Claire Berlinski traveled yesterday to Itamar in the West Bank where Udi Fogel and Ruth Fogel and three of their five children (Yoav, age 11, Elad, age 4, and Hadas, 3 months old) were murdered late Friday night.
She adds a detail she says hasn’t been reported anywhere she’s seen: the baby was decapitated. She concludes that this is not a story about “settlers,” but about something else:
This story is above all about murder. They were children and they were murdered. Two more children were orphaned. The children were targeted deliberately. This was a premeditated murder–not a crime of passion or self-defense–and it was a psychotically savage crime. Anyone who in any way tries to rationalize or minimize this or to suggest that this is a fitting punishment for anything needs to go out and look at a three-month-old baby and ask himself what it would take to climb over a fence, climb in a window, and cut off that child's head.
I think we do know what it would take: the special hatred of Jews that if left unchecked, or excused, or appeased, leads to a place we also know. What got the Fogels murdered was Sleeping in Samaria on Shabbat, in the latest in a long line of atrocities since Israel offered (and offered, and offered) the Palestinians a state.