Back to the terror

After a one-day respite from terror, Tuesday saw a return to the bad old days of nearly nonstop violence and attacks, which somehow seems fitting to write about on an October 21, 2015, that has no flying cars, food hydrators or self-tying shoes.

Until Doc Brown and Einstein come around with a flux capacitor and 2.21 gigawatts of power, it seems there won’t be any hope of changing the headlines and pictures in Israel’s main daily newspapers, which show a father of seven being hit by a truck near Hebron, and car-ramming attacks, stabbings, clashes and other general mayhem in the West Bank.

Even with a time machine, it’s not clear whether investigators and journalists would have any better idea whether the hit-and-run that left Avraham Hasano dead on the side of a road was a terror attack or simply a traffic accident. Despite graphic pictures in all three papers showing Hasano being hit by the truck, all three report that the circumstances of the event remain unclear.

All three papers leave out the goriest pictures captured at the scene, but Yedioth is the only paper to notice a small detail in a picture of Hasano right before he gets hit by the car — that is, a stone flying through the air about to hit him.

While the pictures show him raising a stick at the truck, the paper surmises that it was done on “instinct” after noticing it barreling toward him, and not because he planned on trying to attack the driver.

Haaretz reports that investigators still hope to be able to get to the bottom of what happened, given the large number of witnesses at the scene.

“After the incident, the truck driver turned himself in to Palestinian police and claimed he ran over the Israeli by accident. Later, he was turned over to the Shin Bet for questioning. According to a source in the defense establishment, the driver’s testimony didn’t lead investigators to completely rule out the possibility that the incident was intentional,” the paper reports. “Press footage, as well as footage from surveillance cameras in the area, could aid the investigation. Soldiers stationed in a nearby post will also testify. Some details, like the fact that Chasno’s car was on the opposite lane, were still unexplained.”

What’s done is done, but the papers also peer into the future, which looks about sunny as Hill Valley with Biff Tannen in charge.
In Israel Hayom, Haim Shine writes that the strategy among the Palestinian leadership is to persist with the attacks until the world gives them what they want.

“The seeming trend right now for the inciters of the [Palestinian] Authority and its spokespeople is to transition to a reality of terror of attrition – continuing acts of terror, able to tire out Israeli society and at the same time put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the world stage,” he writes. “The focus of world attention is a basic strategic goal of [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas to raise the flames and incite terror attacks. The Palestinians fear that the world has more pressing matters than dealing with their stubbornness and obstreperousness, and on the back of the murder of innocents they hope to get some attention.”

The possibility that we won’t one day just wake up from this on our front porch thinking it was a bad dream, is addressed in Yedioth as well, which reports that the army is preparing for the long haul in dealing with the wave of violence.

Yossi Yehoshua, writing in the paper, laments that this means troops are being diverted from more important tasks.

“Until they train suitable guards, the task of securing Jerusalem’s public transportation has fallen on the army, and in particular, soldiers in special units who are trained to carry handguns. And thus, instead of training for the next commando mission, they are busy watching buses. This is an important mission on a national level, but it’s clear that it’s not their job. In a proper country, this needs to be done by civilian guards with proper training,” he writes.

While other papers seem to have moved on from the Beersheba shooting and mob beating of an innocent Eritrean, Haaretz is still mired in all the terribleness of it. The message that the paper’s Zvi Barel takes from it though isn’t that Israelis are racist against African migrants, but that Israelis are racist against African migrants and Arabs.

“The relationship between Israeli Jews and Arabs that has been revealed in recent weeks shows that formal citizenship doesn’t protect Arabs from plunging to a status even lower than that of asylum seekers. If the ‘foreign subjects’ are ‘a cancer’ that could be surgically removed from the heart of the nation, Israeli Arabs are a knife in its back. An eternal knife. ‘The woman stabber from Afula’ and ‘the Bedouin terrorist from Hura’ are just the latest examples of this concept,” he writes.

Hello? Anybody home in there?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to alter history without the necessary Delorean Tuesday, asserting that Hitler was just following orders from the Palestinians in destroying the Jews, was somehow unnoticed when the papers went to bed Tuesday night, but Yedioth still takes points and laughs at his George McFly like performance at the border with Gaza, putting on a pair of binoculars with the cap still on.

The paper also takes issue with another part of his speech to the World Zionist Congress, in which he said in English he built less in the settlements than his predecessors, giving numbers for himself and all of them, which the tabloid notes seems to run contrary to something he said in Hebrew just a week before.

“The prime minister was asked why he isn’t actualizing his policies to build in the settlements and if this is a capitulation to international pressure – but dismissed it totally. ‘The ones who criticize me over building in Judea and Samaria are sometimes the same people who come and tell me how much we built, how the populations has grown, and in general what a tremendous drive there has been in Judea and Samaria under the years I am in power,’ he said. ‘I won’t get into a numbers argument, but certainly nobody will teach me what is settlement or faith in the land of Israel. Go check how much we built, go check how much we settled.’”