Herbert Zweibon

The rampage by an Arab bulldozer driver first along Sarei Israel Boulevard and then along the Jaffa Road which wound up killing three, including the mother of a five month old baby girl, and injuring dozens—like the murder of eight teenage boys at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva a few months ago by the driver of an Arab owned transport company licensed to drive school children—was the product of two profoundly disturbing inter-connected developments: the permissiveness of the Israeli authorities toward lawless Arab behavior and the draconian measures against Jews who act in self-defense or the defense of other Jews.

As Caroline Glick reports, when it comes to Arabs, “the police simply refuse to enforce the law….As a consequence of police inaction, thieves, smugglers, terror solicitors and other dangerous criminals are allowed to operate in the open. Fearing the wrath of human rights groups on the one hand and Arab rioters on the other, the police simply do not enforce Israeli law in the Arab sector.”

But if anything goes where Arabs are concerned, the authorities are ruthless in their suppression of Israeli citizens who interfere with that policy. For example, Danny and Itzik Halamish, brothers who live in Gush Etzion, were recently sentenced to 7 and 8 months in prison respectively for warding off an Arab mob of 20 who surrounded them and threatened them with large rocks and poles. No one was hurt; one of the Halamish brothers apparently gave a warning shot into the air. The Israeli judges said they were putting them in jail to “serve as a lesson to others.”

Israelis have learned the lesson. As a result, with the police ever more passive and flaccid, it takes a person with exceptional Zionist faith to act in times of emergency. In both the Jaffa Road and Mercaz Harav terror attacks, it was such an individual who prevented even worse slaughter. In the case of the slaughter of the yeshiva boys, it was furloughed paratrooper Captain David Shapira who killed the murderer. There was a police officer at the scene but even as he heard the cries of the teenagers being murdered he stood outside and did nothing. And on the Jaffa Road, eye witnesses report that unarmed 20 year old Moshe Plesser climbed onto the bulldozer, seizing the gun of a security guard to finally stop the careening driver by shooting him three times in the head. And the police? Caroline Glick reports that a policeman had also climbed onto the bulldozer but instead of shooting, merely tried to restrain the driver. Glick writes that the Arab killed 33 year old Batsheva Unterman (the mother of the baby who miraculously survived) while the policeman was standing next to him in the bulldozer’s cab!

As for the courageous and quick-thinking Moshe Plesser, he is a religious soldier in the Givati brigade and a student at the Yeshiva of Kiryat Arba. whose educational values, he says, inspired his actions. Nor is the fact that he is the brother-in-law of David Shapira, the hero of Mercaz Harav, as extraordinary a coincidence as it would appear: Plesser says he was inspired by the valiant actions of his brother-in-law. Ironically Plesser had to petition the army for two years to be permitted to serve. The Israeli authorities regarded him as a security risk because, when he was 17, he took part in a demonstration against the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza. Photographing a protest in Ramat Gan, he was beaten unconscious by police who were anxious to keep him from documenting their behavior. Arrested and released several days later, he was left with a police record that made the IDF refuse to take him.

If those in power in Israel are incapable of deterring internal foes and instead turn on the finest and bravest of their own young people, what possible chance do they have to prevail against powerful external enemies like Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah?