Israel on the eve of disengagement 2

I wonder how many of you noticed that when a Jew last week murdered four citizens in the Druze-Arab town of Shfaram, the entire Israeli discussion of it used the exact same terminology normally used for Palestinian murderers? The perpetrator was called a terrorist and a murderer, the event was called a terrorist attack, and the victims were refered to as the murdered victims of a terrorist attack. This response was universal, from left all the way across the political spectrum except for the tiny fringe of right-wing fanatics from which the murderer came. Makor Rishon, the newspaper of the settlers, was as apoplectic about the event as everyone else was, and its main headline told about the Jew who murdered Arabs - murder was the word used.

No weasel words. No idiotic moral equivalence. No "one man's terrorist is the other man's freedon fighter" No "but", as in "it was a horrible act BUT one has to remember that blah blah blah".

It then took four days to find a cemetery to bury the dead murderer in, because no-one was willing to desecrate their cemetery with him.

Should any of this ever begin to be true about Palestinian society, then - but probably not before then - will you be able to begin seeking peace.

And then there was the disquieting fact that the Israeli citizens of Shfaram - Druze and Arabs, but Israeli citizens none-the-less - refused to allow Jewish medical teams into town to treat the wounded: the populace was too mad. And while it was mad, they lynched the murderer. Not in the heat of the violence, but an hour and a half later, as he stood handcuffed inside the bus that the police couldn't get to because it was surrounded by a mob.

Should we be pitying the poor murderer? No, not really. On the other hand, Israel doesn't have capital punishment, not for criminals, not for the Prime Minister's assassin, not for Palestinian terrorists (that last one is the reason the Palestinians get to complain endlessly that we're still holding on to hundreds of their freedom fighters, whom we eventually set free).

But we don't lynch their murderers. Admitedly, in recent years we haven't had many chances to try. Most attacks are carried out by suicide murders, who don't hang around to get lynched. In about 98% of the cases they get caught by our security forces before they even arrive at the scene, and in the other cases.. well, you get the picture. Earlier, however, until the advent of the suicide murders in the early 1990s, there actually often were chances to lynch terrorists, yet not a single case comes to mind. Actually, one does: sometime in the mid-1980s a terrorist was wrestled to the sidewalk while carrying out an attack in downtown Jerusalem. An angry mob threatened to lynch him, but they were stopped by an orthodox woman in her 40s who stood over him and forbade the mob to continue. A lot of people afterwards thought he had done nothing to deserve her protection, but that's not the point of the story.

The point, supremely anti-politically-correct as it is, is that culture seems to make a difference, and some cultures handle these things better than others. I insist: "better", not merely "differently" And the story of the lynch in Shfaram may unfortunately indicate that spendig 57 years as Israeli citizens hasn't yet overridden the cultural conditioning.

And please don't tell me I'm a racist, or a hater of Arabs, or that I'm making evil generalizations. I have no doubt some of the citizenry of Shafaram found the lynch as repugnant as everyone should. But there was no 40-something housewife who made her repugnance known, nor would the mob have heeded her had she been there.

Since it's never boring around here, last week's murder is rapidly moving offstage again, making way for the big story. Enclosed is my take on the big story - actually, gigantic.

Yaacov