J.J. Goldberg, the former editor of the excellent Forward newspaper, makes a terrific point here.
If you listened closely, some of the condemnations of incitement sounded an awful lot like, well, incitement. Ron Nachman, mayor of the major West Bank settlement-city of Ariel, blamed the attack on “incitement” by Israeli human rights advocates and urged new restrictions on them. David Wilder, a spokesman for the Jewish settlers in Hebron, wrote that the real source of incitement was “Jewish leaders who are willing to again abandon our land and our people, ‘returning’ all the heavily Arab-populated cities in Judea and Samaria to monkeys dressed up as people.” Yes, monkeys dressed as people.
Wilder also seemed to blame Netanyahu himself — or, as he put it, “Jewish leaders who continue to espouse support for declaration of a ‘palestinian state,’ planning to announce these intentions within the next couple of months in Washington.” There is speculation that Netanyahu is considering making such an announcement in favor of a Palestinian state within interim borders.
Israelis have suffered more than their share of terrorist attacks over the years. This time, though, the response seemed to have shifted up a notch. In large part this was due to the butchering of an infant. The rational mind recoils at the depravity of the act. Politicians, journalists and rabbis struggled to come up with words to match their revulsion at the seemingly inexplicable. (Though an explanation for such acts was offered in 2009 by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, dean of the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in the neighboring settlement of Yitzhar, a few miles west of Itamar, in his book “The King’s Torah”: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately.”)
Indeed, as Goldberg noted, Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote about this kind of thing in his chilling poem, Al Hashechita (On the Slaughter), written after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
“A proper revenge for the blood of a little child/
Satan has not yet devised