01-May-16: What Yehudit knows

The scene of Thursday night's attack near Beit Horon [Image Source]

Far from the headlines and the public speech-making, the mind-numbing daily violence visited by the Palestinian Arabs on Israelis impacts a broad range of lives: the security personnel, the emergency first-responders, the people living in the communities targeted by the agents of jihad. And the families of everyone we just mentioned.

An email we received this morning from our friend Yehudit brings home some of the back-story - the aspects most people don't get to hear or know about even if they are otherwise well-informed on what the news-reporting industry reveals about daily events in our part of the world.

Yehudit, a veteran resident of one of the flourishing post-1967 communities around Jerusalem's northern edge, as well as being a mother and wife and home-maker, volunteers as an emergency medic. She and her fellow medics are called out at all hours to meet the urgent needs of unforeseen events, and especially in these difficult times of injuries arising from Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks.

Here's what she wrote to us this morning:

This past Thursday night after nightfall, the evening of the seventh day of Passover, we found ourselves called away from the festive meal for yet another security/medical emergency. This time, the location was one where, at least six times before, a terror attack had been launched. This time, B"H, our brave defenders were unharmed. One of the terrorists was shot when she came at them with two really large knives and a syringe with the goal of carrying out a murder. 

Sadly, another attack in which the assailant is a "she". Actually, two of them.

Our team provided the monstrous young female terrorist with emergency medical treatment and she was rushed to hospital. The second terrorist, also a female, was placed under arrest and removed from the scene to be interrogated. Seeing these two girls and realizing what brought them there, what plans they had, what their motivations might have been, is something I can never ever get used to. It's striking to me how we are all - the soldiers on security duty along with their officers and the members of the emergency team - only too well acquainted with the emergency routines. Sometimes, we look one another in the eye for a brief moment even as we are busy with giving the best possible medical care, often life-saving treatment, to someone who is getting that treatment only because he or she wanted to murder one of us. Or more than one. Words don't do justice to the difficulty of that reality. That look in the eye, it's like saying to one another "Can you believe we're here, doing this, now?"

We asked Yehudit how old the two Thursday night would-be murderers were.

Of course I know their ages. 15 and 16, I believe. It's unreal. And don't forget this is happening again and again at a location on one of the busiest highways connecting the capital with Tel Aviv, right next to the busy city of Modi'in and a spot which sees thousands of motorists pass by every day. 

We looked for news coverage of the Thursday night attack. We could find only this:

Israeli authorities arrested on Thursday two Palestinians who tried to stab IDF soldiers in Samaria, the army said, adding that one of them was shot and wounded. The suspects carrying knives approached Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Ramallah, in an apparent bid to attack them. The soldiers opened fire in self defense and one of the Palestinians was wounded, an army spokeswoman added... [Israel National News, April 30, 2016]

And this

The incident took place on Thursday evening at the Bell checkpoint, near the community of Beit Horon, in the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, when the two Palestinian women, armed with knives, arrived at the checkpoint. The two asked the soldiers for water and then tried to stab those seeking to help them. The soldiers, who were unharmed, opened fire, wounding one of the terrorists. The other terrorist fled and was found moments later, hiding in nearby bushes. The injured terrorist was treated on site and then taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. According to the military, one of the women was also found to be carrying a syringe full of liquid whose nature has yet to be determined, as well as a suicide note. [Israel Hayom, May 1, 2016]

Yehudit's account throws light on one small, barely-reported aspect of life in the shadow of a neighbour gripped by a death cult; a neighbour who daily fills the heads of his people's children (though never his own children) with thoughts of the glories of killing and being killed in the name of a centuries-old hatred, all the while brazenly pretending this is some version of "resistance" to something termed "occupation". Pretending to the civilized outside world, of course, but not to their own society.

More sickening still is the way this Palestinian Arab worship at the altar of jihad and "blood purity" has entranced Western onlookers living safely remote from the violence and from the challenges of living side-by-side with blood-lusting neighbours. We doubt their delicate, human-rights-obsessed minds can quite grasp what it must mean to not only share trains, roads, hospital wards with people for whom institutionalized government-promoted martyrdom is a life-defining reality but also to choose to leave your family in the middle of the night and go out to tend to the wounds of the Palestinian Arab children who are the principal (but not only) victims of that death-cult worship.

In her gentle, wise and humane way, Yehudit can probably explain it to them.