If our names are indeed written in the book of life on Yom Kippur, and our fate ordained, then perhaps Kineret Mendel (23), her cousin Matat Rosenfeld-Adler (21 and newly married), and Oz Ben-Meir (14) were not meant to live out the year. Who, singing Avinu Malkeinu in synagogue, can guess that he will be murdered the following week..?
From the Washington Post report:
Palestinian gunmen killed three Israelis and wounded four others Sunday in drive-by shootings in the West Bank that officials on both sides said would probably hamper efforts to begin peace negotiations.
Only days before Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was scheduled to meet President Bush in Washington, the armed wing of his Fatah movement asserted responsibility for the shootings…
The Post offers quotes from Israeli spokesmen, to the effect that Abbas is losing control of the Palestinian factions, and should move quickly to disarm them. The Boston Globe quotes Ghassan Khatib, a member of Abbas’ cabinet:
“In Palestine, Fatah people are divided and though Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is relatively popular, he needs to be more decisive with his own faction,” he said in an interview.
Khatib said Abbas’s critics intended to weaken him before his meeting with Bush. “People in Washington should look at this incident as an attack physically on Israelis but politically on Abu Mazen…”
Only several paragraphs down in the Post article do we find out:
The late afternoon shootings came soon after an Israeli police patrol near the northern West Bank city of Jenin killed a military commander of Islamic Jihad, a smaller faction that like Hamas is at war with Israel.
Violence begets violence.
The Post reports that the shooting took place at “a bus stop popular with Israeli settlers hitchhiking south from Jerusalem”. The victims lived in Gush Etzion, a large settlement bloc outside Jerusalem. Settling this area is, by all accounts, a part of Israel’s strategy for annexing territory contiguous with Jerusalem.
The settlers are accustomed to traveling freely around the West Bank, on Jewish-only highways, guarded by watchtowers and gunposts. It’s easy to forget the Palestinians are there. Until they shoot at you.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
Although senior officials in the Palestinian Authority were quick to condemn the shooting, many Palestinians note that it did not take place in a vacuum.
Just last week, four Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids in the West Bank and Gaza, two of them children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza…
“The Israelis want a cease-fire from the Palestinians, but also to reserve their unilateral right to keep going out on raids and continuing to kill,” says Ziad Abu Amar, a Palestinian legislator from Gaza. “If the Israelis continue to arrest and kill members of (militant groups), it will be embarrassing for others to just sit by and watch.”
Dr. Abu Amar, an author and expert on Hamas on other Palestinian militants, describes the situation as most Palestinians see it.
As long as Israel continues military activities in the West Bank, expands settlements, and keeps building the security barrier, he says, Palestinians will look at the horizon and see more intifada than peace process.
“Did the Israelis expect that once they leave Gaza they will get a license from the Palestinians to swallow up the West Bank? It’s fine to expect that the struggle over the West Bank will continue,” Amar says. “Palestinians will try to resist by using violence.”
What does it mean, that I cannot track down the names of the Palestinian children who were killed last week? It was barely covered.
We prefer to see the violence as one-sided, irrational - as stemming from an implacable Palestinian enmity to Israel, to peace.
We don’t want to see it as related to our own sin, coveting our neighbor’s land: the thing that started the settlement project in the first place.
YNet, reporting on the funeral:
In their eulogies, the family members mentioned their grandfather Eliezer, who immigrated to Israel on his own after losing his wife and son in the Holocaust.
“Matat and Kineret, ask Grandpa Eli to go to Abraham and tell him, ‘You sacrificed your son once, why do I have to sacrifice three times?’” they said.
On her blog, Umkahlil offers a translation from the Arabic of an interview with the leader of the Falcon Brigades, the division of Al Aqsa that claimed responsiblity for the attack:
“Abu Jihad,” leader of the Falcon Martyr Brigades’ southern contingent, told Ma’an, “We are preparing for suicide bombings in Gush Etzion, and God protects our brigade members who caused settlers and soldiers to be frightened after an attack by armed Palestinians. A suicide bomber will achieve more in another coming attack.”
Will the sword never perish from the earth?
Perhaps, in the real Jerusalem, the one we all share at the end of time. Not in this one, which we are trying so hard to keep for ourselves; which others are trying so hard to take from us.
The real Jerusalem
This captured eloquently the terrible price exacted by this endless circle of action and retaliation. Yossi Beilin wrote something (which made the rounds on the emails I receive from various Israel/Palestine peace organizations,) on Israel’s "Pavlovian responses" to Palestinian actions, which he says feed in to exactly what the more militant Palestinians want to see happen, because the usual Israeli incursions, arrests, and killings then justify the militants’ response to the Israeli response. But the saddest thing in your piece is what you wrote about not being able to find the names of the Palestinian children who were killed. Next time I am at Shabbat services and we say Kaddish at the end of the service, I will say it for those nameless, invisible children.
the latest round of violence
I find myself at a loss for words after reading this recent commentary. While trivial in relation to the larger atrocities committed in the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, this latest round of reflexive, senseless, tit for tat violence makes me wonder about the optimistic Enlightment view that human beings are essentially good, and that if educated and given the opportunity, we are able/willing to make decisions on the basis of evidence and rationale thought.. I find myself wondering whether the early Christian (St. Agusutine, if I remember correctly) view that humankind is fundamentally sinful, and Freud’s theory about the existence of a death instinct are not, on balance, more accurate ways of thinking about human nature/human motivation. Certainly the Isaeli-Palestinian conflict provides a lot of evidence in support of that view. .