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Details on Anti-France demonstration
1. Update from Thursday night (11/21/02:
FURIOUS CROWD DEMONSTRATES AT PLO UN MISSION TO
PROTEST JERUSALEM BUS BOMBING
2. What happens to the buses that are involved in Palestinian genocidal
terror attacks? The grisly remains at Egged's 'bus graveyard'.
3. The Aftermath -- by Judy Lash Balint
FURIOUS CROWD DEMONSTRATES AT PLO UN MISSION
TO PROTESTJERUSALEM BUS BOMBING
The Jerusalem bus with schoolchildren struck by a suicide bomber today could be a New York City bus tomorrow. Terror must be stopped, wherever is may be.
That was the grim warning of 200 furious demonstrators Thursday evening at the PLO UN Mission in mid-Manhattan. They spilled over into the street from the sidewalk, waving large Israel and American flags, chanting "NYC -- Terror Free!" and carrying signs such as "Arafat: Murderer of Jerusalem School Children".
The protesters, organized by the Coalition for Jewish Concerns-Amcha, placed 11 memorial candles, representing the Israelis murdered, at the door of the PLO UN Mission. As a student read the name of each victim blown up, the crowd chanted, "Am Yisrael Chai! -- "the people of Israel will live!"
CJC-Amcha national president Rabbi Avi returned just the day before from Israel, where he comforted families of the previous Palestinain terror outrages in Kibbutz Metzer and Kiryat Arba/Hebron.
"Our eyes are full of tears, our hearts are broken, gathering when so many of our brothers and sisters were murdered," Rabbi Weiss declared in an emotion-soaked voice. "Just three days ago, I was Kibbutz Metzer in Israel, a leftwing kibbutz which has an ongoing dialogue with Arabs.
"You walk into the home of the mother who was murdered with her children by a terrorist less two weeks ago. You see toys and bikes of little children. Then you walk into the kids' bedroom, of 4 year-old Matan and 5 year-old Noam. There, in the wall, are the bullet holes. Bentzi, the kibbutz secretary, said: 'It was here that their mother, Revital, held her children close and begged the terrorist for mercy, only to be mowed down.'
"In today's outrage, the suicide bomber knew that schoolchildren traveled on the bus. We're here because we can see with our eyes and feel in our hearts the lives of little children brutally taken by the murderers.
"We think not only of the victims but of the horror of those who commit the crime. They sing and dance on the blood of our brothers and sisters. I turn to my my Moslem colleagues asking, where are your voices? Where is your condemnation? We turn to Secretary General Kofi Annan of the UN: where are you? If you stand by as innocent blood is shed, you become complicit."
"1938 was Kristallnacht; the world didn't believe what was unfolding. We hear daily warnings - there's a new Kristallnacht, threatening not only Israel, but America and the world. Unless we focus on the horrors of the victims, the murderers and the silence of bystanders, this new Kristallnacht will turn into something much more serious."
Oliver Koppell, who initiated a New York City Council resolution calling upon the federal government to declare the PLO a terrorist group and thus shut down their UN Mission, told the cheering crowd: "It is impossible to contemplate the horror of people killing little children as a way to accomplish political objectives. What we ourselves must do is stand fully behind the State of Israel. We must continue our efforts here to get the PLO to change or to get out of the City of New York."
Speakers also included CJC-Amcha vice-president Rabbi David Kalb of Westport, CT. and 16 year-old student Abigail Marcus of the Kushner Yeshiva High School, which brought a busload of students to the demonstration.
*****************
What happens to the buses that are involved in
Palestinian genocidal terror attacks?
The grisly remains at Egged's 'bus graveyard'
Etgar Lefkovits
Sep. 1, 2002
Buses blown up by terrorists are brought to the "bus graveyard," the Egged garage in Kiryat Ata near Haifa, to be examined and dismantled.
There you can find the remnants of tragedies like bus no. 960, which was making it way to Jerusalem from Haifa on April 10 when a bomber blew himself up inside, killing eight people.
The charred skeleton of the bus, its roof, bottom, and windows missing, looks like a war relic in the depot.
Metal pieces, cloth from what used to be seats, and personal belongings lie on the ground amid broken glass and bloody plastic gloves and boots. Nearby, you can see the remains of the bus no. 361 that was blown up at the Meiron junction on August 4, killing nine passengers.
One row over, completely unrecognizable, is the burnt out bus no. 823 which was blown up on March 20 at the Musmus junction in Wadi Ara, in an attack that killed seven.
There have been nine suicide bombings on Egged buses in the last year and a half, while four additional bombings were prevented at the last minute, according to the bus company.
Since Palestinian violence erupted nearly two years ago, more than 100 passengers have been killed in attacks on Egged buses, and 600 have been wounded, the company said. One bus driver is among the dead; 20 were injured in the attacks.
After a bus is attacked, it is covered with a sheeting and towed, under cover of darkness, to the Kiryat Ata depot, chosen as Egged's center for bombed buses since most attacks have occurred in the North.
"The following morning, workers from Zaka (Disaster Victims Identification) come to the depot to look for the pieces of human flesh that they have missed at the site of the attack," says Shmulik Dadon, the garage's manager.
Nothing, Dadon says, compares to a bombed out bus. "It is such a horrible feeling, which is renewed every time such a bus is brought in," he said Saturday.
"It's not like anything you see on TV, where you see things from a distance, because here, far from the scene of the attack, and amid the quiet here, everything is up close and personal," he said. He said the buses arrive with a lot of damage which is not discovered at the scene of the attack.
"You see the pieces of human flesh, the personal belongings, and the smell which does not dissipate for 48 hours or more. You just stand there frozen in place."
After Zaka is finished, security officials search the bus for clues, including information on the bomb, its size and the type.
