Israel on screen and off

My young son, David, spent a night in the middle of last week at Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petach Tikva. A hospital isn't a fun place for a child. Or for an adult. Schneider hospital must be a really special place for my son to say when he returned home after a night in intensive care, "Dad, the hospital was fun." One of the people who helped my son feel better was a devoted, professional nurse, a resident of Kafr Qara at the southern end of Wadi Ara.

Schneider hospital has magical abilities: It turns sick children well (the job of every hospital, you might say), but it also turns Arabs, ultra-Orthodox, settlers, Bedouin and people from any other sector into human beings. Here, it's not important where you're from. Here, it's important where you're going, and that you go there as soon and as healthy as possible. Would you have believed that such a thing exists in the "apartheid state" of Israel?

No one at Schneider this week brought up the Arab sector's responsibility for the Tel Aviv terrorist, just like no one looked for a connection between the religious Zionists and the perpetrators of the atrocious attack in Duma. The medical staff at Schneider left that luxury to some of my media colleagues, who were slightly unhinged last week, mostly because of the attack at the Simta bar on Dizengoff Street carried out by an Israeli Arab from Wadi Ara.

It was a week in which the attack received unprecedented coverage (Tel Aviv notwithstanding); it was also a week in which the police and their new commissioner, Roni Alsheikh, were the target of sharp criticism for their supposedly faulty performance; and it was also a week in which a columnist in Haaretz, the thinking people's newspaper, decreed that the commissioner was behaving strangely: "He called on the State of Tel Aviv to get back to normal and not worry." And what's wrong with that? Maybe -- or on second thought, certainly -- that same columnist didn't know what the police chief and the Shin Bet security agency knew? The police's goal was to arrest not only the terrorist, but also those who helped him.

But just a minute, we still haven't gotten to the main point: Our dear columnist, who represents many of our friends, gave us a key sentence in his creation: "The person who really scared us was none other than the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], who brought his podium along with him," and continued, "Bibi is busy with incitement." Thank God, we can sleep soundly at night. Sorry, Nashat Milhem, but as far as some of my colleagues are concerned, the real terrorist this week was the government.

Today, now that we know a bit more about the chain of events since the abominable attack in Tel Aviv, we know that the terrorist Milhem went back to where he came from immediately after the attack and hid out there, not far from his family. No, he wasn't in the West Bank, as a senior analyst in a competing paper explained on Friday. And yes, there were people helping him. He wasn't on his own this week. Yes, there were people -- friends or relatives -- in Wadi Ara who knew he was there and kept quiet. Remember: We're talking about a terrorist responsible for the murder of three people.

You can't help but wonder about the public's responsibility for the acts of individuals. "Are the settlers in Judea and Samaria guilty for the Duma arson? Are the Arabs of Israel co-conspirators in the Tel Aviv attack-" Rabbi Menachem Brod discussed the issue in Chabad's "Weekly Talk," saying: "While some officials on the Left and certain media outlets aren't satisfied with pointing an accusing finger at the settlers in Judea and Samaria and even toward the government as being, in their eyes, responsible for the arson attack in Duma, those same officials go crazy trying to make it clear that the Tel Aviv attack must not be blamed on the entire Arab population, and that we're talking about an exception that does not apply to the general."

Which leads us to the main question -- does the public have the right to isolate the deeds of an individual and claim that it bears no responsibility for them? There is of course a difference between direct responsibility and the need to tighten a few screws to ensure that such acts will not happen again, Brod writes.

We always like to look outside and make comparisons about how wonderful things are abroad and how messed up everything is there; how wonderful it is in other OECD countries and how bad things are at home. So, yes, we would prefer a different reality, without terrorism and without wars, but we have people we can depend on, and a week after the Tel Aviv attack the terrorist was killed, while the eighth terrorist from the November attacks in Paris is still at large.

This week the government was put on the spot for not working to confiscate stolen guns circulating in the Arab sector. This week, the murderer should have been separated from his community, and it was also a week in which the prime minister was the target of harsh criticism for demanding that all citizens of the state be loyal.

Six months from now, my son is supposed to go back to Schneider for a checkup. How lucky that we can see this country for ourselves, and not just through the lens of the media.

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