A tragic death on a tragic day

Tragedy struck the afternoon before Holocaust Remembrance Day. Second Lieutenant Hila Betzaleli, a 20-year-old officer from Mevasseret Zion, was crushed to death by a massive lighting rig erected above the parade grounds on Mount Herzl.

Betzaleli died and six other soldiers were wounded during a rehearsal for the Independence Day ceremony, in what Maariv calls a “Tragedy at Mount Herzl.” Israel Hayom adopts the almost poetic headline “Final rehearsal.”

Pictures of Betzaleli in uniform bearing a Medical Corps flag, which she uploaded to Facebook hours before the accident, were in every paper.

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that Betzaleli’s mother, Sigalit, works at Mount Herzl and rushed to the scene moments after the disaster, calling “Where are you? Where is my daughter?” It shows the mournful Facebook post wherein Sigalit notifies Hila’s Facebook friends of her death and of her burial on Mount Herzl the same night.

Maariv also quotes Sigalit noting the tragic irony of her daughter’s death at Israel’s military cemetery. “How did it happen that she did not fall in battle, but instead at Mount Herzl, of all places?”

Investigations into the cause of the disaster began immediately. Police attributed the structure’s collapse to unsecured cables at its base, and arrested four people for negligence resulting in death, including the safety consultant and the engineer who designed the stage.

Maariv’s headline sums up the outrage towards those responsible: “Hila was killed because a worker didn’t tighten one bolt.”  Maariv also quotes a senior police official saying, “This looks like the crime that caused the Maccabiah disaster,” in which four athletes were killed when a bridge collapsed outside Ramat Gan Stadium in 1997.

The media discovered that Stage Design, the company that constructed the venue, bought the firm responsible for the 1997 Maccabia disaster six years ago. Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline reads, “The investigation, the arrests, and the connection to the Maccabiah disaster.”

Haaretz quotes Stage Design’s denial of any connection between its subsidiary and Wednesday’s incident. It said that no one involved in the Maccabiah disaster was involved in the Mount Herzl project.

Dr. Amir Perry, chairman of the Israeli Society of Safety Engineers, says in Maariv that the Mount Herzl disaster is symptomatic of the absence of an Israeli safety culture. Whereas Western countries have adopted strict safety regulations in the past 25 years, “Israel trails behind in everything regarding safety.”

“As an investigator, it is clear to me that in the Mount Herzl incident there was a mechanical failure, but its safe to assume that beforehand there was an administrative failure. Someone permitted the operation of this construction,” he says.

Haaretz devotes an entire page to the Mount Herzl disaster and three of Wednesday’s equally tragic but less prominent accidents. It reports the death of an elite unit trainee who collapsed while exercising, and two other soldiers who were injured during weapons training. A surprisingly short article mentions the seven-vehicle pileup that killed three and injured six near the Egyptian border.

Despite the death of Hila Betzaleli on the Mt. Herzl plaza, Knesset Chairman Reuven Rivlin said the show must go on.

Haaretz’s lead story, which was passed over by the other newspapers, is the illegal construction of 20 homes on private Palestinian land in the settlement of Mitzpe Kramim near Ramallah. Despite orders by the Civil Administration to halt construction, progress has continued on schedule.

Holocaust Remembrance ceremony

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres spoke at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday night as Israel remembered the six million who perished.

Peres gave an emotional speech relating his personal Holocaust experience, but Netanyahu attracted greater attention from the Israeli media by discussing the Iranian threat.

Haaretz’s headline reads, “Netanyahu at Yad Vashem: It is the world’s responsibility to prevent a nuclear Iran,” but the paper opts to excise his statement thereafter that it is Israel’s responsibility foremost. Maariv quotes Netanyahu in its headline, “Whoever disregards the Iranian threat didn’t learn from the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu acknowledged that “there are those that don’t like it that I say uncomfortable truths of this kind,” but he said that such people have “lost faith in the Jewish people” and their ability to defend themselves.

Ben Caspit writes in Maariv that the only thing Netanyahu didn’t do at the ceremony was issue the order to strike Iran. “His motto, in two short and piercing sentences: Iran is like Nazi Germany. Khamenei is Hitler,” he says.

The real lesson of the Holocaust for Netanyahu, Caspit says, is that we must rouse the world to the Iranian threat but “prepare for the possibility that very soon we will have to do the job alone.”

In Haaretz, Ari Shavit writes that to the east Netanyahu sees Hitler, and in the West he sees Chamberlains. Shavit says that, just like the rest of the country, “In the prime minister’s residence, the Holocaust is alive and kicking.”

Dan Margalit in Yisrael Hayom praises Netanyahu’s speech for being practical rather than ceremonial, and “for telling the nation the truth about the Iranian threat” and not minimizing its significance. He says, however, that unlike Europe before World War II, Israel is already well armed and defended.

The Israeli press fleshed out their Holocaust Remembrance Day coverage with an assortment of articles dealing with survivors’ anecdotes, past and present.

Maariv runs a story about two Holocaust survivors who were in a work camp together in 1944, and whose grandchildren married one another 14 years ago. Now, their shared great-grandchild is becoming a bar mitzva.

Yedioth Ahronoth publishes a poignant article about Samuel Sandler, grandfather of the slain family from Toulouse, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust. “Almost my entire family was killed in the Holocaust because of its Jewishness, and now also my son and two grandchildren — the sole survivors with our family name — were killed because of their Jewishness,” he said.