15-May-16: Putting their "nakba" in perspective

Image Source

Israelis joyously and thankfully marked 68 years of renewed independence, massive economic advancement and attainment on all fronts this past Thursday. The Palestinian Arabs call the same process "catastrophe".

Much of the economic fuel for both of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - the one ruled by the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas from Ramallah; the other by Hamas in Gaza - comes not from industrial growth, not from economic progress, not from anything self-generated by them in the past 68 years. It comes, tragically, from a two-edged sword: massive gifts via foreign aid and cradle-to-grave support from a UN-created refugee agency, UNRWA.

Many billions of dollars/euros are represented by that last sentence - more money is spent on this particular cluster of self-proclaimed, humiliation-averse refugees per capita than on any other refugee group in history - by far.

Among the numerous aspects of UNRWA's odd and highly problematic existence that make it exceptional and peculiar is that it serves only the people called the Palestinian Arabs.

Many otherwise well-informed people fail to notice that every other refugee on earth has to turn to a different UN agency, UNHCR, operating according to a completely different set of rules and principles. Only the people who say they are the Palestinian Arabs are served by UNRWA. (Why this is so, and what it means in practice, is part of an astonishing narrative that needs a separate post.)

Comprehending this is often the first step to putting a meaningful framework around the lethal fury that propels much of the Arab world, and those who advocate for a Palestinian Arab outlook on life, today and for the past seven decades. And long before it as well. Occupation has almost nothing to do with it.

Today, as the friends of the Palestinian Arabs prepare to mark their Nakba, there is a (truly) simple question worth asking: How do they decide whom to call a Palestinian Arab refugee?

The best place we know for the answer is the UNRWA's own website:

UNRWA is unique in terms of its long-standing commitment to one group of refugees. It has contributed to the welfare and human development of four generations of Palestine refugees, defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.
UNRWA services are available to all those living in its areas of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.

You might want to read that a second time. The UNRWA definition, which for practical purposes is what everyone means today when they refer to "Palestinian refugees", is -

• Someone who lived in the area of the British Mandate for Palestine during a window of time that (a) lasted for less than two years during a period of massive Arab immigration into the towns, cities and regions being built up by the Jews, and (b) ended nearly seventy years ago
• And anyone who today can point to an ancestor who fits into that window - for ever and ever into the future, down through the coming generations of new "refugees".

It's unique, inexplicable and self-defeating on so many levels.

There is much else that is catastrophically wrong with how Palestinian refugee-ism is defined. For instance, does anyone at UNRWA record when a "refugee" dies and his or her meal ticket ought to expire? The figure of 5 million beneficiaries of UNRWA services is suspect, unchecked, misleading and essentially meaningless. And can we really speak of 5 million refugees when two million of them have full citizenship in other Arab countries [source], and an unknown but large number are citizens of Europe, Canada, Chile, the US and other non-Arab countries?

As news coverage focuses today on the Palestinian day of catastrophe, spend a moment pondering how large that catastrophe truly is, how little chance there is of it being reversed by the Arabs (among the resource-richest states on earth), how small is the incentive for them to stop this endless cash-fest, how often all of this is used to justify acts of savagery and bigotry, and - finally - who, in reality, brought them into the morass in which they find themselves today.

UNRWA's notorious spokesperson Chris Gunness is personally invited to offer some answers.

[This article is cross-posted as an op-ed on the Times of Israel site today.]

03-Jul-15: Misery, terrorism and money-making: a cynics' guide

From "How We Are Financing the Suffering of the Palestinians"
Click here to view the video

One factor beyond all others ensures that the Palestinian Arab cause manages to sustain its momentum nearly seventy years after the UN decision to split the compact British-occupied territory of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael into two countries: the existence of UNRWA.

