It began with Israel, soon Became as a worldwide epidemic.

[Guest guest]

>Terror Against Israel......... >"It is important to remember that the other

major attack on civil aviation began in the late 1960s with the hijacking of an

Israeli aircraft by Palestinian terrorists to Algeria. It began with Israel, but

it soon spread as a worldwide epidemic."..............

November 28, 2002......... Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s briefing to

foreign diplomats in Jerusalem.....

............What we see from these attacks is that terror has no boundaries. It

has no physical boundaries - it can attack anywhere. It has no boundaries on

the nationalities of its victims - we have had Africans killed, Israelis,

Russians, Americans, Australians, anyone. And now we see, once again, that

terror has no moral boundaries, because indeed yesterday was the crossing of a

threshold.......... The firing of missiles at civilian aircraft is a new and

extremely dangerous development in the escalation of terrorism. It is the

second wake-up call after September 11th. If any government had pressed the

snooze button after September 11th, then they just received the next wake-up

call, because it is now possible - and it almost happened yesterday - to fire

missiles at civilian aircraft and to down such aircraft with hundreds of

passengers in them. These aircraft can hardly be protected at the

moment........... Today they are attacking Israel, but tomorrow they will

attack the planes of any country. It is important to remember that the other

major attack on civil aviation began in the late 1960s with the hijacking of an

Israeli aircraft by Palestinian terrorists to Algeria. It began with Israel, but

it soon spread as a worldwide epidemic. It took us almost 15 years to get the

international community to take the consorted action to break this epidemic and

to stop it.........

What we did was to arrive at a number of agreements and a number of methods to

prevent the insertion of hijackers or even bombs into aircraft. We have the

technology, we have the political will and cooperation to reduce that threat to

a bare minimum today......... We must now engage in the same kind of coordinated

effort to protect civilian aircraft from this external threat, which is far more

insidious and to which we have not yet built common international

defenses......... These defenses fall into a number of areas. First, they fall

in the area of technology; there are certain things that can be done, that can

be shared, that can be developed. They fall in the area of intensified

intelligence cooperation on this particular problem. They fall in the area of

political coordination to make sure that we take all the necessary actions on

the international front to interdict the flow of these weapons. These weapons

are not produced by terror groups, they are not handmade bombs, you cannot

produce shoulder-fired missiles. They typically come from arsenals of

governments. We know where those arsenals are, we know more or less who keeps

them, and we know that groups such as al-Qaida or Hizballah or the Palestinian

terrorist groups are working very hard to receive these weapons, including from

governments that have them. For example, Hizballah receives its weapons from

Iran, through the patronage of Syria. In the end, you always come back to the

regimes that support this terror........... I think we have to explore some new

initiatives in the field of international treaties and arrangements that we have

for the protection of civil aviation. Israel will be making such suggestions in

the coming weeks, and we welcome any suggestions that you have. We will be

discussing this first, of course, with the leader of the battle against

terrorism, the United States. We think that this is something that all

responsible states should join, because if this single incident becomes a

pattern, then civil aviation could be under a greater threat than we have seen

in many, many decades and perhaps for many, many decades to come. This is the

immediate need that we must meet........... In addition to that, understand

that we will have to take action, which the government will decide on, and we

expect that you will lend your support for the kind of actions of self-defense

that are the right and the obligation of any government, to protect its

citizens.