Sick to My Stomach

I am sick to my stomach upon reading of the Arabs' massacre of the four Israeli Jews who were driving on route 60 on Tuesday.  Hamas has claimed responsibility for this brutal, unprovoked attack on unarmed civilians, two of them women, one of whom was pregnant.  It was thought that this was a move to undermine the direct negotiation 'peace talks' which began in Washington, D.C. today.
The reports called these victims "settlers." They are as much settlers as are Americans living in Texas or New York.  They are--were--Israeli citizens, ordinary middle-class people, people with families, children and unborn children, of a country recognized and voted into being by the United Nations in 1948.  A nation which has a perfect right to exist on its ancient lands where it had sovereignty two thousand years before.  A nation which did not even overthrow and conquer another nation in order to exist--no one had sovereignty over what is now Israel, except for the area being a territory under the Ottoman and then British Mandate.

Do you want to know who these people are, the victims? They were your neighbors next door, your aunts and uncles, they were you and I.

The victims were couple in their forties, husband and wife, driving the car, shot dead; they leave six orphan children at home, age twenty-four to one-and-a-half years old. The murdered mother of six was pregnant with her seventh.  The other victims were two passengers, a man who had just moved with his wife to Beit Haggai, the town where the four vicitms lived.  He was in his twenties.  The fourth was a woman in her twenties and a teacher; she leaves a bereft husband and  a daughter eight-years old.

And all the United States could do was issue a condolence statement condemning this as a tragedy:  

“Any time one human being takes out a weapon and fires and kills other human beings it’s a tragedy,” said State Department spokesman PJ Crowley following the attack, adding that the US still didn’t know the circumstances surrounding the incident.

 A tragedy?!  I am incensed at the use of that word.  It's a tragedy when a hurricane rips through a town and people drown and die.  It is a tragedy when a volcano blows apart houses and as a result, people die. Those are what we call "acts of G-d," natural disasters the severity of which we often cannot predict and can only marginally prevent. 

But when cold-blooded, cut throat murderers spray a civilian car driving down the road with bullets and then approach the car, open all the doors and shoot everyone multiple times at close range until they are dead, that is not a tragedy: it is an atrocity, committed by uncivilized barbarians.

Nothing, not 'peace talks,' not accusing Israel of being 'occupiers' -- nothing justifies this barbaric behavior.  And these are the people with whom we are supposed to make 'peace?'  I don't think so.

Oh, and do you know what else happened? When the first responders of Zaka came to the scene, this is what ensued:

A ZAKA volunteer who arrived on the scene recognized his wife's body. "We saw him crying at the scene and didn't understand what was hapenning at first. It wasn't the first disaster he saw," his colleauge, Isaac Berenstein, told the Post. Then he shouted, "that's my wife!' That's my wife!'" The volunteer was immediately removed from the scene by his colleagues and taken to his home in Bet Hagai.

What should be done now? Here's what:  Israel should now annex all the so-called "territories" into greater Israel, and implement the 'One State Solution': the State of Israel.  Anyone who does not pledge loyalty to the Jewish State, may live elsewhere--how about in those tolerant, democratic Arab countries which surround it and who seem to care so much about their fellow Palestinians.

Because the bottom line is: we shouldn't negotiate with people who only want our destruction and behave worse than animals. This is no "partner for peace."