The terrorist among us

A third suspect in the Sarona terror attack was apprehended and the wheels of justice are in motion. But two days after the deadly shooting at a Max Brenner cafe in the central Tel Aviv food market, the Hebrew press is still digesting the enormity of the incident.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the arrest of a third man who was suspected of aiding the two gunmen, Haaretz reports. In a cabinet meeting Thursday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman asked Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit whether the terror suspects’ homes could be demolished within 24 hours. According to a senior source in Jerusalem who spoke to the paper, Mandelblit shot Liberman’s proposal down, “because we live in a state of laws, and there are court and legal processes that we simply have to carry out.”

How the second gunman was apprehended is one for the history books, however. Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth both offer virtually identical reports about the moments when a young man in a white shirt appeared at the door of an apartment near the attack, out of breath and asking for water. The woman and her husband, an off-duty cop, invite him in. Moments later, the cop puts a pistol to the young man’s head: “It was one of the two terrorists,” Israel Hayom reports.

The couple left a cafe near their house on Shprinzak Street with the woman’s mother and her friend after the attack, and rushed upstairs to the apartment — as did the man in the while shirt.

“We entered the apartment, another man just came in with us,” the wife of the policeman, identified only as E., recounts to the paper. “He just came running in with us.”

“He didn’t speak, apparently he didn’t want to give away his accent, or that he simply wasn’t able to speak,” E. tells Yedioth Ahronoth. “He was shaking all over, at the beginning he just sat on the floor and couldn’t even pick himself up. We thought he was a civilian like us who fled the scene of the attack.”

As her husband got into his uniform, E. tried talking to the man. “I asked him who he was, but he didn’t respond and just asked for water,” she tells Israel Hayom. “We didn’t suspect him at all, he just looked like someone who was shocked, like us. He didn’t utter a word, he just wasn’t in the condition to speak and he looked like he was in complete shock.”

As the four victims of the attack hadn’t been named by the time the papers went to print for Thursday’s publications, they ran brief obituaries for Michael Feige, 58; Mila Mishayev, 32; Ilana Naveh, 39; and Ido Ben Ari, 42. Ben Ari had already been laid to rest by publication of Thursday’s paper, and Yedioth Ahronoth quotes his father as he mourned his murdered son, a former commando with the elite Sayeret Matkal unit.

“My son, we will miss you, I don’t know how we’ll continue from here,” his father, Avi, said. Lihi, Ben Ari’s daughter, has her eulogy published in the paper. “You taught me to appreciate and to love, to respect and to worry, to be an upright and fair person, to always think of others, to help everyone and that our family comes before all,” she writes.

With time to ruminate and room to muse in the weekend edition, the pundits mull over the longer-term implications of the Sarona attack. The key issue at hand: Is this the result of Israel’s nearly 50-year occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or not?

Haaretz’s editorial rejects the collective punishment of Palestinians, by revoking 83,000 entry permits to Israel, in response to the attack. It spurns the “impassioned and hollow talk” of government ministers, each appearing to be more aggressive than the next.

“It will not protect the life of a single Israeli; it will just increase the frustration and hatred among those forced to live under Israeli occupation. In the end it will only push more young people to terrorism,” the paper says. “It’s amazing how the Israeli government does not learn its lesson and recognize what should have been clear long ago: The terror will continue as long as the Palestinian people have no hope on the horizon.”

“The only way to deal with terrorism is by freeing the Palestinian people from the occupation.”

Israel Hayom’s pundit of the week Haim Shine dismisses the argument that the occupation caused the murder of four people in Tel Aviv. He constructs the familiar argument that terror attacks by Palestinians against Jews didn’t start in 1967, and that all such attacks share the same motive: “the implacable hatred of Jews and a desire to prevent their return to their homeland.”

“The hope of the Arab Spring is to actualize the right of return to Ramat Aviv (Sheikh Munis), Ramat Hasharon (Abu Qishq) and Ra’anana (Azun). Therefore, anyone who links terrorism to the occupation encourages the residents of Wadi Ara and Jaffa to join the rioters,” he says in a bizarrely constructed argument.

Repeating himself for the fourth time this week, he points out that “the state of Israel’s leadership today is the elected right-wing government, perhaps the most right-wing in the history of the state.” The public doesn’t buy the Left’s argument, he says.

In Yedioth Ahronoth, Ben-Dror Yemini calls the argument that the peace process will solve the problem of terrorism “the standard illusion.”

“The response of the Palestinian street to the barbarian murder was candies and fireworks, but we were blinded. We love the illusion that it’s a nationalist conflict. We refuse to see what’s happening in the region. They don’t want peace, nor a deal, nor an end to the occupation, nor an end to the settlements. They want the flag of Islam over the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower,” he rages. “They say that. The heads of Hamas say that.”