Being on vacation provides the luxury of sleeping in. On Thursday, those few stolen moments were shattered upon waking to a few missed calls and a slew of WhatsApps asking if the family was OK.
Anyone in Israel knows the drill by rote. Something bad had happened.
A quick glance at the breaking news updates, the tweets, the pushes, and the haze quickly melted away. A terror attack on Highway 1 - the main highway connecting my city of Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem at the daily traffic backup leading to the security checkpoint at the top of the winding hill that leads into the Naomi Shemer tunnel under the Mount of Olives into the Mt. Scopus intersection in Jerusalem.
Palestinian terrorists with automatic weapons opening fire on sitting duck commuters. Eight were wounded, one killed. Shooters subdued. Fellow commuters who understood an attack was taking place and acted quickly were heroes.
We’ve repeated the scene so many times - pre-October 7 and since that fateful marker in the history of Israel. This time though, there was something else. Thursday’s terror attack took place - to paraphrase Michael Corleone in The Godfather II - where my wife drives, where my children travel, where I pass nearly every day of the week.
A personal affront
If every other terror attack against Israelis wasn’t already a personal affront, this one felt particularly egregious.
The thousands of daily commuters on Highway 1 are an amalgam of residents of Ma’ale Adumim (with over 40,000 residents, one of the biggest cities in the West Bank), nearby communities of Kfar Adumim, Alon, Kedar, and Dead Sea hamlets, and lots of Palestinian motorists from Jericho, Azariyah and nearby towns.
My son-in-law, who lived for six years in Ma’ale Adumim until October 8, once explained to me that every time he drove up Road One to the checkpoint, he carefully looked at all his fellow drivers to his left and right.
“I never knew if one of them wasn’t going to look over and start opening fire on me. That’s no way to live,” he said.
Since October 7, my family has been torn apart. That son-in-law, my daughter, and granddaughter, unable to handle the violence, left the country. Another living on a kibbutz in the north was displaced to the center, and a third was called up to the IDF for three months of milium.
Ironically, a few hours after Thursday’s attack, everyone was going to be back together for a family life cycle celebration that provided an answer to Palestinian terror. It causes death, and destruction and destroys the beauty of the world. But although it might bend us to the limits of human capacity, it’s not going to break us.
In another irony, the terror attack took place against the backdrop of international efforts to push Israel into recognition of a Palestinian state. If anything demonstrates that such a drive, at this point, is delusional and will only cause more terror, grief, and death, it’s an incident like Thursday’s.
Shooting at sitting duck commuters just trying to get to work in the morning is not the way to bolster confidence in a partnership for a future two-state agreement. On the contrary, it pushes it so far off the map that prospects of it happening will crawl ahead at a pace that will make the Highway 1 traffic jams seem like the Indy 500.