Suzanne Fields
We weep for Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel, Eyal
Yifrach, the three Jewish teenagers whose lives
were brutally cut short because they chose to
walk home from their religious school, hoping
to catch a ride like teenage boys safely do in
the civilized neighborhoods of the world. How
cruel to hear that in their boyish innocence
they were swept up by terrorists with evil in
their hearts.
There are suggestions in Israel that the
kidnappers became frightened when they
thought they were followed, and rather than
use the boys for ransom, they decided to kill
the only unfriendly witnesses, the kidnapped
boys.
We weep as well for Mohammed Abu Khdeir,
16, the innocent victim of a revenge murder.
We don't yet know exactly what happened, but
we do know that three Jewish suspects have
confessed and are in Israeli custody while the
killers of the three Jewish boys are still at
large.
The murders give rise again to "moral
equivalence," a discarded phrase that first
proclaimed that the ideological theories of East
and West in the Cold War were of equal
measure, that the totalitarianism of the Soviet
Union, with its Iron Curtain, was as well-
intentioned as the democracies of the West.
The notion has long been discredited in the
accounts of the Cold War, but in the Middle
East, where the ink still runs blood red,
defenders of the Hamas terrorists characterize
the murders of the four teenagers as reflecting
similar moral values.
Of course they don't. The murders are rooted
in the evil that men do in any place, any time,
in any century, when barbarism rises to the
surface of the human imagination and
galvanizes murderous instincts. The reaction
to these brutal deeds, however, tells another
story.
When the Palestinians got word that three
Jewish boys had been kidnapped, unbridled
excitement swept through the West Bank. They
praised the kidnappers as heroes. Cheering
Palestinian crowds raised the three-finger
salute associated with the release of Gilad
Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier who was
exchanged in 2011 for more than 1,027 Arab
prisoners. The Arab prisoners together were
responsible for killing more than 500 Israelis.
Many Israelis thought that such Israeli
repatriation was foolish, giving incentives to
future kidnappers, but they knew it showed
the importance of a single life to the Jews.
They demonstrated no anger at the
government. Nobody rioted.
When news of the three kidnapped Jewish
boys was first revealed, Arab celebrants
mocked the value Jews place on a single life,
"which contrasts so sharply with the value
(Palestinians) place on taking Jewish life,"
Ruth Wisse, Harvard professor of Jewish
literature, writes in The Wall Street Journal. "It
is one of the ironies of Israel that Jewish
parents whose children are murdered by Arabs
are not guaranteed justice as surely as Arabs
whose children are murdered by Jews
Collective grief cannot always contain
destructive impulses, and it's a tragedy that
Jews mourning the three murdered teenagers
killed a Palestinian boy to take revenge.
Heinous as that crime is, action for justice has
been swift, just as Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu promised. Suspects are in custody,
and no one doubts that the guilty will stand
trial and, if found guilty, will go to a long
harsh life in prison. Neither the Palestinian
Authority nor Hamas has found the killers of
the three Jewish boys, nor is there evidence
that they have tried.
She doesn't know who killed her son, but the
mother of one of the murdered Israeli boys
raged on behalf of the family of the Arab boy,
and pleaded for compassion in the name of
her faith.
"It is difficult for me to describe how
distressed we are by the outrage committed in
Jerusalem -- the shedding of innocent blood in
defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the
foundation of the lives of our boys and of all
of us in this country," said Rachel Fraenkel,
mother of Naftali Fraenkel, 16, who was
murdered and his body thrown in a ditch with
his two companions.
The silence of the Arab mothers expressing
outrage at the deaths of the Jewish boys is
deafening.
Jews in America often memorialize a death by
planting a tree in Israel in honor of a person
who died. If the rockets unleashed by Hamas
didn't prevent them, Jews in Israel today
would plant four trees, one each for Gilad
Shaar, Naftali Frenkel, Eyal Yifrach, -- and
Mohammed Abu Khdeir.
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