MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Marianna Belenkaya.) It was to be expected: Israeli terrorist Eden Natan-Zada shot four Israeli Arabs in a bus in Shfaram on August 4. The infuriated crowd of Arabs killed the murderer on the spot.
The tragedy in Shfaram (Shefar-Amer in Arabic) is shocking but not surprising.
Israel has a history of improbable attacks. Take Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler from the U.S. who killed 29 Muslims at a Hebron mosque on the Feast of Purim in 1994, or the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. Jews around the world could not believe that the premier was shot by a compatriot.
Compatriots have betrayed and killed for "noble goals" before, both in Israel and other countries. But the murder of Rabin was the end of the world for the Jewish diaspora, which was proud of the achievements of Israelis.
Israel is a state like any other, with people like any other. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, once said that Israel would become a real state when it would have Hebrew-speaking thieves and prostitutes. The dream of Israel's founding father has come true: It now has more than that; it has terrorists who speak Hebrew. This is life.
Ethnic extremism as an acute problem for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Mahmoud Abbas. Israelis and Palestinians spent their lives fighting each other, and now it turns out that the watershed has always been somewhere else. It divides Israelis and Palestinians into those who want to live and work together and terrorists from Palestinian and Jewish extremist groups.
But stereotypes die hard, which gives additional aces to terrorists.
The threat of new terrorist attacks and provocations grew immeasurably when Sharon proclaimed the plan of evacuating all Jewish settlements from Gaza and partially from the West Bank of Jordan. The Israeli police and the PNA security forces have been put on red alert, because Natan-Zada has implemented the simplest plan of the Israeli extremists. Other threats include the murder of Sharon and the explosion of the Temple Mount mosque in Jerusalem. This is what these inhumans want to do; there can be no justification for their plans. The task of Israeli society is to stop them.
I respect the first reaction of Israeli officials and journalists, who denounced the killer and demanded to know who made this possible. The search for the guilty parties is going on in Israel. Unfortunately, it is implied that the tragedy happened because of slackness of security-related services, while they should also analyze the ideological and political aspects of the terrorist attack.
But reviewing an ideology has never been an easy business. It calls for creating an alternative, which is so far indiscernible amidst the chaos of explosions in the Middle East.
