Friday, November 20 2015
4:00 pm UPDATES
3:27 pm: Palestinian stabbing attempt thwarted. Palestinian terrorist captured by Border Guards near Gate 6 to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. No Israelis wounded. The terrorist is from Dura, near Hebron, the same Palestinian town of the terrorist who murdered two Israelis yesterday in Tel Aviv.
3:05 pm: Major enlargement of IDF forces in Hebron and surrounding areas. IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot orders the IDF to reinforce the soldiers in the Hebron area with a battalion and the transfer of all the Kfir Brigade to the area. In addition, all access routes from Hebron to secondary Palestinian towns will be closed, and all Palestinian vehicles will be searched.
2:30 pm: Large Palestinian riots are currently taking place in Hebron and on the Gaza Border across from Nahal Oz.
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SPECIAL NOTICE:
Jonathan Pollard and his wife. The first picture of him after his release.
Israelstreet rejoices in the release of Jonathan Pollard today after his languishing 10,956 days in prison.
As all readers of this blog know, we believe that Pollard has been the victim of an egregious miscarriage of justice–in large part fraudulently perpetrated by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger.
He should never have been arrested in the first place, the 2-year plea deal he agreed to should have been honored, and a succession of presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama should have paroled him. Finally, he would have never been arrested (and perhaps convicted) in the first place had not Israel abandoned him (click here for a blog that we wrote on the subject “The Sordid Story of Shimon Peres and Jonathan Pollard.).
10,956 days. What were you doing 10,956 days ago?
UPDATES 9:00 AM and TODAY’S BLOG
Yesterday, Thursday, was a black day here in Israel. Two horrific Palestinian terror attacks have left the country reeling–and realizing that any coexistence with the Palestinians is impossible.
The dead from yesterday, left to right: Aharon Yesiav, Shadi Arafa, Ezra Schwartz, Yaakov Don, Reuven Aviram.
Four Jews were murdered–three Israelis and one American. In the second attack, the Palestinian terrorist also unintentionally shot and killed another Palestinian. For reasons described below, both attacks hit very close to home–far too close.
In the first attack just before 2 pm, two Israelis, Reuven Aviram (51) and Aharon Yesiav (32), were gruesomely stabbed to death outside a synagogue in south Tel Aviv. One man was repeatedly stabbed in the head and neck–the other in the back and neck. Yesiav heroically saved the lives of many in the synagogue; as one witness said: “He was the one who saved the people and shielded them with his body from the stabber.”
After the terrorist had wounded two more people, he was wrestled to the ground. The terrorist, it turned out, was a 36-year-old man from Dura beside Hebron who was illegally working at a restaurant next door–three of his employers have been arrested this morning.
All of this, and the ensuing crush of police and ambulances took place directly across the street and under the window of the office where the daughter of your humble servant works. During the entire episode, I was on the phone with her, listening to the terrible screams and blaring sirens coming from the street.
For two hours after the attack took place, her building remained on lockdown as police with weapons drawn went room by room looking for another supposed terrorist that never materialized. It is still not known this morning if one terrorist got away–or if there was only one terrorist to begin with (witnesses on the street reported “two”).
The second attack occurred about three hours later just before 5 pm. Taking advantage of a traffic jam that always occurs on Route 60 near the Alon Shvut intersection at that hour, a Palestinian terrorist in a car bypassed a line of cars that was stopped and opened fire with a machine gun. After spraying a number of cars with bullets and apparently reloading several times, he eventually plowed his car into a group of people beside the road.
Three people were killed by the terrorist’s gunfire: American student volunteer Ezra Schwartz (18), Israeli Yaakov Don (49), and Palestinian bystander Shadi Arafa (40). Another 6 people were wounded. More would have certainly died if not for the heroic act of a man named Yuval Lasri who got out of his car and tackled the terrorist when he exited after ramming.
Last night, when I was at another event, I called my daughter to see if she had recovered from the trauma of the afternoon in Tel Aviv. I discovered her angry and in tears. It turned out that Ezra Yehiel Schwartz was a “lone student” in one of the programs she works with–Ashreinu Yeshiva in Beit Shemesh. He was in Israel on his own to help build the Oz Vegaon site, which was established in memory of the three yeshiva students who were abducted at the same intersection and murdered last summer. Schwartz was on his way back to Beit Shemesh after taking food boxes to IDF soldiers at a base nearby.
So what can we say about all of this?
1. Route 60 must be closed to Arab traffic. It is sadly ironic that we blogged about this very fact yesterday. How many more Jews must die before the Netanyahu government and IDF come to their senses?
2. A real effort must be made to root out Palestinian workers in Israel. The number of these workers has dramatically increased in recent years as Israel has kowtowed to international entities who have claimed that Israel has a responsibility to employ Palestinians.
We do not have that responsibility.
This morning we have a first step. Last night, the government announced that it was revoking approximately 10,000 “special” work permits that have been issued to Palestinians from the Hebron area. These Palestinians supposedly go in and out of Israel every day (but, ludicrously, no revocations are taking place for Palestinians from Hebron who live in Israel).
3. Your humble servant believes we have reached a tipping point. How many people are left in this country who actually believe that coexistence with the Palestinians is possible? Hardly any.
Even parties on the “left” such as Yesh Atid and Herzog/Livni are calling for a complete divorce of Israelis and Palestinians.
The fact is that everyone is now conscious of Arabs all the time and views each one of them with suspicion. Every Palestinian–and we are talking about Palestinian children, women, and men–is viewed as a potential terrorist because we have seen Palestinian children, women, and men carry out stabbing attacks in the last month.
On that unhappy note we will end today’s blog.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.