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On Sept. 9, I drank an ice coffee and sat with friends for several hours at Café Hillel in Jerusalem. Twenty-four hours later, I heard the café being blown to shreds by a Palestinian suicide bomber.

The night of the bombing I had eaten dinner a few restaurants down the street from the café. The next day, as I walked past what was left of it, I saw blood-spattered walls for the first time in my life. How lucky I was to have “only” been half a block down. A couple hundred feet closer and a few hours earlier, and I could have been one of those seven innocent people brutally murdered – or possibly among the dozens more maimed. As if this incident wasn’t enough, I was also about 100 feet away from a stabbing terror attack in a Jerusalem suburb. Many people were a lot closer to death than I. If only my story were unique.

Imagine not knowing if the Big Blue Bus you’re riding to Westwood will blow up. Imagine having to check out every pregnant woman and 15-year-old boy entering the Coffee Bean because they might have explosives packed with nails, bolts and rat poison strapped to their chest. Imagine constantly looking over your shoulder at Maloney’s on a packed Saturday night because a suicide bomber blew himself up at Madison’s the week before, killing three of your friends.

Welcome to Israel.

Since the beginning of the Oslo Accords process 10 years ago, Israel has been subject to a targeted campaign of brutality and terror aimed at destroying the Jewish state. Almost 900 Israelis have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the past three years alone. Since September 2000, there have been just under 19,000 terror attacks perpetrated against Israel, according to the Israel Defense Force. If this isn’t a war, I don’t know what is.

So here’s the $64,000 question: Why are the Palestinians waging this campaign of terror against Israel? Some people maintain that if Israel were to stop settlements (which take up 1.36 percent of the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem and roads, according to Peace Now), or simply grant the Palestinians a state, Palestinian violence would cease. Such logic, however, is perverse, historically ignorant and politically naïve.

First, it suggests a sickening moral equivalence between settlements and murdering innocent men, women and children. Negotiations, of which settlement evacuation may well be part of the final agreement, simply cannot take place while babies are being blown up. To suggest so is to encourage terrorism by granting it legitimacy, thus making it a viable means of gaining political concessions – ensuring the inevitability of continued death and destruction.

Second, can any reasonable person expect Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority while they are simultaneously funding terrorism? If you don’t think the PA funds terrorism, don’t believe me – believe the documents recovered during operation Defensive Shield with Arafat’s own signature, allocating money to Fatah/Tanzim, Force-17, and Al Aqsa – people used to blow up cafés like the ones I sat in this summer.

Third, a Palestinian state was offered by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 and during the subsequent Taba negotiations. The Palestinians could have gotten 97 percent of the West Bank (contiguous, according to the chief U.S. negotiator present, Dennis Ross), 100 percent of Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem as their capital. According to Alan Dershowitz in an MSNBC article, even Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia described Arafat’s rejection of the Camp David negotiations as “a crime against the Palestinians – in fact, against the entire region.”

Unfortunately, however, not much has changed since Palestinians were offered a state in 1937 by the Peel Partition plan and in 1947 by the United Nations. Again in 2000, Palestinian leaders chose war over accepting a Jewish state. Moreover, violence against Israel unequivocally preceded Israeli settlements or any presence in the territories whatsoever. From 1951-1955 alone, over 900 Israelis were killed in cross-border “fedayeen” attacks, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The vicious wars of 1948 and 1967 dramatically underscore Palestinian irredentism and readiness to take up arms.

Despite the fact that more Israelis were killed in the first three years of the so-called Oslo peace process than in the previous decade, Israel continued to relinquish territory and control to the PA. Indeed, since the implementation of the Oslo II interim agreement of September 1995, 98 percent of the Palestinian population has come under Palestinian jurisdiction – ending any myth of so-called “occupation.” But did Palestinian terror stop? No. Rather, Israelis continued to be slaughtered en masse, forcing Israel to increase its military presence in the disputed territories.

Make no mistake about it – this war of terror, imposed upon Israel, is about one thing – an attempt to destroy the Jewish state. Arafat said as recently as 1980 that peace for Palestine means the destruction of Israel. His recent funding of terror and rejection of a Palestinian state in 2000 demonstrates that his goals are still the same.

All decent and peace-loving people worldwide must unconditionally and unequivocally condemn the inexcusable targeting of civilians. Dare I point out that Jews, even as their women and children were being slaughtered and made into soap during Hitler’s genocidal Holocaust, never took to blowing up German kindergardens? Indeed, no cause can ever justify taking a 15-year-old, indoctrinating him with hate, strapping explosives to his chest, and sending him into a disco to blow himself up, trying to kill as many people as possible.

So next time you’re at a party, dancing and having fun with friends, look around and imagine you’re in

Israel. …Boom.

Keyes is a second-year undeclared student. This summer he assisted former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, and was published by his Jerusalem-based think-tank. His cartoon “Imagine That” was published in the Daily Bruin.

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