Ha'aretz
A man wakes up in the morning and asks himself what he should be shocked by first: the fatal predawn traffic accident or the nightclub brawl that ends in a stabbing? The "father" who was investigated on suspicion of killing his wife's daughter and throwing her remains into the Yarkon River in a suitcase, or the father under investigation on suspicion of suffocating his daughter in cold blood with a plastic bag? The gang rape perpetrated by a group of 12-year-old boys on a 7-year-old girl? The woman suspected of starving her child, after which the ultra-Orthodox community rushed to save her from ... the hospital? The shocking descriptions of what veteran soldiers in the Golani Brigade and the armored corps do to new recruits? And the man says to himself in terror: What?! One of them could be my son. And either the abuser or the one being abused, supposedly in fun, could actually die - perhaps in battle, perhaps in an ambush.
The soldiers say this is a tradition that goes back many years. I know from personal experience...
But after you have been through it, you do it to those who come after you. And each time, it gets harsher and more humiliating. Recently, it has gotten totally out of control. The mother who sends her son to the army today does not know which danger to fear more: the external enemy, the hazing or traveling on the roads.
The bloodbath in a gay-lesbian club, shocking and upsetting though it was, is merely a part, or perhaps a result, of the general violence into which this country is descending. Hatred or intolerance for others' opinions leads to them dying by violence. There is a chilling similarity between what happened on Nahmani Street in Tel Aviv and what Yigal Amir did years ago.
There is also a link between the thuggish violence on the roads, in which one drunk driver can cause a bloody pileup, and the crime families that have taken over dozens, if not hundreds, of neighborhoods and businesses in our cities, and have begun killing each other to "settle accounts," a la 1920s Chicago. More and more Israelis have turned into aggressive people with short fuses in their dealings with others.
"If you see a car weaving from lane to lane on some highway overseas, you know it's an Israeli," a friend once told me. "And I've learned the hard way that, in the blink of an eye, you can become embroiled in a brawl in the middle of a highway here."
........ The ready availability of weapons in a country where the entire nation is in the army has turned us into a violent society. It was truly unbelievable to see a soldier shooting a bound Palestinian in the leg while his commander held the man down. Or to see border policemen freely abusing residents of the territories. Such mutations have left us shameless and utterly without inhibition.
Thus we have reached a situation in which, for example, Interior Minister Eli Yishai personally urges District Court Judge Moshe Drori to acquit Itamar Biton, the son of Hadera's chief Sephardi rabbi, because he was due to become a rabbinical court judge, even though he had been caught on camera trying to run over cashier Noga Zoraish in cold blood - just to avoid paying NIS 18.
You have to be blind not to notice that our domestic security situation has long since spiraled out of control. Thus, in addition to demanding that the latest abominable murder be solved, the government must set up a ministerial committee on domestic security and immediately launch an effective campaign against vandalism, hatred, violence, corruption, drunkenness and, above all, the brutalization of the State of Israel. Full story
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