The things we lost in the terror

Editors were probably scratching their heads around 7 p.m. Sunday night, wondering how the almost unheard-of day without a terror attack would play on their front page. Would they lead the paper with that, pointing to it as a sign that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s calls for calm and the deployment of troops was working? Perhaps they would start things off with diplomatic efforts being spearheaded by the United States’ John Kerry, or a wall erected next to Jerusalem neighborhood Jabel Mukaber, or maybe even switch over to Iran, where sanctions are being lifted.

And then tragedy struck, as shots rang out through the Beersheba central bus station, leaving one soldier dead, 11 other people wounded and an Eritrean man bloody and beaten on the floor after being shot by mistake, “just because of the color of his skin,” according to Yedioth Ahronoth, and then kicked by a lynch mob before dying at a hospital.

While there is plenty of hand-wringing over the killing of the black man later identified as Haftom Zarhum, 29, most of the coverage focuses on the attack itself and its possible status as a game-changer. Haaretz notes that the attack is “extraordinary for its use of live fire, since this wave of attacks has mostly been characterized by stabbings.”

It’s not just the use of a gun that makes Israel Hayom’s Yoav Limor say the attack “changes the situation,” but also the identity of the attacker, who was named Monday morning as an Israeli Arab from the outskirts of the Bedouin town of Hura.

“The attack last night changes the picture. Firstly because it happened ‘here’ in the heart of Israel, but mostly because of the identity of the attacker. He indeed did not carry any ID, but all the signs last night pointed to him being a minority,” he writes, using a slightly more PC euphemism for Arab. “We need to be careful about collective punishment, but the effects of the attack will be well felt: both with an accusatory finger and with suspicion that will fall on all of them.”

Rather than playing up the aspects of the attack that show a shift, Haaretz’s Amos Harel instead notes that the Beersheba shooting is a sign that the violence that has rocked the country for some two weeks now isn’t going anywhere. His prognosis looking ahead is not a positive one.

“What’s liable to happen next is what the defense establishment has been predicting for the past several days: Organized cells, perhaps affiliated with terrorist organizations, will join the lone stabbers. There are plenty of weapons in the West Bank aside from those belonging to the Palestinian Authority security services,” he writes. “Most are held by the Tanzim, the armed wing of the PA’s ruling Fatah movement. But there are also presumably armed Hamas cells that have been keeping a low profile until recently. Saleh Aruri, who runs Hamas’s West Bank terror cells from Turkey, will surely invest significant effort now in fomenting additional attacks.”

Yedioth devotes a considerable amount of space to the tragic mistake that led to the death of Zarhum, who was shot after being mistaken for a terrorist, and then beaten by a mob, who threw chairs at him and kicked as he lay writhing on the floor.

The paper gives the man seen shooting Zarhoum in a security video little mercy, noting that he shot him as he ran by and didn’t stop to check who he was and if he was armed or give him medical attention. But most of the indignation is saved for the mob.

“They unloaded their anger on the injured Eritrean,” a witness tells the paper. “They abused the injured man. They thought he was one of the terrorists. Anti-terror cops and Border Police officers shot him. He was shot in the leg. But the real terrorist ran outside. Afterward the cops tried to keep people away, and there were also civilians who tried to protect him.”

The sadness of the whole affair rings out in a column written for the paper by Danny Adeno Abebe, a frequent commentator on the Africans, Ethiopians and Eritreans alike, in Israel. “These foreign workers, the infiltrators from Eritrea and Sudan, suffer twice: First since they are foreign and now because terrorists don’t know the difference between them and Israeli citizens,” he writes. “The Eritrean youth is an outstanding example of foreignness. He was critically injured in a war that was not his. Alone.”

Elsewhere in the war quickly becoming Israel’s own, a wall put up between the Arab East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber and the Jewish West Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv also serves to split papers on what it all means.

To Israel Hayom, the wall is nothing more than a temporary security measure, as the police and municipality described it.

“The talk of dividing Jerusalem is malarkey,” a source in the Prime Minister’s Office is quoted telling the paper. “This is not a diplomatic decision.”

But in Haaretz, the wall is seen as part of a larger plan to make the division of Jerusalem a fact on the ground with the use of walls and other types of concrete barriers.

The paper reports that the city council was recently presented with a number of proposals for keeping East Jerusalem Palestinians from being able to easily reach Jewish parts of the city.

“Between the proposals brought up and being seriously considered, including one by Mayor Nir Barkat, is a proposal to limit East Jerusalemites’ ability to enter the west of the city, aside from a list of workers who are pre-approved. They will be able to go through checkpoints to get to work,” the paper reports. “Those present at the meeting were split as to whether this was something to implemented immediately, or if it was presented as an idea for the future.”