Beyond Words

The first revelations were reported on the evening of April 10, 1997. The partially decomposed body of Staff Sgt. Sharon Edri was unearthed in the Arab village of Tzurif by the IDF. Sharon Edri, a twenty year-old Jewish soldier who went missing September 9, 1996, was finally found, dead. Although denials of less the than admirable behavior of the Israeli police concerning the Edri case rang throughout the media, the police could not hide from their claims all along that Edri had disappeared for his own reasons and went into hiding due to personal difficulties with army life. The police even suggested that Edri had committed suicide. Regardless of family cries that Sharon was not that kind of young man, the police insisted that they knew otherwise. Now the blue of the Israeli police is red from embarrassment and shame. Why? Two reasons account for the stunningly inadequate conduct of the police, security agents and most government officials (Minister of Defense Yitzhak Mordechai is one exception). The first reason may be expected due to the nature of the Israeli socialist beast, that is to say, the government and its bureaucrats knew the soldier better than his family. However, the second reason (upon which the first reason is primarily based) is totally incomprehensible and key individuals must be held accountable for the supposition that because there was no intelligence reports about terrorist activities, Sharon Edri could not have been a victim of this sort of foul- play. In other words, the absence of any hard data on terrorist activities clearly indicated to these bureaucrats that none existed.

Israeli officials were unwilling or unable to believe that organized terror was thriving under their noses as the hear no evil, see no evil, do no evil, Palestinian security forces looked the other way. There were no intelligence reports of terrorist activities because there was no intelligence. Israel, as a gesture of good-will and trust removed it agents from Palestinian controlled areas leaving those Arabs who cooperated with Israel as canon fodder for the PA “preventive” security forces. Countless Arab informants were massacred at the hands of Arafat’s minions. Israel’s vast web of informational resources came to an abrupt end as Palestinian death squads targeted Arabs cooperating with Israel’s security agents. Israeli pompous certainty that if something was going on, they would know about it, led to their inability to accept the reality that terrorist activity of this kind had not ceased.

The authorities finally learned of Sharon Edri’s tragic fate through what can only be described as a sequence of mishaps on the part of the terrorists. The book on a number of terror attacks remained open with no intelligence information pointing in a particular direction. Israeli security agents were unable to string the pieces together until the Apropo cafe terrorist bombing in Tel Aviv on March 21, 1997 gave the first clue. The bomber, who now appears was not supposed to die in the explosion, was from the infamous Arab village of Tzurif in Judea just outside of Hebron.

Tzurif is infamous because the Arab residents of the village were responsible for the mass slaughter of thirty-five Palmach fighters in the 1948 War of Independence. The result of Tzurif’s butchery in 1948 was the loss of the Gush Etzion settlement from Israeli control. The “Lamed Hay Battalion” (thirty-five), was to bring supplies to Jews under siege by troops of the Jordanian Legion, they never made it and all was lost.

Although Tzurif still remains under Israeli military administration, it took Israeli investigators until April 10th to uncover a fully functioning Hamas cell operating out of the Arab village. The reason the terrorist cell was so difficult to expose was not because of Israeli ineptitude, but because of its blindness. The terrorists were able to move in and out of Palestinian controlled Hebron and Halhoul, well protected by their neighbors and the Palestinian security forces. Israel’s dismantling of its intelligence infrastructure in Judea and Samaria prevented information relating to terrorist activities from reaching Israeli security agents. Oslo was supposed to ensure that Palestinian security forces do the job that Israeli security forces once did. The lack of adequate preventative security measures by the Palestinian para-military police should come as no surprise and the blame is squarely upon the shoulders of Israel for entrusting a sworn enemy with the job of protecting the Jewish people. The Tel Aviv bomber, it ends up, was part of a cell of tens of terrorists responsible for at least eleven Jewish murders and numerous attempted murders going back to November of 1995.

This terror unit kidnapped and brutally murdered Sharon Edri; shot dead Major Dr. Oz Tivon, Sgt. Yaniv Shimmel, Efrat Unger, Yaron Unger, Uri Munk, Rachel Munk, Ze’ev Munk; blew up Anat Rosen Winter, Dr. Michal Meidan, Yael Gilad and injured 49 others as Israel, with its Oslo preoccupation, sat idly by. All this while the “peace process” was in full-swing and Nobel Peace Prizes were still being fondled by their recipients. Wishing for peace is not enough in the Middle East, in fact, it is criminal when it means the death of Israelis at the hands of their “peace partners”.

Had not Israel unilaterally withdrew its intelligence apparatus from Judea and Samaria, such a horror might not have occurred. Peres, Beilin and company need run to a city of refuge lest the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Sharon Edri hunt them down for the murder of this young man. Television pictures of Edri’s family, still hoping their son and brother would return for Passover, can never be expressed in words as they received the news of their loved one’s murder at the hands of ruthless terrorists.

A commission to prosecute the crime of genocide need be convened against those responsible for what in years past would have been terrorist atrocities quickly halted by bullets of undercover Israeli security agents. How many of the known Jews murdered by the Hamas cell could have been saved? Jewish blood covers the hands of all those involved, both the Arab murderers and the Jewish collaborators. While Israel found a pact with the devil, satan’s agents were busy sacrificing Jews upon the alter of their aspirations to wipe out the entire Jewish nation.

Every Jew must be sickened by the revelation that as Israel let down its guard, terrorist utilized the opportunity to kill. The Arab/Islamic plan is no less than genocidal and the Israeli lackeys that allowed this heinous force to exercise its will are guilty of the worst form of collaboration. The vile nature of this crime is unspeakable. The righteous indignation of the Israeli “peace” proponents only compound their collective guilt, making their behavior beyond words. Not only must Oslo and the “spirit of Oslo” be immediately abandoned, but all those responsible should be forced to account for their actions.

A call of sanity, of normalcy, of self-preservation necessarily must be sounded from every corner of the Jewish world. Not one moment longer can the Jewish people allow the obscenity of the “process” to continue. The “new chances” and “rare opportunities” for peace that rock the Israeli/Jewish body politic every few weeks as part of the “process” are nothing more than ruses in the continuing battle to destroy the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel. Nothing has changed in Tzurif just has nothing changed in the Arab desire to rid the Land of Israel of the Jews. There exists a hatred that runs deeper than peace and economic prosperity. This is the lesson of the infamous Arab village of Tzurif and Israel must now learn it.

Dr. HaKohen is the head of B’tzedek