Roth - Fewer terror attacks? It's no accident

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
04 May '12..

A week ago, we wrote ("28-Apr-12: Security barrier proves yet again to be a life-saver") about the small victories of an alert security force confronted with terrorists in ordinary clothing carrying weapons of extreme hostility in their bags and on their bodies.

This morning there's more. Two Palestinian Arab men, reported to be in their 20s, were apprehended by Israeli Border Guard personnel yesterday (Thursday) near busy Tapuah Junction in the Shomron (Samaria). They were found to have explosive pipe-bomb devices and knives in their backpacks. The bombs were safely exploded by sappers and none of the harm which the terrorists intended to cause materialized. They are now in custody.

Roth - Terrorist attack on Jewish village foiled this morning

Elon Moreh, a village in Samaria, with Mt Gerizim 
and the city of Nablus, called Shechem in Hebrew, 
off in the distance

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
06 March '12..

Far from the media swarms and the rent-a-crowd 'protests', the ongoing confrontation between Israeli society and the terrorists embedded among our neighbors goes on daily.

This morning, the focus - for the relative few who know about such matters or care to know - of that confrontation was Elon Moreh. It's a community that was established in the mid-1970s over the opposition of critics who claimed that allowing Jews to set down homes near Nablus, in the heartland of Biblical Jewish history, was going to antagonize the Kingdom of Jordan who had controlled the area previously. The Jordanians barely managed to defeat Yasser Arafat's Palestinian forces seeking to overthrow the monarchy in 1970. In 1988 they permanently relinquished their claims to the West Bank [source] and are now long gone from the neighbourhood. Their claims in any event had no foundation in international law or history. A thriving Jewish village of some 1,200 people today, Elon Moreh is in the vicinity of Itamar, Har Bracha and Yitzhar.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, M-16s, and A New Respect for Veterans

West Bank Mama
11 April '10

I wrote this post in the spring of 2006, looking back at a very symbolic way that I spent Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2002, and the lessons that I learned from it.

In 2002, during the intermediate days of Passover, a terrorist broke into the Gavish home in Elon Moreh and killed four members of the family. After analyzing the details of the incident, the army came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to train women to use the weapons that were issued to their husbands. Soon after Passover the first training session was on offer in our yishuv.

I grew up in a liberal Jewish household in America, and one of the ingrained messages that I received was that GUNS WERE BAD. As children we weren’t even allowed a squirt gun (pity my poor brother). Consequently I developed an aversion to the M16 that my husband uses when he performs guard duty on our settlement. If I needed to handle it at all, I would touch it gingerly – as if I was holding a dirty dead thing that I wanted as little physical contact with as possible. So westbankpappa thought that he would have a hard time convincing me to agree to a training session. Imagine his surprise when I told him that I was one of the first women to sign up.

Not long after the terrorist attack some of the details of what happened came out. One particularly harrowing fact was that the wife and daughter-in-law of those killed saved her life and that of her child by hiding under the kitchen table with her hand over her baby’s mouth, as she watched the terrorist walk through the kitchen stalking his prey. This searing image was enough to trump whatever aversion I had to guns many times over, so on the appointed day I took the M16 and showed up to learn how to use it.

The day chosen for our first round of training was Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The symbolic significance of the day, commemorating another group of Jewish civilians who were forced to take up arms in order to defend themselves, was not lost on any of the twenty women gathered a bit nervously in an empty classroom.

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