A Violent Week Comes to an End

Yesterday a  very reasonable suggestion was made on my Twitter feed; have ambulances have two sirens, one for regular events and one for attacks.  People are just too nervous.  Yesterday morning all of Tel Aviv was tied up in one traffic jam as police pursued a suspicious vehicle and closed off roads. We actually got through a day with no successful attacks, could things be quieting down  maybe- we can always hope.  It should be noted that a number of attacks were thwarted yesterday when a number of Arabs were caught with knives and arrested.  Meanwhile my son’s school cancelled their annual three-day trip for the students scheduled for next week, originally they said they would wait until Monday to decide, but they concluded it was not going to end soon.

Traffic Jam

Yesterday, most of the media attention was directed at the Palestinian kid who Palestinian President Abbas claimed we had killed and is doing fine in Hadassah Hospital after the 13 year old tried knifing Israelis.  Of course in a sign of the time Human Rights organizations were quick to condemn Israel for violating the privacy of the kid.  Israelis often say that we are lucky in our enemies, that they always seem so divided and often incompetent.  There is of course, some truth to that, and clearly Abbas calling the 13-year-old who he had to know was alive a martyr was one of those stupid moves.  But in some ways it also works against us, at times the Palestinians almost seem to incompetent to make peace.  When Saeb Erekat who has been the chief Palestinian negotiator for more sthen  a decade calls on the world to stop us from massacring Palestinian children he makes it all that less likely that a majority of Israelis will ever believe peace is possible.  Furthermore the Palestinian ability to believe their own lies only deepens the hatred.

Many Israelis have been obsessing about either the wrong-headed coverage of events or at least until that last few days the very limited coverage. Neither surprises me.  However terrible this is for us, less people have been killed or wounded here in the last week than on a weekend in Chicago.  Furthermore, we should be used to the fact by know that part of the press are not fair.  Its been that way for most of my lifetime.  I, of course, have nothing to complain about in the year and half, I have been writing for Newsweek, they have printed every article, but one that I filed and the only editing they have done has been for punctuation and grammar.

I frankly have no idea what the next few days or weeks will look like. While there have been less stabbings, only one today, there has been other violence including the burning of Joseph’s tomb in Shechem(Nabulus) a place a had to guard almost 40 years ago during my basic trainingThis wave might just pass, on the other hand, it could also just as easily last weeks or months.