Should Israel protect Jewish Diaspora or its own citizens?

The Jan. 19 death of Jewish Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, a short time after he predicted that he would pay with his life for accusing President Cristina Kirchner of a cover-up in the bombing of the Jewish community center Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, reminded me of an important Spanish word I learned while covering the attack in the Argentine capital in 1994: “impunidad,” meaning impunity.

A local Jewish journalist I met there, next to what was once Buenos Aires' large Jewish community’s center of cultural life, proposed to me a wager that no one would pay for the deaths of 85 people in the terror attack and for the wounding of dozens of passers-by. He told me then that in the two years since the explosion of a booby-trapped car at the entrance to the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital — an attack in which 29 Israelis and Argentinians were killed and more than 200 were injured — police investigations had gotten nowhere.

Nisman, who was 51 at the time of his death, told Haaretz seven years ago, “Iran’s top leadership, with the help of Hezbollah, was responsible for the attacks.” As my journalist friend predicted, 22 years have gone by since the attack on the embassy and 20 years since the bombing of the AMIA, and no one has paid. Synagogues, Jewish schools and museums and Kosher food stores around the world are still targets of radical Islam. And until the wave of terrorism that recently hit Europe, authorities across the continent treated the activity of extremist Muslims and anti-Semitic organizations with indifference, sometimes to the point of ignoring them entirely.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attack in the Quneitra area of the Syrian Golan Heights over the weekend also took me back 20 years to the tragic event in Argentina. Tourism Minister Uzi Baram, who traveled to Argentina to represent the Israeli government at the funerals of the AMIA victims, invited me to join him at a meeting with Jewish community leaders. The head of the community, Reuven Bracha, started off by thanking the minister for his comforting words and for troubling himself to journey to faraway Argentina to lift the spirits of his Jewish brethren. After this polite introduction, he went on the offensive. “I ask that the next time that the Israeli government decides to eliminate the leader of an Islamic terror organization,” he said, “consider us, too. Think of the broad implication of the expression, ‘All the people of Israel are responsible for one another.’”