As I sit in my home in Jerusalem, venturing out only when necessary, shivering with each ping of the cellphone that alerts me to some new horror, I wonder how this place survives and how we come out of it on the other side of despair. I don’t have answers, I have questions.
How do children pick up weapons and strike innocent people on the street, at a bus stop, on their bicycles? Just kids, with ideas not fully formed, bred on despondency and humiliation; desperate acts caused by desperation. It’s hard to remember this when hour after hour there is another report on yet another stabbing, shooting, car ramming — not only in Jerusalem and other seam-line cities, but in the heart of Israel, in Raanana, Holon, Tel Aviv. It comes rushing back as in the past, the fear, the anxiety, a mother’s dread until her children return safely home each day. And the suspicion — everyone you pass a suspect.
How to maintain humanity alongside the desire for revenge? How quickly we become animals, kicking the terrorist who has been “neutralized,” lying on the ground amid shouts of “Kill him! Shoot him in the head, not the leg.” It matters not that the terrorist is a 13-year-old boy, and although he had just attacked another 13-year-old boy on a bicycle, he is still a child. What have we — what have they — become? What have our leaders offered in moral clarity and vision, denouncing and calling for moderation? What we do have is more power to suppress the powerless, more hatred to put down the humiliated. And yet, Israeli citizens must be protected: A 78-year-old man must be able to ride the bus with his wife without fear that two young men from the neighboring village will get on the same bus and shoot him dead. A child must be able to ride his bike without fear of landing in the hospital with critical wounds that threaten his life. Commuters must be able to ride the light rail to get to work or school without fear of being run over by a homicidal driver. This is legitimate, basic and essential to all citizens of a functioning society.
And what is this neutral term “neutralizing” about? That is what we call here the taking out of a terrorist. But neutral suggests without an opinion, not on either side, without judgment. The neutralizing of the attackers, of course, is anything but. They are dead, and their neutral state is flashed across TV screens and social media posts across the territories and the region. They hold funerals where more and more young people rise up to cry for jihad and revenge.
How can this interminable conflict be so misunderstood by both sides? How can we all cling so faithfully to our own narrative, not just regarding historical claims but in the retelling of events now occurring? Reality has flown out of the window and some weird parallel universe has arisen whereby Mahmoud Abbas is seen by the Israeli government as the primary instigator, directing the terror at all times; never mind the declarations by Israeli security officials who say that Abbas is in fact trying to quell the terror in spite of inciteful public rhetoric. Or the Palestinian contention that the women and young men who attack Israelis with knives are innocents who were merely holding a cellphone or candy in their outstretched hands; never mind the videos taken in real time that graphically show bloody knives raised against unsuspecting targets. This vicious cycle of murder and lies only serves to deepen the black hole of hopelessness, creating an abyss so deep that no one can pass.
There are no answers; there are only tears. We are paralyzed by fear, existing in a fog of despair, unable to see how this ends well for anyone. As we approach 20 years since the death of Yitzhak Rabin, the only thing clear is that the assassin Yigal Amir murdered both the man and the vision for a peaceful resolution to this tragic conflict. For those living here now, and for the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians, this terrible cycle of hatred and murder threatens any hope for coexistence of any kind. Without another leader like Rabin willing to stand up in these horrendous days and state loudly the need for a political process, for an “intifada” of ideas and proposals rather than an intifada of rocks and knives, we will see more acts of terror; we will build more concrete obstacles to block off Palestinian villages; we will call upon more Israeli civilians to arm themselves whenever they leave their homes; we will watch more children on both sides become both victims and martyrs — and for what? This is not the Zionist dream.
Roberta Fahn Schoffman is Israel Policy Forum’s representative in Israel.
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