opinion
BY RUTHIE BLUM
Fear Terrorism, Not the Israelis
Defending Against it
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A t a Tel Aviv café on April 11, I overheard a couple
talking about the terrorist surge responsible for
the fact that the normally packed establishment was
as relatively empty as the adjacent Carmel Market.

On such a beautiful day, and with Passover
fast approaching, both venues ought to have
been teeming with Israelis taking a time out from
grocery shopping to sip espresso in the sun.

But the shooting spree on April 7 at one of the
White City’s popular pubs, as well as other deadly
attacks by Palestinians and like-minded Arab
Israelis, has people on edge.

This makes perfect sense. Less logical was the
conclusion that the husband and wife reached
about the perilous situation.

In their view, the greatest threat to their safety
at the moment is not a potential assault from res-
idents of the Palestinian Authority or their Arab-
Israeli brethren. The danger lies, rather, in the
slippery trigger fingers of Israeli security forces
and members of the general public in possession
of firearms.

The conversation turned to Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett’s recent call on licensed gun
owners to carry their weapons. That this directive
came on the heels of heroic acts by armed civil-
ians against terrorists on a rampage didn’t enter
the discussion.

They cited two examples, both of which occurred
on April 10, to justify their fears. The first involved
the shooting to death of an unarmed Palestinian
woman in the town of Husan. The second was the
killing of a Jewish-Israeli man at an intersection
near Ashkelon.

It’s not clear whether the spouses had bothered
to learn the details of each case. Their unified
position, which they indicated by nodding and
sighing at each other’s comments, was that the
specifics were irrelevant.

Such an attitude, though far less rampant in
Israel than the far-left would have one believe,
provides fodder for the foreign press. This is not
to say that publications like The Guardian and The
New York Times need any help crafting headlines
and concocting news stories that completely dis-
tort reality. But it sheds light on the tendency of
Israeli liberals, like their counterparts abroad, to
place blame where it doesn’t belong.

Unable, as an eavesdropper, to set the record
straight in real time, I am taking the opportunity
to do so here for anyone who has a similarly false
sense of the above events.

Let’s start with the first instance, which took
place at a makeshift checkpoint. Widowed moth-
er-of-six Ghada Ibrahim Ali Sabateen charged
at Israel Defense Forces soldiers in a suspicious
manner and refused their order to halt. Following
standard procedure, the soldiers first shot in the
air. When Sabateen ignored the command, they
shot her in the leg.

As soon as she fell to the ground, the soldiers
administered first aid and called an ambulance.

Palestinian medics quickly arrived and rushed
her to the Al-Hussein Governmental Hospital in
nearby Beit Jala, where she died of blood loss
from a torn artery in her thigh.

If anything, this incident illustrates the care that
the IDF troops took to avoid killing Sabateen,
whose behavior indicated that she was seeking
to die that afternoon as a “martyr,” rather than by
suicide due to deep emotional problems. Now her
family is eligible for a hefty monthly stipend from
the P.A.

The second tragedy in question was equally
unavoidable. Though it would subsequently
emerge that the victim was not a terrorist, but
rather a patient who had escaped from an institu-
tion for the mentally ill, his death wasn’t the result
of some frivolous error.

In the first place, he was wearing pants resem-
bling military fatigues and waving what later turned
out to be a toy pistol. Secondly, he assaulted a
female IDF soldier at a bus stop and grabbed her
rifle, spurring witnesses on the scene to shout,
“Terrorist! Terrorist!”
At this moment, IDF Binyamin Brigade
Commander Col. Eliav Elbaz happened by and
called out in Arabic to the perpetrator to put down
the weapon. It was only after the man ignored the
command and kept running that Elbaz shot him
dead. Even if the above IDF actions hadn’t been
taken under the current circumstances, with a
Ramadan-spurred terror wave that claimed the
lives of 14 innocents in the space of less than
three weeks, they would have been completely
justified. Contrary to the aspersions cast by exter-
nal or internal ill-wishers, Israelis are far from
trigger-happy. Indeed, it’s the jihadists who should be feared,
not the men and women in uniform — or jeans —
defending against them. JE
Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and
author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter,
Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ”
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