Our daughters and sons were killed at midnight. International Children’s Day was coming to an end, taking the lives of twenty of them with it. They were not protected…
The “Russian” disco, located on a crowded seaside promenade, was not included in the list of places requiring strict surveillance. Park your car in the wrong spot — and within seconds an officer appears and leaves you a fine on the windshield. But for constant — both visible and covert — patrol of a mass youth gathering area, there was neither the funding, nor the foresight, nor the will.
After the day when we failed to protect those children, there should have come a day of reckoning with their killers. It never came…
The beasts, enraged because they had not been truly punished for so long, were granted a reprieve. Was it only so they could hide their claws, lick their fangs, tuck their tails, and pretend they had never torn people apart? And so they would have time to whimper pitifully from their filthy cage — perhaps hoping no whip would strike their bristling backs?
On the day we mourned the children of Israel, the world should have cursed the inhuman figure named Arafat. It did not…
On television screens marked with the logos of leading networks, the “rais” leaned toward microphones, his lip trembling vilely, claiming he did not wish death upon Jewish children. And beside him stood a well-groomed German official visiting him at such a “significant” moment for the “Palestinian people.” Killing boys and girls because they are Jewish children — das ist schlecht, yes, yes, naturally! Yet even this hollow statement did not lead Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to cancel or postpone his planned visit to the leader of a criminal syndicate.
Today it is said that Fischer influenced the tone of Arafat’s ritual statement, and that Europe has finally begun to look objectively at what is happening in our region. It is painful to admit, but not isolated drops — torrents of blood forced the West, for the first time in eight months, to reluctantly acknowledge our suffering. Apparently, before June 1, the blood shed by Israelis was not enough.
And yet public opinion still has not called the Palestinian Authority what it long should have been called — a stable criminal organization, a community of killers and their accomplices. For some reason, only in this case does Western political correctness remain especially “correct,” particularly regarding the national identity of the victims.
To the credit of the people of Israel, they understood everything. As the country buried the “Russian” teenagers, it could not ignore that the attack was targeted. By killing today’s aliyah, the enemy seeks to destroy tomorrow’s. To prevent the Jewish state from growing younger, expanding, rising. For the same reason settlers are shot on the roads, and explosives-laden cars are driven toward school entrances.
And it is terrifying even to consider that the choice of the “Russian” disco “Dolphi” may have been suggested to Hamas by sympathizers living in neighborhoods adjacent to the Tel Aviv promenade. It cannot be denied that, in a distorted nationalist mindset, Jewish immigration from the former USSR is associated with the issue of so-called “Palestinian refugees.”
Yes, most Arab residents of Jaffa view the “Russification” of the coastal area pragmatically: immigrants buy a lot, use garages and workshops, are not demanding, and, unlike veteran Israelis, do not bargain aggressively. Shops, stalls, and markets are growing rapidly, and their Arab owners have little reason to complain — just keep working. Outwardly, everything appears neighborly. But it is possible that part of the Arab population is filled with resentment as they watch demographic changes: “Russians” filling Jaffa, Bat Yam, Holon, Lod. And are these not the very places included in Arafat’s claims for the return of “Palestinian refugees” to their “historic homeland”?
For Palestinians, we are enemies twice over: as “Russians” and as Israelis. Combining these two notions, they have declared war on us — on our children, on our shared future in this land. This is no longer a blind strike against aliyah, as in 1972, when Israeli Olympic athletes from the USSR were killed in Munich. Then the aliyah was smaller, and the killers were less “politically sophisticated.”
But may the punishment for those who killed and maimed young Israelis in the summer of 2001 be as inevitable as it was thirty years ago under Golda Meir. Everyone expected the country’s leaders to firmly promise to find and destroy every person responsible. They did not swear…
The overwhelming majority of Israeli citizens mourned alongside the new immigrants during those dark June days, bowed their heads before the grief of the parents, and were struck by the resilience of the “Russians.” Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon noted the composure with which the community endured this tragedy.
But, unfortunately, there were those eager to display their own “principled stance” against the backdrop of collective grief.
Anonymous officials rushed, even before a decision by the Chief Rabbinate, to deepen the suffering of grieving parents by threatening to deny burial in common cemeteries for several children from mixed families. Meanwhile, prominent members of the Knesset inflamed tensions around this issue, worsening an already painful situation. In doing so, rigid guardians of “tradition” and overly zealous “human rights advocates” only complemented each other, causing discomfort among ordinary people. In the end, however, neither side prevailed: a compromise was reached, and the children were laid to rest where their parents chose.
…I began with the days when we failed — to protect, to avenge, to prove… And I have no ending.
Any of you could finish this article for me: each new day can render any conclusion meaningless. All that remains is to wonder how events will unfold before the next issue of this newspaper is published.
And to hope that a night like June 1–2 will never happen again. That fear for the lives of our children and loved ones will finally leave us. That we will protect them through faith in our cause. That this will not require a great war. That the enemy will retreat. That honest people will help us. That new graves will not open.
That everything will somehow be set right…
How much one wants to believe it. But how can one believe?..