An expose published a few days ago in an Arab publication, Al-Araby al-Jadeed (published in London - we were made aware of its existence by the invaluable Daily Alert), takes a sympathetic look at the price being paid by UNRWA's existence - who loses and who wins (and there are plenty of winners). Some extracts from "The Nakba profiteering cliques", authored by Samer Jaber:

• The word [profiteering] refers to the practice whereby seemingly unfair profits are made through exploiting certain conditions of vulnerability. Profiteering does not necessarily involve manipulative or corrupt activities, but can simply occur by virtue of being in the right place at the right time...
• The foremost of these is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is a direct provider of services to refugees. UNRWA employs more than 30,000 people, including 28,000 Palestinians, and has a two-year budget of $1.4 billion for 2014-15. A large percentage of this comes from Western European and North American countries on a voluntary basis - which enables them to indirectly influence UNRWA policies. 
• For UNRWA to sustain its funding it has to maintain the principle of neutrality, which really means maintaining the status quo..
• [T]he decision-making ranks and most middle-line administrators are comprised of international staff assisted by local middle class personnel. The managerial ranks have developed vested interests, including high salaries and generous perks based on UN standards.
• UNRWA has, however, been suffering chronic budget shortages - though these tend not to affect the higher management ranks. Funding shortfalls almost always seem to lead to cuts in services to refugees.

It has to be said that it's refreshing to see some core truths about this bizarre, malevolent and damaging institution exposed, and by a Palestinian Arab analyst at that.

We would have appreciated some focus on the fact that budgetary funding for the billion-dollar UNRWA colossus has come almost exclusively from Western countries, which begs the question so rarely asked: if Arab states claim the Palestinian cause is dearer to them than life itself, why are they not at the forefront of ensuring a little less suffering by their Palestinian Arab cousins? [Some background on the money aspect here.]

The question gets magnified vastly when we take account of how parts of the Arab world have stratospheric cash resources, and ruling families, wealthier than almost anyone else on the planet, who can decide at the snap of a well-jeweled finger, to underwrite the education and health services that UNRWA keeps running out of cash to deliver. A recent article in Time Magazine ["Why Qatar is Spending $200 Billion On Soccer", July 11, 2013] gives some perspective on the sheer money power of Qatar's owners:

Qatar will spend 286 times more money per capita on the World Cup than Russia will on the most expensive Olympics ever, the Sochi games. The country will spent 1,852 times more capita to stage the same event that South Africa did in 2010. [Time Magazine]

The same article goes on to quote a Qatar expert from the University of Denver who says: "The World Cup is an amazing opportunity, and Qatar will do everything to make sure it works."

Where there's a will, there's a way. And when you want to preserve misery at all costs, leverage it to ensure a ready supply of human bombs and other terrorists, there's an ever-willing cast of international figures, NGOs and the many arms of the UN who are evidently only too pleased to be of assistance - or to be exploited by others with more detailed agendas. We touched on some aspects of this just a few weeks ago ["04-Jun-15: Exploding for decades: UNRWA needs more, more, more"], and dozens more times before that. And a recent video [click here] explains it reasonably well in a mere 3m40s.

Understanding the Palestinian Arab leadership's sociopathic obsession with terror requires some familiarity with the extremely shabby story of UNRWA [some background here].

(Here's a shout-out to to UNRWA's indefatigable "Spokesperson, Director of Advocacy & Strategic Communications", Christopher Gunness, to straighten us out and indicate a more UNRWA-friendly way of looking at this.)

15-May-15: Attempted murder by vehicle: yet another Palestinian Arab attack on pedestrians

Looking for a ride in Gush Etzion [Image Source]

The entrance to the town of Alon Shvut in the cluster of Israeli communities known as Gush Etzion is a 25-minute drive from downtown Jerusalem via multi-lane roads and just a few minutes walk from the Rami Levy supermarket that embodies ordinary day-to-day, live-and-let-live relations among Jewish, Moslem and Christian residents of this land.

But it's neither the good traffic infrastructure nor the routine neighbourliness of shoppers [as we described some months ago here] that brings the place into the news today.

Yesterday [Thursday] afternoon, in another attack in a growing list of similar assaults by vehicle-borne Arabs, four young men were injured - three of them aged just 16, the fourth and most serious hurt a young man of 25 - leaving them alive but with injuries ranging from serious to mild. They are all hospitalized and recovering today at Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center and Hadassah Ein Karem hospital.

Thursday afternoon's attack vehicle [Image Source]

That hitch-hiking post at the entrance to Alon Shvut Junction is the place from which three Israeli youngsters  - Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Sha'er and Naftali Frenkel - were kidnapped and murdered, their bodies dumped while a massive search went on, by Hamas terrorists in the summer of 2014. [We reflected on little-noticed dimensions of that horrifying chapter in a post "11-Aug-14: Shalit Transaction revisited: At what point does facing up to the cost of a disastrous decision become unavoidable?"]

