Stopping violence for dummies

A vehicular assault on three soldiers in the West Bank garners top headlines Friday morning, with plaudits for the officer who shot the driver abounding amid what all three papers call a terror attack.

Yet the reports also give way to varied ideas for what must be done to keep attacks like this from happening, with more ideas thrown out than you can wag a finger at.

The location of the attack, outside the Arab town of Sinjil and just a stone’s throw from Duma, the village which will forever be linked in Israeli minds to the horrific firebombing attack which killed a Palestinian toddler, likely by Jewish terrorists, is not lost on the papers.

Israel Hayom reports that the soldiers were on the road as part of an effort to beef up security out of the fear for revenge attacks after the firebombing.

“I Identified the attacker trying to get out of the vehicle, shot him and neutralized the situation,” Sgt. Daniel Elbaz is quoted saying in Israel Hayom, which reports that if not for his quick work “The attack could have ended much worse” than the two seriously injured soldiers and one soldier with light wounds.

Not everybody is rushing to sing the praises of Elbaz, though. In Yedioth Ahronoth, Alex Fishman writes that while the soldier should certainly be given his kudos, the soldiers were in an area where there was a high risk of some sort of attack and should have been better prepared.

“A spontaneous attack by a lone attacker, revenge for the burning of the Dawabsha family in Duma, was the most expected threat and appeared in every situational assessment of every security body, with four exclamation points. The threat should have had an affect on the behavior of the soldiers posted in the West Bank and every settler traveling around today,” he writes. “The vehicular assault yesterday was not the last revenge attack. We can’t treat these attacks as a decree from above. If we can’t identify the love wolf attacker before he carries out his attack, the answer is defense: Awareness by soldiers and civilians of the dangers and correct management of it – in the way they are on the roads, for instance – would prevent the lone wolf attacker from gaining his objective.”

It’s not the soldier’s lack of awareness of the threat, but rather politicians’ lack of quick condemnation, that has Israel Hayom’s Haim Shine’s panties in a bunch. After condemnation poured in following the attack on the Dawabsha family , in which an 18-month old baby who wasn’t guarding any road for any army was killed in the dead of night, Shine is wondering why politicians were so slow to issue the same words after a car rammed into three soldiers.

“I waited with bated breath for the strong condemnation to the vehicular attack. It took a long time, and came in drips and drabs. I couldn’t understand why they stood as a chorus to condemn what they saw as Jewish terror, and disappeared one by one when we are talking about Palestinian terror. Against this, it’s no surprise that we still haven’t gotten an apology or regrets over the Oslo Accords, which have claimed thousands of Israeli lives, and continue to do so, over the decades,” he writes.

Shine likely won’t be happy to see that Haaretz, the paper of those dastardly leftists, runs on its front page an in-depth look not inside Palestinian terror, but rather the Jewish variety, which may be just as scary.

The paper’s Chaim Levinson’s bases his report on their plan to take down the state on documents drafted by the leadership of the Jewish extremists, known by popular catch-all “hilltop youth.” He notes, though, that while their words may be full of vitriol and frightening ideas for the future of the Jewish state, these guys are not exactly terror masterminds, but rather school dropouts on the fringes of society with little connection to the mainstream religious settler movement (which by and large has condemned their actions.)

And stopping them, he notes, may be as easy as finding them a nice wife and a little pisher whose mouth they need to shove food into.

“Group members move from place to place – the West Bank, Jerusalem (a fertile spot for attacking Christians), even communities like Yad Binyamin on the Coastal Plain – carrying all their belongings with them. They live on donations or temporary jobs in agriculture or construction. But the West Bank isn’t their main theater of operations – in part because many have received injunctions barring them from there,” he writes. “Luckily for the Shin Bet, they tend to abandon the violent life at a young age. They enter at around 16, but by 20 or 21 have a wife and child, and need to make a living. At that point, they stop perpetrating violence themselves and instead provide training and support to the younger generation.”

In Yedioth Ahronoth, Bat Galim Shaar, the mother of Gil-ad Shaar – one of three Israeli teens kidnapped and killed by Hamas operatives in the West Bank last summer, makes a heartfelt plea for the violence and bad blood to halt, calling it an existential threat. She notes that she spent the week visiting with terror victims from the Dawabshas to the family of Shira Banki , killed by a religious extremist at the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade last week and the family of Inbar Ezrack, who was injured in a firebomb attack in Jerusalem earlier in the week.

“Last summer I met people from all over the Israeli social map. Under a tree by our home, we learned of the good will, of the yearning for peace, both internally and externally. We are desperate for listening and restraint, inclusion and not exclusion, because behind everything that happened this week, there is a family with a face and a name,” she writes. “To see the face of Hussein Dawabshe, grandfather of the infant that up until a week before the arson worked in our house as a tiler. To see the face of Inbar, who just a month before being burned by a firebomb planned a student trip to Talmon to learn about the three teens, and to understand that there is no room for stigmatization and exclusion. This is our responsibility to do as much as possible to ensure the continued existence of our country.”

That hippy-dippy-don’t-stigmatize-one-love stuff might work in the West Bank, but in Tel Aviv Haaretz Columnist Yoel Marcus is only too happy to play the blame game, crowning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the anti-Midas, with the ability to turn everything into a big pile of night soil.

“Netanyahu bears responsibility for everything bad that happens among us and around us. How many times have we warned that hate crimes against Arabs is a dangerous phenomenon? But he is threatening not only Iran, he is gradually causing real damage to the Jewish influence in the United States as well,” he writes. “There’s danger in everything he touches. Netanyahu is dangerous to Israel.”