By Michael Regenstreif
The massacre, earlier this month, of eight students at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem was a heinous act. The students – all but one were just teenagers – were slaughtered as they studied Torah. The lone terrorist, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, was killed on the scene by an off-duty Israeli soldier.
News reports from Israel after the massacre said the family of the murderer, Ala Abu Dhaim, claimed he was not a member of any terrorist organization. Hamas, the supposedly religious terrorist organization that controls Gaza, denied involvement in the attack, all the while celebrating the killings, just as they celebrate any attack on Jewish Israelis. There were parties in the streets of Gaza with celebratory gunfire and the passing out of sweet treats to children.
What a lesson to teach their children. Go out and kill some Jews and we’ll dance in the streets and eat some chocolate.
In the absence of late-breaking evidence that may have come out in the days between the deadline for writing this column and when you’ll have the opportunity to read it, it doesn’t appear that Hamas was directly involved in the attack.
While sickeningly overjoyed at the result of the act, Hamas probably wasn’t directly involved as they’ve never been particularly shy about claiming credit for the terrorist acts they have perpetrated over the years.
In fact, there have been no credible reports of any real terrorist group’s involvement in the terrible crime. Maybe he was just a delusional, hate-filled individual with a stockpile of guns.
When delusional, hate-filled individuals have access to guns, innocent people die. We’ve seen it time and again. Think of Baruch Goldstein, a delusional, Orthodox Jew who hated Arabs and murdered 29 of them and wounded 150 more as they prayed at a mosque in Hebron in 1994.
Closer to home, there was Mark Lepine, yet another hate-filled, delusional individual with a gun. Lepine hated women and killed 14 female engineering students in 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. How many other such senseless school shootings have we witnessed in recent years in Canada, in the United States? All committed by hate-filled, delusional individuals with access to guns.
Given the realities of the Middle East, we’re quick to assume that every attack against Israeli Jews is the work of an organized terrorist group. An assumption that comes easily because we know there have been so many terrorist attacks perpetrated by such groups.
But maybe this one was just the work of a delusional individual who lost it like Baruch Goldstein lost it, like Mark Lepine lost it, like so many others have lost it.
I fear that as long as hate-filled, delusional individuals have access to guns, we will see senseless massacres of innocent people.
I’m sure Dhaim’s attack was well-planned. There are reports that he had stockpiled weapons and had been to the yeshiva as part of his work as a delivery driver in Jerusalem. Whether he acted alone, or was following the orders of puppet masters, he was a terrorist.
Dhaim is dead. In the absence of any evidence that he was part of an organized terrorist group, there is no one to bring to justice for his terrible crime.
However, Israel’s Channel One television has reported on March 11 that three alumni of Mercaz Harav secretly met with an unnamed rabbi from the yeshiva who encouraged them to seek revenge. The report said two others rabbis endorsed the call to revenge as religiously sound.
A day later, leaflets signed by several rabbis were posted in Jerusalem that called on Jews to extract revenge for the murders at Mercaz Harav by matching them “measure for measure.” An Agence France-Presse report said one of the rabbis signing the leaflet was Uzi Sharvaf, “a rabbi who received a presidential pardon in 1985 after being convicted for a 1983 attack on a West Bank university that left three students dead.”
Vigilante Jewish terrorists, under the direction or blessing of rabbis, killing innocent Arabs in revenge for the killing of innocent Jews: the thought sickens.
Israel has a democratically-elected government, intelligence services, army, police force and justice system to deal with terrorism and terrorists. Given the magnitude of the constant threats, they do a remarkable job. Just as there is no excuse for terrorist attacks against Jews, there can be no excuse for terrorist attacks by Jews.
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