Times of Israel is reporting this morning that a Palestinian Arab they name as Muhammed Arfaaya, 22, from Hebron, who has confessed to the attack. He was behind the wheel of a black Subaru sedan bearing yellow Israeli license plates (note that many of the vehicles that travel the roads near Gush Etzion daily bear white PA license plates) that slammed at high speed and considerable force into the young Israelis at the bus stop. He then fled the scene but was apprehended within the next hour by IDF soldiers and arrested. The Shin Bet conducted a post-incident interrogation. The vehicle he was driving had been stolen [source].

The Times of Israel report says Arfaaya

was released from Israeli prison last year, after he served a sentence for carrying a weapon and throwing stones. According to the Shin Bet, Arfaaya claimed nationalistic motives drove him to hurt the Israelis. [Times of Israel, today]

Today, May 15, is marked by Palestinian Arabs as their Day of Catastrophe, recalling the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 following on from a decision by the United Nations. Israel's security forces are poised to deal with an expected wave of violence, the traditional form in which the Palestinian catastrophe is steadily enhanced and rendered perpetual.

15-May-12: Their history, our history

64 years ago [Image Source]

It's May 15. On this day in 1948, the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish presence in Palestine, declared itself independent and announced the establishment of the State of Israel.

This year's anniversary celebrations in Israel have already been completed. Jews throughout the world, including here in Israel, mark the day according to the Hebrew lunar calendar: the 5th day of the month of Iyar which this year was April 26 and which was marked with great joy.

The Arab residents in the new state, as well as the Arab armies of all the surrounding countries (and some that were further away than that) had already begun waging a cruel and disproportionate war against the 600,000 Jews of Palestine during the months before the proclamation of Israel's independence.

A blog posting by Robert Werdine, "The Forgotten War" published a few days ago in the Times of Israel, will provide some surprises for people misled by the refashioned history of that period that has become the standard - but wrong - narrative. He reminds us of how bad things were for Palestine's Jews from November 29, 1947 when the United Nations voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine into a state for the Jews and yet another Arab state - to add to the two dozen already created during the twentieth century - for the Arabs.

From then until the official start of the War of Israel's Independence in May 1948, Yassir Arafat's kinsman Haj Amin Al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, along with the Arab High Committee that he controlled, and together with all the nations of the Arab League, waged full-scale war against Jewish Palestine. For this purpose, they had the armies they had set up inside Palestine. Werdine enumerates them as

"the Arab Liberation Army for the League, the Arab Legion from Jordan, the Muslim Brothers from Egypt, and the Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas (“Army of the Holy War”) for the Mufti and the Palestinian AHC". 

They were engaged in a deliberate, well-publicized ideological and thoroughly military battle to destroy the Jewish settlements, to choke the highways and cut them off, and to hold the capital city Jerusalem hostage and besiege it and its thousands of Jewish residents. This they did for months.

There was no Arab plan to create an Arab state in the wake of the British Mandate of Palestine - none.

The goal that unified the Arab world was to destroy what the Jews had built and were building, and to do it not by blogging or petitions but by killing as many people as possible and expelling the rest (whatever that means). This is something the uninformed of 2012 need to know but do not.

That brings us to today, literally. This morning, our neighbours the Arab Palestinians of Gaza, have already managed to set the tone for the anniversary of the day they call Nakba (as in "Nakba Never Ceased", a short op ed that captures the spirit of the Arab version of events.)

Families in Israeli communities right across southern Israel were wakened around 6:30 am today to the frightening wail of the Color Red (Hebrew: Tzeva Adom) incoming rocket warning. The rocket, yet another in the growing Gazan arsenal of many thousands, was fired from the northern part of the Gaza Strip and exploded in an open area of the Shaar Hanegev region close to the southern Israeli city of Sderot (population: 24,000). Fortunately no injuries or serious damage are reported but that was not, never was, the intention of the men who daily place their lives at risk by firing them. They seek to create dead Jews as has been the custom of their communities for several generations.

It's a tense day here. 

