Jewish religious school students pray near the scene of a shooting attack in
The names of four of the murdered students have been released: Neria Cohen, 15, Yonatan Yitzhak Eldar, 16, Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, 19, and Yohai Lifshitz, 18. Not one of them even twenty years old.
Here is the report from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
A Palestinian terrorist infiltrated the Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary on Thursday evening and opened fire on a crowded library and study hall, killing eight people and wounding 11 others. . . . [T]he yeshiva students — mostly teenagers — had returned from prayers at the Western Wall. They were about to begin a party celebrating the beginning of the month of Adar — a month of joy marked by the Purim holiday.
“They deliberately target Jewish teenagers in a religious school for slaughter and then they rejoice on the streets. What unspeakable evil is here.” — Melanie Phillips
Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz’s correspondent, writes that:
[T]he terrorist demonstrated he could carry out an attack that required prior intelligence gathering. This was not an accidental arrival at some city’s commercial center and the setting off an explosive charge, but entering one of
Yoni Tidi writes that the attack is “a stab at the heart of religious Zionism:”
If you don’t understand the ramifications of this targeted attack, let me give you some background. Mercaz Harav Yeshiva is considered the leading national-religious yeshiva in
Calev Ben-David concludes in The Jerusalem Post that it is “An Assault on the Heart of Zionism:”
In striking the flagship institution of the religious Zionist movement, a
If the goal was to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors, then the bullets struck home with deadly and accurate force.
. . . [T]he impact of this incident will be profound.
This will be a sharp blow for those Israelis, especially Jerusalemites, who have allowed themselves to let their psychological guard down since the second intifada petered out. That the gunman was able to carry out this operation in the heart of a crowded Jerusalem neighborhood, some distance away from the Arab neighborhoods of the capital, will raise serious questions about assumptions made since the construction of the West Bank security barrier.
The Olmert government, which until now has been able to contain political fallout from the rocket fire on Sderot and Ashkelon in part because of the absence of major attacks elsewhere in the country, will now find its margin of error — and survival — dramatically narrowed.
The efforts by both
The grief and fury in particular of the religious-Zionist sector will be beyond measure at this violent desecration of the cradle of their movement. The current efforts by the government to reach an accommodation with the settler leadership on the removal of outposts will have been in vain for the time being, as any spirit of compromise will be buried with the victims of this atrocity.
Anne Lieberman’s eloquent prayer expresses what must be in the hearts of all who choose life:
I am but a small person and I don’t know how to hold my hot anger, my deep sorrow and my faith in You — all together in the limited space of my being.
Rationalization is not available. Anger is not a whole answer. I don’t see any way forward but to carry on with the commands we have received.