Today's double suicide bombing in Be'er Sheva, which killed 15 people until now and wounded tens of others, 'proves' several things.

1) The fact that this is 'only' the first succesful suicide bombing in Israel in five months shows that all in all the security forces are quite successful when it comes to preventing major terror atacks being carried out. Unfortunately the work of terrorists is much easier than that of the security forces: even one successful attempt out of many bears results for them.

1 a) There is no military solution that will eradicate terror. Terror must be confronted with force, but that battle has to be accompanied by some sort of political vision/plan.

2) The fact that this is 'only' the first succesful suicide bombing in Israel in five months shows that the separation wall basically 'serves its purpose': it makes it much harder for large bombs and suicidal volunteers to be smuggled into Israel from the territories. That purpose can be served just as well by building the wall on ( the Israeli side of ) the Green Line, not inside Palestinian territory.

3) Obviously the Hamas, which claimed the murderous attack, is very proud of this success. As always, it is annoying that rightwing Israeli politicians and public figures feel the need to immediately publish told-you-so declarations, which usually leave me with the feeling that their interests and those of Hamas, Jihad, Hezbollah etc. correspond in oh so many ways. The timing of this attack - the day on which dates were made public for decisions related to a pullout from Gaza - suggests that, like the settlers and their supporters, Palestinian(-Islamist) terrorists would prefer Israel to continue its occupation. In the past, during every stage of negotiations or planning towards some Israeli pullout from occupied territory we witnessed a rise in terror attacks ( plus a heightened level of activities by Israeli nationalist groups and individuals ). By the way, this really proves that PM Sharon and minister of Defense Mofaz are right when they say that they want to take Israel out of Gaza at once, not in stages.

4) The UN and the EU are slightly one-sided when it comes to the protection of human rights. Will we hear any unmistakable denunciations of acts like these from the Security Council or the General Assembly, or will we have to satisfy ourselves once again with perfunctory condemnations from Koffi Annan and some EU official? Ah, of course, this was just another legitimate act of popular defense against the occupation, wasn't it?