RUTHIE BLUM: HIGH ALERT FOR ISRAELI SOCIETY
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10531
At noon on Monday, 18-year-old terrorist Nur a-Din Hashiyeh tried to wrest the rifle from 20-year-old IDF Staff Sgt. Almog Shiloni at a train station in Tel Aviv. When Shiloni resisted, Hashiyeh, from the Palestinian Authority-controlled area of Nablus, stabbed him. Onlookers immediately tried to resuscitate Shiloni. Others tried to overpower Hashiyeh, who managed to run away, until police caught up with him in a nearby building.
Shiloni was transferred to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where he died on Monday night.
Hashiyeh, who sustained minor injuries, was brought to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. Fearing revenge attacks from the mob of Israelis who had gathered around the train station yelling “Death to terrorists,” the police covered him from head to toe and whisked him off in an ambulance.
Hashiyeh is a member of Hamas. One photo that has been circulating shows him holding a sign that reads: “We are a people whose passion for death is like our enemies’ desire for life.”
Early Monday evening, as Shiloni was still fighting for his life, 30-year-old Maher al-Hashlamoun, an Islamic Jihad member from Hebron, set out to commit the kind of vehicular attack against innocent Israelis that has become popular among Arabs in the PA. But when he arrived at the hitchhiking stop next to the Judean settlement of Alon Shvut (opposite the very spot where three Israeli teens were abducted and slaughtered in the summer), his car crashed into a concrete block.
Undeterred, he exited the car and began stabbing the people at the stop, among them a young man. He also slashed the throat of 26-year-old Dalia Lemkus from Tekoa, who died at the scene.
While Hashlamoun was on his rampage, a passing driver stopped to intervene. He ended up getting stabbed in the jaw, but did enable the guard at the entrance to Alon Shvut to shoot Hashlamoun. Like the two innocents he attempted to murder, Hashlamoun was brought to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem.
Lemkus, an occupational therapist beloved by all who knew her, survived a similar terrorist attack when she was 17.
At around the same age, Hashlamoun was incarcerated in an Israeli jail for terrorism. After serving only five years, however, he was released in 2005 as part of a prisoner swap.
Monday’s carnage was to be expected. The sharp rise in violence is being referred to by both Arabs and Jews as the start of a third intifada. Though the current excuse for what is simply another battle in the war against Israel is the desire of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, it is the stuff that successful propaganda is made of — lies.
This brings us to, and puts in perspective, the events of the past weekend, which caused an unjustified, yet revealing, stir.
In spite of the fact that the focal point of the current Arab uprising is Jerusalem, police in other Arab-populated areas have been trying to prevent an already volatile atmosphere from escalating. In such a climate of rock-throwing, fire-crackers, Molotov cocktails and hit-and-run terrorist attacks, law-enforcement agents are in a state of constant jitters.
It is in this context that policemen shot and killed 21-year-old Kheir Hamdan in the Galilee town of Kafr Kanna on Friday night.
On Saturday morning, the Northern District police issued a statement about the incident, according to which Hamdan tried to attack the officers with a knife, and it was only after firing into the air that they shot him directly.
Footage from the scene indicates otherwise.
What the video shows is a frenzied Hamdan slamming his knife into the door and window of a squad car. One policeman is then seen trying carefully to open his door without getting stabbed. And when he manages to get out of the car, Hamdan begins to run away. It is at this point that one of the policemen shoots him. Still alive, Hamdan is dragged into the vehicle and driven to the hospital.
Following this revelation, a storm ensued, as did calls for investigations into the “unnecessary killing” of Hamdan. Even many mainstream Israelis have been saying that the police “could have shot him in the leg.”
Arab Knesset member Ahmad Tibi (Ram-Tal) called the incident a “cold-blooded execution,” and demanded that the officer who shot Hamdan be immediately arrested and put on trial.
MK Mohammad Barakeh (Hadash), Kafr Kanna Mayor Majhad Awadeh and other Arab dignitaries joined thousands of Israeli Arab demonstrators on Saturday as they chanted, “Zionists, get out of our lives,” while waving posters of Hamdan saying, “His only crime was being an Arab.”
In fact, his “crime” — like that of Hashiyeh and Hashlamoun — was terrorism. And while he is hailed as a martyr, the policeman who shot him will be dishonored and possibly imprisoned.
It is this societal situation, more than any weapons deemed fit in the PA for an intifada, that ought to spring Israel into high alert.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”
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