In the words of an Israel National News report, "Israel's security services are expecting the worst and hoping for the best on Tuesday. Along the northern border, the military said it will not allow a repeat of last year’s Syrian infiltration into the Golan Heights. Soldiers also have been deployed along the Egyptian and Lebanese borders to prevent disturbances."

They have their history, and it brings them to massive deployment of missiles inside villages and mosques, and a culture that glorifies death, martyrdom, hatred of the Jew and of Jewish achievement, along with a deep and historically unprecedented collective memory of an event they call The Disaster. But while the State of Israel grows, develops and seeks its place in the world, the disaster that resonates in their schools and books is self-inflicted, self-perpetuating and completely self-limiting. They have wasted their future in order to endlessly relive their past.

Daniel Mandel in an oped in the Washington Times entitled Perverse Palestinian Pride captures the uselessness of it:

The very fact that naqba commemorations are held today is therefore instructive in a way few realize: It informs us that Palestinians have not admitted or assimilated the fact - as the Germans and Japanese have done - that they became victims as a direct result of their efforts to be perpetrators...

Finally, Robert Werbine's final paragraph puts it eloquently:

I am an American, am not Jewish, and have no religious or ancestral connection to the state of Israel... I am drawn to this period of the war, in particular, not only because it was a momentous event, but because it is a great epic story... There would have been no refugee crisis if there had been no war, and there would have been no war if the surrounding Arab states had not rejected the partition. From the moment it passed the General Assembly the Arab states have literally organized their whole polity around denying any Jewish sovereign state whatever its size, and to delegitimizing and destroying it when it was established. The free, vibrant, sixty-four-year-old state that exists today is an eloquent testimonial to the failure of these efforts.

16-May-11: 63 years on, they have their celebrations, we have ours

Israeli children celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the events of 15th May 1948 in the manner taught to them by their families and their society

Palestinian Arab children celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the events of 15th May 1948 in the manner taught to them by their families and their society

The diametrically opposed ways in which we and our neighbours mark 63 years of the events of 15th May 1948 are illuminating, especially in light of the violent events of yesterday. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post ("Repeating the Nakba mistake") from last week when Israelis joyfully celebrated Yom Ha'atzma'ut or Independence Day hits the right note:

For Arab Israelis and Palestinians, the creation of Israel was a “nakba,” a catastrophe. On Friday, Arab towns across the nation will kick off three days of Nakba commemorations with marches, conferences and rallies. Though these ceremonies take place every year, this year is different in a significant and positive way. The absurd practice by which organizations and municipalities were allowed to use state funds to pay for Nakba events has been stopped. Legislation approved by the Knesset in March, known as the “Nakba law,” empowers the state to fine those who finance their commemoration ceremonies with public money. 

The Nakba law will not, and was not intended to, prevent Arab Israelis or anyone else from commemorating Israel’s Independence Day in any way they wish to, as long as they do so peacefully. Rather, the legislation has put an end to the folly in which Israel underwrites activities that undermine the very foundations of Zionism by falsely presenting it as an imperialist movement that engaged during the War of Independence in ethnic cleansing and the intentional, wholesale transfer of the Arab population outside the borders of Israel.  

However, while it is Arab Israelis’ and Palestinians’ right to commemorate the Nakba in a way that not only incriminates Israelis for crimes they never committed but also places all the blame for failure on the Zionist movement, it is self-defeating and a major obstacle to peace for them to do so. 

If Palestinians were to look clearly and objectively at their behavior around the time of Israel’s founding, they would realize that today they are repeating many of the same mistakes. “Jihadism” – or the hatred of the infidel and a desire to kill him – to a great degree underlay the Palestinian assault on Zionism through the 1920s-1940s period. The leader of the Palestinian national movement during these years, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a rabidly anti- Semitic Muslim cleric with close ties to the Nazis. 

Similarly, today, many Palestinians have chosen to embrace the most extreme form of Islamist leadership. In the West Bank-Gaza elections of 2006, Hamas trounced the ostensibly secular Fatah. And the national unity deal signed on May 7 in Cairo, which enjoys broad Palestinian support, has brought Hamas – a rabidly anti-Semitic Islamist terrorist organization that has launched dozens of suicide bombings and thousands of mortar shells and rockets against the Israeli civilian population – back to the heart of the Palestinian leadership in all its rejectionist, reactionary glory. 

