A mother slain, a protector remembered

Words like “shocking,” “tragic” and “horror” are bandied about all too often in the Hebrew press, but sometimes the words are unfortunately appropriate. Monday morning is one of those times, as papers recount the heartbreaking killing of mother Dafna Meir in the West Bank settlement of Otniel the previous evening.

Papers play up the heroism of Meir and the fact that she was stabbed to death at the entrance to her home trying to fight off an attacker, likely saving her children inside.

“A mother against a terrorist,” reads a headline in Yedioth Ahronoth, which reports that 17-year-old daughter Renana also likely played a role in scaring off the stabber.

“Renana, who saw her mother stabbed before her eyes, broke out in screams that likely pushed away the terrorist, who escaped without trying to hurt other members of the family,” the paper reports. “The shocked daughter quickly called for help. ‘They stabbed my mother, they stabbed my mother, help,’ she yelled over the phone.”

It wasn’t just Meir’s own kids she saved, but also the two foster kids she had in her home.

“All her life she raised foster kids and moved between institutions,” her niece Moriah tells Israel Hayom. “Her dream was to take kids that had nothing and give them a good life. She was the best mother in the world.”

The issue of children comes up again in a column by Yifat Ehrlich, who writes in Yedioth of having to decide whether to tell her children everything is OK or the truth of what happened.

“Maybe I should let my kids in, maybe just the big ones? In any case, tomorrow morning their friends at school will talk about it, and then the details can become scarier and more threatening. But I have no strength to tell them, and really I don’t have the claiming words to answer the hard questions they’ll chirp,” she writes.

In Israel Hayom, Haim Shine has some hard questions about who the stabber could have been and where he could have come from.

“What human being is able to understand the amount of evil, wickedness, and hatred that is needed to thrust a knife, time after time, into the throat of an innocent woman, in her home in front of her kids? In Palestinian society, whose leaders incite to kill Jews because of who they are, this lowdown murderer will soon become a martyr, his picture hung in schools as a hero of the Arab people, his friends will continue to shout ‘Allahu akbar,’ his mother will boast about her son and the family will get money from the Palestinian Authority. For killers of women and children, they have a special rate,” he writes.

Shine assumes that the killer will be a martyr, but the truth is that the stabber is still on the loose. With a manhunt underway, Haaretz reports that the IDF had already been in the midst of bolstering its West Bank presence in response to the four-month wave of terror, setting up new posts in various strategic areas, including retaking the abandoned Shedma army outpost, east of Bethlehem.

“In the last few weeks there has been a sharp rise in engineering activity at Shedma, bulldozers and diggers are working at the site, building a fence to go around and expand the area of the post,” the paper reports. “A reserve battalion — one of several battalions stationed in the West Bank from the start of the month as part of a buildup of forces — mans the site, alongside other observational posts in the Bethlehem area.”

While Shedma is near Tekoa, the site of a stabbing attack Monday morning, Yedioth reports on how the Hebron Hills area further south around Otniel has become a hotbed of terror activity, with 55 out of 150 attackers coming from there.

“The Hebron area awakened late, after East Jerusalem, Nablus and Ramallah. It quickly become the main city and area from which came attackers, and for now the army and Shin Bet security service don’t have a solution for how to return the quiet,” the paper’s Yossi Yehoshua writes. “It’s possible that the Shin Bet figures, which show a drop in the amount of attacks in the last month, are correct. But not regarding the severity of the attacks. Every day there is another incident, and the central threat, as published in Yedioth Ahronoth, is the Hebron sniper, who has already acted several times and injured soldiers from afar in the area around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and until now they haven’t managed to lay a finger on him.”

Also still on the loose is whatever right-wing mole is going around recording leftists of doing dirty deeds, who becomes the target of op-ed writer Odeh Bisharat in Haaretz. Bisharat defends activist Ezra Nawi, recorded as saying he turns in Palestinians who sell land to Jews, and says his group or B’Tselem would have helped thwart the Holocaust, indirectly making everyone’s favorite comparison between Israel and the Nazis.

“With all of the problematic nature of his conduct, Nawi still projected a message to the Palestinians that there is good in this world, that people don’t need to be wolves to one another. But Ilana Dayan, on whose Channel 2 ‘Uvda’ program Nawi’s comments were aired, rushed to clear away such a hazard from the Palestinians lest they, heaven forbid, think that there is one good Jew,” he writes. “Therefore Dayan’s morality, which equates Jewish settler hilltop youth and Nawi’s Ta’ayush group, is a sick morality. If we’d had a Russian Ta’ayush or a Polish version of B’Tselem during that dark period in Europe, the situation in Europe of the Jews, as well as of the non-Jews, would have been better.”