Dadon says that two of his men can take apart a destroyed buses within ten days, but that it usually takes months since work only begins after the security officials give their approval and the Tax Authority files compensation forms.
Some of the buses like the one from the Merom junction come is such a state that nothing can be saved, not even the wheels or part of the engine, he said.
"Some buses come in so utterly destroyed that you cannot recover even one screw," he said, pointing to the green bus.
Wallets, cellphones, bracelets, even IDF insignia lay amid ripped apart chairs metal wire on the ground.
Relatives of victims often come to visit the bus on which their loved ones died, and Dadon is quick to remove stray cats who gather nearby, smelling human flesh.
The parents of two young girls who were killed recently came to the site.
"They stood here for a long time, they sat near the bus, and wept. Hours later, they finally left," he said. ******************
The Aftermat
h by Judy Lash Balint
Kiryat Arba/Hebron-- Yossi Zarman and David Marguiles don't look as if they would be friends. Yossi, is a native born Israeli in his late twenties. He is handsome, soft-spoken, with short dark brown hair, clean-shaven dark skin and eyes that are deep with sorrow and pain. Yossi wears a dark blue pea coat over a sweater and jeans and no headcovering. David, a French immigrant, is younger. Tall and thin, with long straggly blond hair and payot (sidecurls) he's dressed in baggy cotton pants and shirt and a large knitted kippa.
But in the aftermath of the ambush between Hebron and Kiryat Arba last Friday night, Yossi and David are "brothers, not only friends," as Yossi says. They are both members of the Kiryat Arba civilian emergency response team called out when a terrorist started shooting at the IDF jeep that escorted worshippers walking between the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and their homes in nearby Kiryat Arba.
The two men are standing in the lobby of Hadassah's Ein Kerem hospital. Miraculously, neither one was injured in the firefight. They are here, as I am with Rabbi Avi Weiss who has flown in for the day from New York, to visit the four wounded men recovering at the hospital.
It's evening, and we have all spent the day in Hebron at the site of the tragedy. The words spill out of Yossi's mouth. "What hurts us most is the portrayal of who we are and the media's horrible spin on things," he says, his large brown eyes staring off into the distance. "Look at us--we're not crazy religious fanatics. We ran from our homes to save soldiers, to defend Kiryat Arba. We didn't think twice about it--we just ran forward."
In Yossi's opinion, the Kiryat Arba-Hebron attack was one of Israel's most difficult battles. "It's not always about numbers. The Arabs were shooting from every side. I know that they must have been preparing for a long time for such a fight. They must have rehearsed it and prepared for months. There's no way the people living all around there didn't know what was happening."
He goes on to describe the horror of that night. "I saw my friends lying there mortally wounded with death in their eyes. All I could think of was how can I go back home without my friend, my brother?"
David says that now they just want to be busy--not to have to think about what they saw in the battle.
As they talk, I try to picture the scene, but it's hard to square the images painted by David and Yossi with the activity I saw earlier that day in the area between Kiryat Arba and Hebron. At first glance, driving the short distance between the two cities, all looks normal. Arab kids play by the side of the dusty road as if nothing out of the ordinary had occured there. But when we turn onto the path that Kiryat Arba people used to walk back from Hebron, the scene is far from normal. The football field size area is a hive of activity. A Beit Midrash (study hall) is in full operation. Dozens of teenagers sit around plastic tables learning. One area is set aside for prayers. A few feet away, a few tents have been pitched and further on, three or four freight containers have become temporary homes to young couples who have moved down from Kiryat Arba. On one slope above the site, the apartment buildings of Kiryat Arba are visible--Arab houses sit atop the other three sides of the hill. Media crews, foreign and Israeli, are scattered around, trying to grasp the idea that anyone would want to live in a container as a reaction to the murder of other Jews.
The Christians I was with got it instantly. Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America, and five other leaders of the organization, insisted on visiting Hebron when they arrived in the country just after the ambush, on a 4 day visit. "We're not afraid of terrorists," Ms. Combs said, in her southern accent. "We understand this response to terror. Y'all just have to stand your ground," she told some of the young people who gathered around as the group walked through the area. Hugging a shy young boy, Ms. Combs announced that Hebron would be in her prayers when she returned to the US.
A couple of hundred yards away from the encampment is the alley where the gunfight took place. An IDF jeep blocks the entrance, but in the house next door, an Arab family is sitting on the balcony. Arab houses are on both sides of the ally, and it's easy to understand what Yossi Zarman had explained. "What happened on Friday night was a carefully planned military operation, " he said. "They must have rehearsed it and run through it several time--there's no way the people living in those houses could not have known what was going on."
Back at Hadassah Hospital, Moshe Frej lies sedated in intensive care. His brother, a teacher at Kibbutz Shaalvim, sleeps fully clothed on a bench in the waiting room. He hasn't left the hospital in four days, since Moshe was brought in. A few floors up, Alex Benzikry's mother sits by her son's bedside waiting for a positive word from his doctors. On the second floor, the son-in-law of Kiryat Arba Yeshiva head Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, lies quietly in his bed. He too is a member of the civilian emergency response team called away from his Friday night meal to rescue soldiers under fire. He hopes his leg wounds will be sufficiently healed so that he'll be back home for this Shabbat.
There wasn't really time to digest the aftermath of the Friday night ambush before the cowardly murderer from El Khader blew up Egged bus #20, full of grandmothers and schoolchildren the following Thursday. Just hours after the bombing, the Christian Coalition group decided to ride that same #20 bus route from downtown Jerusalem toward Kiryat Menachem, the site of the attack. I went with them to Hadassah--to visit victims of indiscriminate hatred--again.
Judy Lash Balint, Jerusalem
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