For Israelis - and Jews everywhere - fear is now international

The sick fact is that, by Israeli standards, this was not a particularly big one. Suicide bombings inside the country regularly claim a dozen Israeli lives or more, while the terrorists who attacked the Paradise hotel outside Mombasa yesterday killed as many of themselves as they did Israelis (three each).

If terror were a crude matter of numbers, the African murders would have less significance than, say, yesterday's raid on a Likud party office in Beit Shean, which killed five. But numbers are not always decisive. Location matters too. Which is why yesterday's double assault from Kenya will strike so hard.

First, it will deepen yet further Israelis' state of fear. For more than two years Israelis have lived with the daily possibility of violent and random death within their own borders. Every parent worries that the bus carrying their child could blow to pieces; a trip to the mall could be a deathtrap; a pizzeria could be a minefield. That constant fear has seeped into the marrow of the society. Nothing is normal.

But Israelis always had one way to escape the fear. A holiday outside the country could be the valve that releases the pressure. Home may not have been safe, but abroad could be.

Now Israelis have lost even that comfort. Now they will believe that nowhere is safe. They will be hunted down wherever they are, targeted for the crime of being Israeli. That is the message of yesterday's attack: Israelis cannot live at home, they cannot live in the world.

Some will think that an overreaction. After all, Australians were the target of October's Bali bomb - yet surely few Aussies now feel themselves in a state of siege. That's true, but it misses two important differences. Australians are not under constant attack in their own country. Nor are they a people with a long, collective history of persecution.

Which is why Kenya's psychological impact will not be felt by Israelis alone. It will fuel a growing mood of alarm spreading across the Jewish world: the sense that Jews are being hounded in a way unseen for more than half a century.

Many Jews will see Mombasa as confirmation that Osama bin Laden's words are to be taken at face value. That when he repeatedly declares a "jihad against Jews and crusaders", he means it. And he puts Jews first for a reason: because he regards them - not Israelis or Zionists, but Jews - as enemy number one. Al-Qaida's April attack on an ancient Tunisian synagogue, which left 16 dead, was an early proof. Yesterday was another.

Politically, there are two likely impacts. First, Kenya will, like all terror attacks, prompt Israelis to close ranks. They will unite behind their prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who last night looked set to cruise to re-election as Likud leader. When terror strikes, Israelis accept the Sharon view that the only proper response is crushing force.

So the fledgling campaign of Labour challenger Amram Mitzna - arguing that a peace process, not military might, is the only long-term answer - will now struggle to get a hearing. What is there to talk about with maniacs prepared to blow 261 passengers out of the sky?

Sharon and much of the Israeli consensus will see a second vindication in Mombasa. Ever since September 11, Israeli leaders - and their allies among the US hawks - have argued that Israel's struggle with the Palestinians is merely one front in the wider war on terror. "Arafat is our bin Laden" is the slogan.

The desire to link the two is not hard to fathom. If these are the same fight, then Israel has the same right to hit at the "terror camps" of the West Bank as America had to strike at Afghanistan. And why negotiate with Palestinians if they are merely a local branch of al-Qaida? No one expects George Bush to make concessions to Bin Laden, so why should Sharon to Arafat?

As of yesterday, that argument will gain ground. Overtly now, the al-Qaida and Palestinian campaigns have been fused. As an Israeli government statement declared yesterday: "Whether in New York or Washington, Bali or Moscow, Mombasa or Bet She'an, terrorism is indivisible, and all attempts to understand it will only serve to ensure its continuation."

Kenya adds weight to the hawkish view that Israel faces a murderous enemy with whom there can be no reasoning; there is no point talking peace, because this is not a local, soluble struggle over real estate but a global, metaphysical "clash of civilisations". That is the view of the right, in Jerusalem and Washington and, not for the first time, the terrorists have just served as the hawks' star witness.