Later, police sappers discovered a second bomb that failed to explode attached to the vehicle's chassis. Apparently detonated by a cellular phone, the bombs were intended to cause the explosive destruction of the entire depot, killing anyone in the area, and raining death onto the nearby residential areas of Herzliya and northern Tel Aviv. It would have been, security officials said, "a strategic event."

That expression means that, had it been successful, the fuel-depot attack would have been several orders of magnitude more serious than even the worst of the recent suicide bombings. Ninety percent of the people in proximity to the facility, including motorists on the major highways passing nearby, would have been killed immediately, and 50 percent of the residents of the neighboring residential areas would have died in the ensuing fires or from the poisoned air that would have blanketed the area. Ehud Yatom, a former General Security Services officer and one-time nominee to head the prime minister's antiterrorism task force, commented that a successful attack on the installation could have caused a chain reaction culminating in a full-scale regional war. Therefore, Yatom said, "Israel must work together with the United States in preparing its reaction, as the ramifications are world-wide." Former minister of national infrastructures, Avigdor Lieberman, had noted and warned of the possibility of a disaster such as the one that was avoided Thursday morning during his tenure in the government. "It is clearly a tempting target for hostile elements," Lieberman said on Israel Radio. The Israeli intelligence community has been warning of a "massive attack" against strategic targets over the last few months. A successful attack on the Pi Glilot facility would definitely have fit that description.

While almost all players on the Israeli political stage appear to be in agreement that a successful attack on a target like the fuel depot would lead to, even demand, massive Israeli retaliation, a massive Israeli retaliation does not appear to be in the offing just yet. It is clear that such a response at this point would be met with even less sympathy from the world community than Operation Defensive Shield was following a month of daily suicide bombings, even though the type of attack attempted today was a far greater strategic threat to the Jewish state. It remains an open question, of course, if a successful attack on the fuel depot would have led to a United Nations condemnation of the PLO or of Israel.

Some in Israel, however, are insisting that the failed Pi Glilot attack should be treated just as seriously as if it had been successful. "In the Middle East," the head of the Israeli Air Force commented, in another context, "if you fail to retaliate, it is not seen as goodwill, but as weakness." Referring specifically to Thursday's attack, Ehud Yatom told Israel Radio, "A near-miss is just as serious as a successful attack…" Failing to retaliate immediately, he said, would be a "clear signal of weakness to the terrorists, and it will increase their motivation to employ non-conventional weapons."

Americans with a little bit of historical knowledge can probably appreciate those sentiments. One wonders what might have happened — or rather, what might not have happened — in 2001 had the United States treated the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which was meant to bring at least one tower crashing down, as if it had done so and gone after terrorist infrastructures the world over in the 1990s. More importantly, today, would the Bush administration support an Israeli preemptive strike to prevent the tragedy yet to come?

— Nissan Ratzlav-Katz is opinion editor at www.IsraelNationalNews.com. He writes from Israel.