Israel Hayom..
21 September '15..
The murder weapon aimed at me doesn't require its wielder to have a license, pass an exam, or go to a shooting range every three years. Plenty of it is lying around on the hills and slopes we drive through. It needs only a clenched fist and a simple muscle movement -- and a mother and baby can be murdered in a manner that redefines "accessible." Murder at one's fingertips.
I don't know when historians will determine that the Third Intifada has broken out. For us, the residents of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, it's been around at least since Operation Pillar of Defense nearly three years ago. At the time, my husband and I were coming back from the hospital with a new baby. While driving home, I kept turning off the car's air conditioner and covering him up so he wouldn't be cold, then worrying he didn't have enough air, uncovering him, and turning the air conditioner back on. I asked Eyal to take the turns slowly so he wouldn't get carsick. Worrying because of his jaundice, and because we needed to go back to the hospital the next day for tests. And how the other children at home would take to him. And if the motions he was making with his mouth meant that he was starting to get hungry right then, in the middle of the trip. Anat, my neighbor, was right behind us. A Molotov cocktail hit her car, right at the turn where I was afraid the baby would get nauseous.
The rocks and firebombs are seen as something romantic, a harmless outlet for the fury of young people who love the land and its furrows. Six months ago, the state prosecutor decided not to launch an investigation against journalist Amira Hass, who wrote in Haaretz that "rock throwing is the birthright and obligation of anyone under foreign rule. Rock throwing ... is a metaphor for resistance."
Hass' piece was quoted on the Palestine Liberation Organization's website. Three years ago, the military court in Samaria ruled that rock throwing was not necessarily an attempt to kill, and exonerated four Palestinians who had thrown a 20-centimeter (8-inch) rock at a car, hitting a 12-year-old girl in the head, of attempted murder charges.
"It is a crime of varying severity, depending on the circumstances. ... It can be an act of mischief. An act without the potential to cause harm," the court wrote.
Hurling boulders at Jews' heads can no longer be considered a mischievous act. Not after Adele Biton, Asher Palmer and his baby son Yonatan, Alexander Levlovich, and the other 10 Israelis killed by the "metaphor for resistance." The sad, weakening solutions of setting up concrete barricades and donning shields and bulletproof vests cannot be the only defenses of those who are determined to be sovereign in their own country. The Zionist movement built cities and factories, schools and hospitals out of these stones. But there are people with hearts of stone who want to use them to build graves for the next victims.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=13795
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