Israel said goodbye to the children killed in the Dolphy discotheque. The Arab world praises the kamikaze terrorist.
Funerals for the victims of the nighttime terrorist attack at the "Dolphi" disco took place in Tel Aviv and nearby cities — Holon, Bat Yam, Rehovot, Ramat Gan, and Jaffa. The victims were young men and women aged 14 to 20, most of them from families of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
It is unlikely that the Hamas suicide bomber deliberately chose his target with the intention of striking "Russian" Israelis, yet what he did acquired an additional meaning — dark and tragic.
The Medvedenko family had moved to the Jewish state from Yakutsk, only for it to turn out that, on the shore of the warm Mediterranean Sea, the angel of death spread his wings over Marina Medvedenko. Death did not spare the sisters Elena and Yulia Nalimov, nor the security guard at the "Dolphi" club, who had changed his country of residence only six months earlier, nor the Christian Katrin Castenyada, who was buried in the old Catholic cemetery in Jaffa.
One of the main reasons for emigration is expressed simply: "for the sake of the children." In some cases, it is the most important reason. We lived our lives as we could — but let the children… It was precisely this dream, these hopes, this justification for emigration that the suicide bomber Saeed Khutary struck at, turning himself into a living bomb.
It would be incorrect to exclude him from the list of victims as well, for the young Arab man died after allowing himself to be intoxicated by propaganda, immersed in the atmosphere of hatred prevailing in the region.
The terrible tragedy in Tel Aviv once again demonstrated that Israel has very little it can oppose to terrorism, because Palestinians are willing, irresponsibly and recklessly, to sacrifice the lives of their children — while Israelis are not. Parents send young stone-throwers under bullets. Parents enthusiastically hand over their sons to militant groups. Saeed Khutary's father stated in an interview with Jordanian television that he was proud of his son, and that if he had twenty sons, he would bless each one for such a "heroic death."
Jewish love for children, however, cannot — and must not — extend beyond raising in the younger generation the motivation for worthy service in the army, once they reach the appropriate age, in uniform, with insignia and weapons.
The Arab side has long turned teenagers into an effective tool of guerrilla warfare and developed an ideology clearly expressed, for example, in John le Carré's novel The Little Drummer Girl: "Why should we hesitate to kill Jewish women? They give birth to soldiers for Israel. Why should we hesitate to kill children? They will grow up to become soldiers." No civilized society can find an adequate response to such a tactic.
A somber postscript: On a Russian-language Israeli website, a drawing appeared — an Israeli and a Palestinian shooting at each other with rifles. The first shields a child’s cradle with his body; the second shields himself with a child’s cradle. Not entirely, but uncomfortably close to the truth.