Unspeakable Evil in Jerusalem

Jewish religious school students pray near the scene of a shooting attack in Jerusalem, March 7, 2008. A Palestinian gunman opened fire in a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem on Thursday, killing at least eight people and wounding about 10.  REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun.

The names of four of the murdered students have been released:  Neria Cohen, 15, Yonatan Yitzhak Eldar, 16, Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, 19, and Yohai Lifshitz, 18.  Not one of them even twenty years old. 

Here is the report from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

A Palestinian terrorist infiltrated the Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary on Thursday evening and opened fire on a crowded library and study hall, killing eight people and wounding 11 others. . . . [T]he yeshiva students -- mostly teenagers -- had returned from prayers at the Western Wall. They were about to begin a party celebrating the beginning of the month of Adar -- a month of joy marked by the Purim holiday.

Gaza's streets filled with joyous crowds of thousands on Thursday evening following the terror attack . . . .  In mosques in Gaza City and northern Gaza, many residents went to perform the prayers of thanksgiving.  Armed men fired in the air in celebration and others passed out sweets to passersby.

“They deliberately target Jewish teenagers in a religious school for slaughter and then they rejoice on the streets. What unspeakable evil is here.” -- Melanie Phillips

Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz’s correspondent, writes that:

[T]he terrorist demonstrated he could carry out an attack that required prior intelligence gathering. This was not an accidental arrival at some city's commercial center and the setting off an explosive charge, but entering one of Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods and penetrating a yeshiva, which the Palestinians see as a prestigious target.

Yoni Tidi writes that the attack is “a stab at the heart of religious Zionism:”

If you don't understand the ramifications of this targeted attack, let me give you some background.  Mercaz Harav Yeshiva is considered the leading national-religious yeshiva in Israel, with hundreds of elite students. Among its thousands of graduates are leading public figures including senior rabbis and IDF officers. It was founded in 1924 by mandatory Palestine's first chief rabbi, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook.

Calev Ben-David concludes in The Jerusalem Post that it is “An Assault on the Heart of Zionism:”

In striking the flagship institution of the religious Zionist movement, a Jerusalem landmark whose history is linked with the founding and fulfillment of the Jewish national home in the Land of Israel, the gunman aimed his weapon at the heart of the Zionist enterprise.

If the goal was to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors, then the bullets struck home with deadly and accurate force.

. . . [T]he impact of this incident will be profound.

This will be a sharp blow for those Israelis, especially Jerusalemites, who have allowed themselves to let their psychological guard down since the second intifada petered out. That the gunman was able to carry out this operation in the heart of a crowded Jerusalem neighborhood, some distance away from the Arab neighborhoods of the capital, will raise serious questions about assumptions made since the construction of the West Bank security barrier.

The Olmert government, which until now has been able to contain political fallout from the rocket fire on Sderot and Ashkelon in part because of the absence of major attacks elsewhere in the country, will now find its margin of error -- and survival -- dramatically narrowed.

The efforts by both Jerusalem and Washington to renew the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, interrupted by the fighting in Gaza, will now be officially put on hold, and picking up the pieces in the wake of this outrage will not be easy.

The grief and fury in particular of the religious-Zionist sector will be beyond measure at this violent desecration of the cradle of their movement. The current efforts by the government to reach an accommodation with the settler leadership on the removal of outposts will have been in vain for the time being, as any spirit of compromise will be buried with the victims of this atrocity.

Anne Lieberman’s eloquent prayer expresses what must be in the hearts of all who choose life:

I am but a small person and I don't know how to hold my hot anger, my deep sorrow and my faith in You -- all together in the limited space of my being.

Rationalization is not available. Anger is not a whole answer. I don't see any way forward but to carry on with the commands we have received.

Comments

[Yael]

I appreciate your kind words, but my prayer was totally inadequate; words didn't come easily to me yesterday. It is unbelievable that the right words did come through some of the people most affected. The mother of Avraham David Moses Z"L is quoted at YNet: "Gd saw him as an angel and we must thank Him for the privilege of raising him for 16 years."

Were it me, Gd forbid,I wouldn't have been able to think and say such a thing; at best, I would have simply spewed confusion and anger. But this is the sort of people our enemies have struck down - in the heart of Jerusalem. The "Palestinians" were right about one thing, this was a prestigious target.

The best thing would be if we were to take up where these boys left off, by increasing our Torah learning and observance. We should at least keep that alive, since to our shame and grief we could not protect these sons of Zion.

Good Shabbos.

[Dr. Chemical]

Dershowitz has some relevant comments, from his WSJ March 3 op ed and repeated last night on cable news:

"The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores."

Perhaps it is time israel concluded that the old rules no longer work for them either.

[mal]

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