The people watching the sunset here on the beach in Tel Aviv don’t know that, at this very spot, 25 years ago today, 21 teenagers were killed by terrorists as they arrived at the Dolphinarium nightclub, now replaced with this beachfront promenade.
Exactly a year before, hoping for international acclaim, hapless Israeli PM Ehud Barak pulled the IDF out of the South Lebanon buffer zone they had held for 18 years.
Hezbollah immediately planted its flag on the border, literally. Nasrallah came to the border to declare victory, famously noting that Israel was “weaker than a spider’s web.”
Arafat took note, and so, weeks later, rejected the Clinton offer at Camp David that would have brought about a Palestinian state.
Two months after that, he began the campaign of terror that killed 1,000 Israelis.
Twenty-five years later, a new generation of Israelis is back in Lebanon, still cleaning up the mess the hasty pullout from Lebanon precipitated.