It was this sort of religious extremism and intransigence that exacerbated the plight of the Palestinians back in 1948. In the first weeks of the War of Independence, for instance, Jaffa mayor Yousef Heikal tried to reach a non-belligerency agreement with neighboring Jewish Tel Aviv, to allow the citrus crop to be harvested and exported. But Husseini vetoed this and called for “jihad against the Jews.” As a result, many of Jaffa’s Arabs were expelled during the ensuing war. 

Another repeated Palestinian blunder over the past century has been the rejection of a two-state solution. 

Offered successive compromises – in 1937, the Peel Commission partition of Palestine with a Jewish state on only 17 percent of the land; in 1947, the UN partition with the Arabs getting 45% of the land; and in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US president Bill Clinton’s partition with Arabs getting 20%) – the Palestinians consistently said no. And each uncompromising refusal was accompanied by violence and terrorism. 

IN THE 1948 War of Independence, after they had rejected the UN partition plan that would have given them a state, Palestinians launched a bloody offensive to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state. If they had won the war, the result would have been a massive slaughter of Jews just a few years after six million Jews had been massacred in the Holocaust. 

The violent, unsympathetic and ungenerous Arab population of Palestine repeatedly attempted to destroy any hopes that the Jewish people would return to their homeland after nearly two millennia of exile and after suffering the worst genocide ever known to mankind. 

Thankfully, they failed. 

The world’s only Jewish state is now surrounded by 21 Arab nations and has shown a willingness to help establish a 22rd state, for Palestinians. Yet in large part due to their distorted view of history – the Nakba being just one example – Palestinians continue to focus on their victimization and suffering while ignoring personal responsibility for their predicament. One of the crucial psychological barriers to peace today is Arab Israelis’ and Palestinians’ stubborn insistence on ignoring their own role in creating the refugee problem and in the failure to obtain Palestinian political autonomy. 

Instead of devoting so much energy to emphasizing their victimization, Arab Israelis and Palestinians would do well to learn from their mistakes. At present, they seem bent on repeating them.

16-May-11: Behind the Syrian scenes

"I will remain dutiful and faithful to my people and will walk along them
to build Syria, which we love and feel proud of." [www.presidentassad.net]

Yesterday, Catastrophe ("Nakba") Day according to Arab mythology, the world was focused on a thousand-plus Syrians bused by the Assad regime down to his country's border with Israel. Lenny Ben David writes in a JPost article today (see below) that "No gathering of more than five people is tolerated in Syria, not to mention the busing of hundreds across a country under martial law."

And Ron Ben-Yishai writing on the Ynet site says that in his experience "You cannot go near the Syrian side of the border without Damascus' written permission. The presence of dozens of buses, shuttling Palestinians... suggests that Sunday's infiltration incident was premeditated."

At the border, the rent-a-crowd were "encouraged" to push forward and destroy the fence [see this amateur video]. Around noon (according to the Jerusalem Post's account), about 1,000 people on the Syrian side were right on the border fence and a few hundred then rammed it. There followed a flood into the nearby Israeli town of Majd al Shams where they taunted the handful of armed Israeli service personnel stationed there. Think of the rioters as human shields since that's evidently the role in which they were placed. Certainly the government officials (and buses they laid on since practically nothing moves in Assad's Syria without his approval) that brought them there cared not one jot for whether this was smart or safe or a life-threatening thing to do.

We know all of this because it was so relatively widely reported.  But meanwhile far from the attention of the reporters...

Army shelling kills 7 in Syrian protest town: group    At least seven Syrian civilians were killed Sunday when Syrian troops shelled the town of Tel Kelakh near the border with Lebanon to quell a pro-democracy uprising, an activists' protest group said. The town, just a few miles (km) from Lebanon's northern border, is the latest focus of an intensified crackdown by Syrian troops and tanks, sent to quell demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. The shelling on Tel Telakh concentrated on al-Burj, Ghalioun, Souk and Mahata neighborhood, the Local Coordination Committees said in a statement, adding wounded people had little access to care because the main hospital in the town was sealed by security forces and the main road to Lebanon blocked. 

Reuters published this picture of a mob crashing through the
Israel-Syria border yesterday [Source] - click to enlarge

This happened at about the same time. But for some mysterious reason, the photographers and reporters of the great metropolitan newspapers were - how to say this? - somewhere else. So there are no newsagency pictures, and no direct reportage. 

