Soccer Dad

Terror remembered

Batya Medad of Shiloh Musings reprints her recollection of her brush with death at the hands of a terrorist:

1996 - Flora Yechiel was killed when an Arab drove his vehicle onto the sidewalk at the “Trampiada” hitchhiking post in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood. The terrorist was shot dead.

Generally, I force myself to avoid these announcements in the news digest I read daily. They’re depressing, always about death, murder, terrorism. Unfortunately, this time I failed; it somehow caught my eye. You may not know it, but seconds before the terrorist rammed his car into Flora Yechiel, HaYa”D, he drove it over my left foot and knocked me down.

Flora Yechiel, as I recall, was a young woman undergoing treament for cancer. At the time she was murdered she was with her sister, Irit Mizrachi, a widow, whose husband had been murderd by terrorists.
I observed the reporting from this side of the ocean. There was a condescension to Israel that was typical of the reporting at the time. Here's Barton Gellman of the Washington Post ("DEADLY SUSPICION ON A DAY OF GRIEF MOTORIST SLAIN AFTER TRAFFIC MISHAP AS ISRAEL BURIES BOMBING VICTIMS," Feb 27, 1996):

It is not certain, and may never be, why Ahmed Hamideh drove his car today into a crowd of people at a bus stop on Jerusalem's northern edge, killing one person and injuring 22.

Long skid marks at the scene suggest that the 36-year-old Hamideh, an American of Palestinian origin, had tried to brake, and police investigators now say they think he somehow lost control of his rented car. Two armed bystanders, seeing bodies on the street and a man who appeared to be an Arab leaving the car, believed otherwise. They shot him dead on the spot.

So jittery are Israeli nerves a day after Palestinian extremists set off bombs on a Jerusalem bus and amidst a crowd of hitchhiking soldiers in Ashqelon that hundreds of policemen converged on the bus stop and brought afternoon rush-hour traffic to a halt. Police munitions experts, presuming another terrorist strike, searched Hamideh's small Fiat for explosives. They found groceries meant for his nephews in the West Bank.

As the nation buried the bombing victims today -- the toll having risen to 27 overnight -- a palpable sense of anxiety prevailed here. Had Hamideh done what he did on another day, said Hebrew University law professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, he probably would have lived to explain what happened. Today, Kremnitzer said, "people are afraid."

Just in case anyone had any doubt that the killing of Hamideh was a tragic mistake by jittery Jews, Gellman followed up the next day with "ISRAELI AIDE SAYS AMERICAN MAY HAVE INTENDED TO KILL U.S. RELATIVES CALL SUGGESTION 'INCONCEIVABLE'":

But Internal Security Minister Moshe Shahal said it now looks as if the driver intentionally slammed his rented car into the crowd. "It's not final but I have the latest assessment from the checks done by police. The tendency is to see yesterday's incident as an attack," Shahal told Israel Radio. "And that is based on information in the hands of the police concerning the man himself, things he said, his background and technical checks of the route the car took."

Jerusalem Police Chief Arye Amit told reporters: "Most of the signs rule out a traffic accident. The car and brakes were in working order. One of the skid marks we saw yesterday apparently did not come from this car."

Of course the Post also got a special correspondent to show how inconceivable the murder was:

Special correspondent Kathryn Wexler reported from Los Angeles:

Friends and relatives mourned the death of Hamideh today, and called him a devout and peace-loving Muslim.

They said Hamideh, who immigrated to the United States 19 years ago and lived in Los Angeles, had gone to the West Bank last summer, partly to seek a wife.

Relatives described themselves as anti-fundamentalist and supportive of the peace efforts of Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

"He didn't go there to cause trouble. He never caused trouble in his life," said Geman Hamideh, a cousin.

The effort they went to to show that the only intentional violence that day came from "jittery" Israelis. (If an Israeli killed an Arab, regardless of the circumstances they'd have done all they could to show that it was intentional.)
The Seattle Times though, in its international section noted:

The Islamic militant group Hamas said today that an Arab American who rammed his car into a crowd at a Jerusalem bus stop on Monday was a member of its military wing and was avenging the death of Palestinian militant Fathi Shqaqi.

And the Jerusalem Post (courtesy of the invaluable resource, IRIS) after noting that the government did all it could to downplay the possibility that Hamideh had perpetrated a terror attack concluded like this:

Whether continued terrorism is an indication that the Oslo process is a failure - as the opposition believes - or nothing more than the sputterings of a dying, old-fashioned movement - as the government maintains - should be the subject of a legitimate, momentous public debate. But to deny the facts of terrorism, and to try to whitewash incidents because they might tend to reinforce one set of arguments or another is to endanger the nation's morale and its faith in government more than all the acts of terrorism can ever hope to do.

And of course the equivocation led to this sort of poison:

The reports gave rise to new questions. If Hamida was slain vigilante-style by Jewish settlers, how many bullets did they pump into his body? And if he was a drug addict, did an autopsy show traces of drug ingestion? These questions may never be answered, however, if Israeli authorities persist in refusing to relinquish Hamida's body to his family.

It may be that Israel is faced with unfair standards and biased reporting. But as the murder of Flora Yechiel and injuries to a score of others shows, if Israel doesn't stand up for itself it will only feed those who hate it.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at March 13, 2005 10:02 AM