Blood on the motorway

All it takes is one stabbing at a gas station to turn a perfectly normal highway, one used as a major alternative route between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, from the Old Apartheid Expressway into the Highway of Terror Attacks.

Or so it is on the cover of Yedioth Ahronoth, which tries its best to sell papers by ginning up some nice old fashion fear to go with readers’ cornflakes. Israel Hayom also places emphasis on the attack’s location on Route 443, perhaps because it wasn’t on some out-of-the-way West Bank dirt road, but a highway that many don’t even realize passes through the West Bank and has perhaps become more than anything else a sign of Israel’s normalized presence in the territories.

Of course, there really was a terror attack on the road, and there really was a Molotov cocktail hurled at a car last week that injured its passengers on a continuation of the highway in Jerusalem, both rare events for a road normally seen as nearly as safe as any other inside Israel.

“It’s just 28 kilometers from the start of Route 443 to its end, but the road leading to Jerusalem and out if it is one of the central Israeli travel arteries,” Yedioth starts off its report. “Yesterday, in the wake of the second attack on the road in a week, another reminder came that this is one of the highways with the largest potential for danger.”

Israel Hayom meanwhile sees in the attack justification for all the warnings of an uptick in a terror “wave,” characterizing an attack in which only the attacker was killed as “murderous.”

“The army and police warned there would be a wave of terror, and now it seems the fears are growing and materializing, and attacks are following attacks,” the paper writes. “Yesterday, the murderous terror came to one of the most central highways in the West Bank, which leads from Modiin to Jerusalem and is used by hundreds of thousands of Israelis.”

Haaretz leads off with a report on the Shin Bet security service upping its crackdown on Jewish terror, arresting a bunch more people and sending alleged Jewish extremist ringleader Meir Ettinger to administrative detention.

At the same time, the paper notes that Palestinian detainees being held without charge have mostly stopped hunger striking to protest the use of administrative detention to keep them behind bars without any writ of habeas corpus – after a single day.

Israel says the strike was called off for no reason, but Palestinian officials disagree.

“Prisoner society chairman Qadura Fares told Haaretz that the strike was halted because the prison service agreed to return 120 prisoners to the wing of Nafha where they were previously held and made concessions over searches and other issues. Fares said the prisoners would evaluate the deal’s implementation and could resume the strike after two weeks if progress was unsatisfactory,” the paper reports.

Commentator Dan Margalit writes in Israel Hayom that the attacks are proving justification for the use of administrative detention among both Jews and Arabs, even if it is controversial and even if doctors are refusing to go along with force feeding Palestinian inmates.

“Nobody knows in advance what the regime can withstand. Margaret Thatcher let the Irish hunger strikers die in prison in England – is Israel also prepared to do that? To Palestinians? To Jews? The test will be in putting it in action. In any case, if Israel has embarked on this dangerous and unpleasant path of administrative detentions of its extremist citizens, it needs to at least give it a chance to work.”

Yedioth reports on an issue that should come as no surprise to readers of the English press, that Netanyahu and AIPAC’s drive against the Iran deal is driving a wedge between the dual identities of Jewish Americans.
“The loaded meeting between the Jewish lobby in support of Israel fully exposed the strength of the two breaks created with the Iran deal – the first between the administration in Washington and Israel and the other within the Jewish-American community,” the tabloid reports. “Jewish Americans are being forced to choose between who they are more loyal to: The American president trying his hardest to pass the deal, or Israel, which is leading the high pressure charge of congressmen, including Democrats, so they will vote against Obama’s plans.”

Haaretz’s lead editorial takes on Diaspora Minister Naftali Bennett’s plan to push supposed Jewish family values on Jews around the world, saying the idea is mistaken and redolent of a provincial worldview.

“Any program dealing with the dangers of ‘assimilation’ and Jewish criticism of Israel must be opposed. The government has no right to preach to overseas Jews about what kind of family units they should establish,” the paper writes. “This presumption reflects a harmful arrogance and even emits a racist stench.”