Assad's impact on his country has been considerable. AFP, quoting human rights activists in Syria, says that "up to 850 people have been killed and at least 8,000 arrested since the protests started in mid-March". They're all Syrian, by the way. As are the gunmen who fired at them. And the politicians who gave the shooting orders for the ongoing bloodbath.

Lenny Ben David, as we mentioned above, has some insights in today's Jerusalem Post about the Syrian ruler and his inner thug: "Bashar Soprano of Syria". Among other little-known or unknown aspects of the Assad-inflicted Syrian catastrophe: 38,000 Syrians killed by Assad the Father's men in Hama in 1982. Children raped and tortured in Daraa by Assad the Son's thugs in the past few weeks. And Assad Enterprises up to its eyebrows in arms trafficking, drug trafficking and of course terrorism.

"Besides running Syria’s government with an iron fist, the Assad clan and its associates control Syria’s media, army, phone companies, intelligence service, tourism services and banks. They’re also involved in smuggling, the drug trade and arms dealing in and out of the region. Lebanon, a regional financial center and smuggling hub, is important for Syria’s kleptocrats, and Syrian hegemony in Lebanon is critical for the clan’s financial success. If the Assad associates are not blood relatives or from the Alawite sect, then they’re likely connected through marriage."

It's here and worth a few minutes of your reading time.

15-May-11: More celebrating

Hat-tip to Jameel from muqata.blogspot.com for alerting us to a four-minute-long video of yesterday's Nakba-ready rock-throwing party in Silwan, a neighbourhood a few minutes' drive from where we live in Jerusalem.

In the background, you hear local children shouting throughout the video "Allahu Akbar", an expression of their aspiration for peaceful relations along secular, democratic, live-and-let-live lines, as received from their parents, teachers and religious leaders.


Source: YouTube

15-May-11: Just celebrating

For us Israelis, the 63rd anniversary of the nation's independence was honoured by country-wide celebrations this past Tuesday (the anniversary according to Hebrew lunar calendar). Many of us enjoyed the day in the company of our extended families, with a traditional outdoor grill as the centerpiece. Speaking personally, it was a great day.

The Palestinian Arabs observe the same event today, Sunday 15th May. But for them, it's termed Catastrophe Day, or Nakba. And their approach to history and current affairs reflects some fundamental differences about how they see themselves, us and the relations between us.

In an unusually frank disclosure, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reported Friday on some preparations:

In preparation for a third intifada, which it is hoped will be ignited on Friday, 13 May tens of thousands of short messages (sms) flooded the mobile phones of Palestinians in the West Bank, urging them to take part. The messages also urged participation in similar events on Sunday, a Christian holiday. The messages were signed “Muslim Youth Association,” and the group has announced a whole program of events organized in coordination with other groups reflecting a range of views along the Palestinian political spectrum. The association listed the mosques where mass rallies are to begin, while some planned activities will remain secret until they are launched to prevent their frustration by occupation forces. The announcement suggests that most of the activity will be centered in the Al Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem, where activists can take advantage of the large number of worshippers who attend Friday prayers there. A large showing would encourage the viability of the protest movement.

Sad to say, Al-Ahram's wishes seem to have materialized and the 'celebrations' have started.

Haaretz is reporting that a truck, driven by a 22 year-old resident of the Israeli-Arab town of Kafr Kassem, plowed at high speed into a bus, several private vehicles, a motorcycle and some pedestrians at Bar Lev Street near the busy Mesubim Junction at Tel Aviv's southern entrance in the past hour. The editors at Haaretz are speculating that this is a terrorist attack which in the circumstances is not such a stretch. Ynet says the driver has been caught and arrested. One person is dead, at least four people are seriously injured.

Reuters ["Truck rampage kills one person in Tel Aviv"] carries this brief report from an eye witness as heard on Israeli radio:

"We heard terrible slamming behind us in the car -- boom, and another boom and another boom -- until it reached us, and we simply flew up in the air," a witness, identified only as Yossi, said on Army Radio. He went on and crashed into a bus. He got out and began to go crazy, throwing things at people. There was this poor innocent girl -- he struck her on the head. She just fell down, and now people are treating her. What can I tell you? A terrorist attack."

Updates as we get them.