Straight out of ‘Lord of the Flies’

How do you report on an incident that more resembles something out of “Lord of the Flies” than your typical terrorist attack? What image do you show on the front page of a newspaper after Palestinian teens not old enough to watch an R-rated film stab two Israelis, one of them just 13 years old, before being shot by police?

For the tabloids, Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth, the decision is simple: a tragic photo of the Jewish boy’s bicycle, on which he was riding when he was stabbed by a Palestinian not much older than himself from the neighborhood next door. Haaretz opts for a blurred out photo of either a victim of that attack, or one of the subdued attackers, surrounded by police racing down the light rail tracks. Of the four attacks in the capital on Monday, it is the one most prominently featured in the papers, indicative of its horrific nature and the shock it instilled in the public consciousness.

“This is the difference,” Israel Hayom writes on the front page, “a 13-year-old from Beit Hanina goes on a killing spree with a knife in the streets of Jerusalem. A 13-year-old from Pisgat Ze’ev goes riding his bike and is stabbed and critically wounded.”

“One day, one city, two peoples and four terror attacks,” Yedioth Ahronoth runs as a banner over its play-by-play coverage of the stabbings that wracked the capital, which it calls “a city of war.”

Even Haaretz, without hesitation, refers to the 13- and 15-year-old culprits in the Pisgat Ze’ev attack as “terrorists.” Monday is universally referred to by the press as “the most difficult day in the city since the beginning of the wave of violence” at the beginning of October.

To make sense of it all, the press calls upon its sharpest minds. “Only the sick reality in our Middle East can create a sickening scenario like the attack yesterday in Pisgat Ze’ev,” Boaz Bismuth writes in Israel Hayom.

“The knife attacks introduces us to the psychotic reality in which young Palestinian girls and boys are not worried about dying when they kill Jews,” he says. He dismisses the claim that the ever-growing rash of attacks on Israelis stem from despair or loss of hope among young Palestinians, noting that similar despair doesn’t result in such attacks in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East. Instead he attributes it to “something else. Something very, very sick… a contagious terror virus passing from one zombie to the next.”

I’m sorry, did Boaz Bismuth just call Palestinian terrorists zombies?

These zombies, he says, are spurred on by Israeli Arab MKs and by false claims that Israel seeks to build a third temple atop the ruins of al-Aqsa Mosque.

“They are nihilist youths, but this isn’t the nihilism of [Albert] Camus, because this that stands before us doesn’t reject faith. It acts in its name,” he says.

Nir Hasson gives some first person perspective in Haaretz, calling Monday “an especially bad day, even for seasoned Jerusalem reporters.” He writes that the issue at hand with 13-year-old stabbers is less likely to be incitement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Arab Israeli MK Hanin Zoabi, but rather, “almost certainly that he was influenced much more by the discourse on Facebook and the pictures of martyrs.”

Monday’s attacks, far from the focal point of the Old City, he says, “is starting, for the first time in many years, to affect the daily routine of [Jerusalem] residents. More and more parents are preventing their kids from going out.” The rehabilitation the city enjoyed following the Second Intifada is unraveling and residents of the East and West sides of the city now avoid crossing the now-imaginary line; “Fear, if you like, is dividing Jerusalem.”

Contrary to the statements by many politicians, he argues, the way to bring calm to the situation isn’t “to pile up more bodies in a policy of kill in every instance.” He offers no suggestion, however, of how to resolve it.

Yedioth Ahronoth runs an op-ed by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat who calls the capital “a big city that knows to act when need be like a small, warm community.”

“The wave of terror we’re experiencing in Jerusalem is difficult and brutal,” he writes. “We hurt from the pain of the grieving families, we lend a shoulder to the injured, straighten our backs and continue forward. This always was and always will be our response to terrorism.”

He urges residents to stay vigilant, but “to overcome the fear and the concerns and continue with life as normal, to continue to plan for the future.”

“If we demonstrate unity, strength and determination, I have no doubt we’ll get through this,” he says.