Last night, as my wife and I were watching our local TV channel and waiting for the evening weather forecast, the program was interrupted by breaking news. A gunman had opened fire on customers at a Cafe on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. We watched the story develop for the next hour or two. I was impressed by how quickly many people responded. The TV news people, including some who were off duty, at home, swiftly came to the scene and streamed reports of what had occurred. They were also extremely careful to keep their reports accurate. Emergency medical teams reached the scene even faster. Some of the earliest footage we saw showed the motorcycles of individual EMT responders parked near the cafe. The riders were already inside dealing with the injured. Security forces also raced to the scene. We saw them isolate the area and urging bystanders to go home. Within a short time all I could see were first responders, both in and out of uniform, and a few reporters. The first report from the nearby Ichilov Hospital indicated that the staff had dealt with the sudden arrival of wounded from the incident promptly, and thoroughly. I must say that I am proud of my countrymen for their speedy and professional response.
As the news came out to other places there were reactions of a quite different kind. In the Arab city of Jenin and the adjacent slum neighborhood that they still call a “refugee camp” people came out to distribute sweets in celebration. Jenin, by the way, is where the perpetrator lived. The idea that someone would want to celebrate the deaths of some innocent people who had been having a meal at a restaurant and had no direct involvement in the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is abhorrent to me. I cannot understand their thinking processes. The victims were shot just because they lived in an Israeli city and were assumed to be Jews. In a similar attack earlier in the week 2 of the 5 dead were non-Jewish Europeans, possibly tourists. In another such ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attack an Israeli border police sergeant was killed. He was a Christian Arab.
The organizations trying to churn up more violence are often those with ties to Muslim extremism. Some originate in groups supported by the Shiite clerical regime in Iran, Others are radicalized by the Sunni ISIS group. Both push their agendas by rhetoric targeting Jews. In the past, individuals who executed murders like the one last night were admired by Arab political leaders. If they were killed, their families received generous pensions from the Palestinian Authority (PA). When the US congress prepared legislation to deduct the amount of those pensions from American aid to the PA the response was that the PA would continue the payments by transferring funds from other parts of their budget.
In Gaza last night there was an strange development. The Gaza ruling party, Hamas, an entity listed in America as a terrorist group, sent their armed ‘enforcers’ to confront another Arab terror organization. The Palestinian Islamic Arab Jihad wanted to fire rocket at Israel in support of the murder in Tel Aviv. Hamas, apparently realizing that this might upset their currently profitable rebuilding programs, vetoed the idea. The Jihadists went forward anyway, and the Hamas troops ended up in a brief exchange of gunfire with them. In the end, no rockets were fired.
The paragraphs above might give you some idea of how complex the Palestine-Israel conflict can be. But one part is crystal clear. The Palestinians are the ones who promote murder as a policy. They teach this blind hatred of Jews to their children. They celebrate when it leads to killings. Until that stops there will never be a real, lasting, peace between Israel and all of the Palestinian Arabs.
Wetherhorn 