P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator in Beersheva, Israel. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com.
“With the winds of change blowing through the Arab world, it’s more urgent than ever that we try to seize the opportunity to create a peaceful solution between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” President Obama said yesterday after meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres.
Peres’s visit is widely regarded as a groundbreaker for a visit in May by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is expected to come under a mounting tide of pressure on the Palestinian-state issue, culminating in a Palestinian attempt to secure UN recognition of a Palestinian state in September.
Meanwhile a poll by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found that one-third of Palestinians approve the attack in the Israeli West Bank community of Itamar in March. In the attack five members of the Fogel family—the parents as well as their 11-year-old son, 4-year-old son, and 3-month-old daughter—were stabbed to death in their home.
Four decades ago America was shocked by the Manson murders, in which intruders shot and stabbed to death four adults and a teenage boy at the house of actress Sharon Tate in Los Angeles (Tate, one of the stabbing victims, was eight months pregnant). One can imagine the horror Americans would feel toward any society one-third of whose members would approve the Manson murders. On the scale of horror, the Itamar massacre, given the ages of three of the victims, was even worse.
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