Israelis are famous for being addicted to the news. We have radio newscasts every hour, on the hour – unless, like me, you have your radio permanently tuned to Kol Hamusica (קול המוסיקה – The Voice of Music), Israel’s classical music and jazz programme, more or less equivalent to the BBC’s Radio 3. In that case, your daily news consumption is limited to hourly broadcasts between 6 am – 9 am, and then you can remain blissfully unaware of what is going on in Israel and the rest of the world until the 2 pm broadcast. If you managed to miss that one too, the next broadcast is at 8 pm, with a final roundup pf the day’s events at midnight.
Sometimes, especially when I have something planned for the evening, like a concert, or a visit to the opera in Tel Aviv, I switch off the radio and go and lie down for a long nap in the afternoon, and it isn’t until midnight that I get a chance to catch up on what has been going on.
Maybe it’s better that way. So often, lately, I have returned from a day devoted to trying to forget, for a few short hours, the relentless campaign of terror being waged against us, only to learn, once again, that there is no hiding place from evil. How could I have enjoyed Die Fledermaus last Thursday evening (February 18th), knowing that earlier that afternoon, there had been a deadly terrorist attack in a supermarket in Sha’ar Binyamin, just north of Jerusalem and that a young husband and father , 21-year-old Tuvia Yanai Weismann had been murdered – stabbed to death while attempting to protect other shoppers from two teenage “Palestinian” terrorists. Although a member of the IDF, Yanai (as his wife called him) was home on leave and was out shopping for Shabbat with his wife and baby daughter, and was unarmed. The two terrorists, who continued their rampage and seriously wounded another Israeli, were eventually neutralised by armed citizens.
I knew nothing about this, having had the radio off all afternoon, and it wasn’t until riding home in the taxi, at midnight, planning the blog I intended to write about the opera, that I heard the bitter news.
If you live outside Israel, and are dependant on foreign media for your news, you probably won’t have heard about this at all. If you have, the headline probably gave precedence to the fact that the two teenage “Palestinians” (the terrorist murderers) were shot, and that one of them later died. If you read past the headline, all you would probably have learned about the Jewish Israeli victim was that he was an IDF soldier (albeit off-duty) and a “settler”.
But the victim had a name. He had a family. He was someone’s husband, someone’s father, someone’s son.
Tuvia Yanai Weissman leaves a young widow, Yael and a baby daughter, Netta.
May God avenge his blood.
THE VIEW FROM THE PALACE 