The dangers of unchecked anger

To beat or not to beat, that is the question. The tabloids address the issue gripping the conscience of many Israelis after video footage from a recent terror attack showed civilians running right past a wounded grandmother in pursuit of a suspected terrorist.

Israel Hayom weighs in on the matter of whether bystanders should assist the wounded or stop attackers. In the red with anger corner — Sagit Bracha-Eisenkot, whose 80-year-old grandmother was stabbed in the terror attack. “They talk about Israeli society, about how united it is because of the crisis,” the woman’s granddaughter tells the paper. “And then you see in the video the feeling of anger and vengeance of the mob. You chase after a terrorist so that he doesn’t harm other people when you should be doing something else. Pick up my grandmother. There was some guy who even jumped over her and didn’t try to give her a helping hand. We witnessed the lack of humanity in people.”

In the blue with inexplicable rage corner, members of the mob responded on social media, arguing that the priority should be stopping the perpetrator of the terror attack, and only then tending to the wounded, Israel Hayom reports.

Ariela Ringel Hoffman concedes in her Yedioth Ahronoth op-ed that there can be something honorable in stopping a terrorist “sometimes with bare hands, sometimes armed with an umbrella or a selfie stick.”

“Only this time something in this eagerness, this wild running, in this ignoring a woman lying on the ground, was especially disturbing,” she says. She says it reminds her of a manhunt, of mass hysteria that ends in a lynching.

“It’s no longer bravery, no longer readiness to take a chance, no longer the initiative,” she says. “Just unchecked rioting of the masses sweeping the streets, which the cameras perpetuate and reinforce. A type of pornography recorded on mobile devices and disseminated by them; shameful pornography that abruptly, instantaneously and simultaneously, also erases compassion and tenderness.”

Israeli defense officials say that relations with Palestinian Authority counterparts have been irreparably damaged, and that even if the current wave of violence subsides, it will be difficult to bring security coordination and cooperation back to where it was months ago, Haaretz reports.

The paper doesn’t specify which officials, or even which agencies, make this contention, but states that any restoration of calm in the West Bank would not be long-lasting because of the deterioration of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s political standing. In fact the author, Amos Harel, attributes no direct quotes to any officials when he writes that “intelligence branches assess” that even if the current round of violence is quelled, it will surge anew in a matter of months.

Israel Hayom, for its part, devotes its first seven pages to a section — dramatically labeled with a black banner highlighted by a fireball, a keffiyeh-clad Palestinian, and Israeli soldiers — titled “Combating terror.” Within that coverage, the paper reports that Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubenstein lashed out at Israeli politicians who criticized the court for delays in approving the demolition of Palestinian terrorists’ homes, saying such remarks smack of “exceptional ignorance.”

“The Supreme Court is part of the nation and the state,” he said at a ceremony in honor of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. “It’s not part of the United Nations. It fights for the character of the state as a state of laws, human rights and human obligations.”

But how will the IDF address the next round of Palestinian violence when it doesn’t have ultra-Orthodox soldiers in its ranks, Yedioth Ahronoth cries. The paper reports that the ultra-Orthodox parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have threatened to scupper a long-awaited budget vote scheduled for November 19 unless a universal draft law passed last year is amended.

The previous government, spearheaded by the Yesh Atid party, last year issued a law levying criminal penalties on ultra-Orthodox Israelis who dodge the draft. Now that Yesh Atid is out and the Haredi parties are in, ultra-Orthodox MKs are using their leverage in Netanyahu’s wafer-thin majority to try to get those penalties lifted. According to the current law, the paper notes, if Israel’s ultra-Orthodox citizens don’t meet draft targets by July 2017, criminal punishments against draft dodgers will take effect immediately.

“For us it’s intolerable that in the Jewish state there would be a law which imprisons a man who’s learning Torah,” an unnamed ultra-Orthodox political official tells the paper, “even if this law doesn’t materialize.”