In my view: On the night of the murder

By Meir Weingarten

Issue of Nov. 7, 2008 / 9 Cheshvan 5769

There used to be a cozy little restaurant, no more than six or seven tables, hidden away in what were then vacant fields behind the King David Hotel.

It’s a beautiful Saturday night in November. We park near the restaurant. As we’re about to get out of the car a report on the radio of breaking news holds us back. It was a confused report: shots heard at the pro-Oslo rally in Tel Aviv. No one knows where they came from. But, the announcer assures us, Rabin, Peres et al are fine and have left the scene.

That night our table was one of three. The picture is seared in my mind’s eye, as if it was yesterday.

An Israeli family was seated at the table near us. Father: Kippa Seruga, beard. Mother: simple head covering; and Daughter: jean skirt, long sleeved top. You get the picture. Probably live somewhere in Yehuda & Shomron. They had that stereotypical “settler” look.

The next table over, a middle-aged Israeli hosting three friends from America. The Israeli: a sterotypical secular “tzfoni” Jew (Upper class, Ashkenazi, Northern Tel Aviv resident). His small group was conversing in English.

My friend and I at table number three.

A cell phone rings. The tzfoni begins hollering, piercing the quiet calm of the meal: “No, no! It’s not possible. It can’t be.”

The small room shakes.

The tzfoni jumps out of his chair. He looks like he wants to kill someone, anyone. First, he runs to the kitchen, at the front of the restaurant. He’s seething, his face is red.

“Turn on the radio, turn it on now! They shot the Prime Minister!

A few seconds go by. He notices the “settlers” table. In a fit of rage he runs to their table, points his finger at them and starts yelling:

“Atem, atem ashaimim, atem ashaimim.” You (in plural, referring to an entire group of people), you are all guilty.

He grabs the edge of their table and tosses it.

For me, it’s all happening in slow motion. I see the table flying up, the tablecloth as if suspended in midair, the beautiful dishes crashing to the floor, the family regaining their balance, faces frozen in disbelief. A restaurant employee races over, grabs the tzofni and pulls him away.

He wasn’t alone, our tzfoni. Over the next days and weeks, Israel was consumed not only by mourning, but also by hate.

Many on the left, the “liberals,” whose lives ostensibly are devoted to compassion and tolerance towards others, let loose a barrage of hate aimed at an entire population of “atem.” The same newsmen, commentators, actors and authors who so often invoke “collective punishment” to save the homes of Arab murderers from destruction, had no problem indicting “all” religious Zionists for the reprehensible act of one person.

The masks were off. The hatred and rage harbored for years, boiling within, came pouring out. It came out in the media and in the public discourse as uncontrollably as it had in the restaurant, with finger-pointing cries of “Atem.”

Irony of ironies. I’d lived most of my 30-plus years outside of Israel, surrounded by non-Jews, in quintessential “urban America.” Yet, it is only now, in the heart of Jerusalem, in our Jewish State, only now that I first witnessed an anti-Semitic attack, a hate crime against Jews.

Some 10 minutes later the tzfoni got up and apologized. He told the restaurateur and the diners that he would pay for whatever damage he caused.

But he couldn’t. The damage was not to the dishes or the tablecloths. We were all damaged that night, damage that cannot easily be repaired.

That night I mourned the political assassination of a Jew by a Jew. And, I cried over a rift in the Jewish people that was pried open and continues to grow.

Meir Weingarten is President of Ariel Tours, a leading tour operator to Israel. He is also a public speaker and commentator on Israeli affairs heard on Kol Israel’s Reshet Bet, on the nationally-syndicated Mike Gallagher Show, and internationally on JM in the AM with Nachum Segal.