Suicide Bombers Then and Now
"The Amorites who dwell on that mountain… pursued you as the bees would do and struck you." (Devarim 1:44)
In recounting, in this week's Torah portion, the abortive attempt of the ma'apilim to enter Eretz Yisrael after being condemned to forty years in the wilderness, Moshe compared the Amorite attackers to bees. Rashi explains that just as the bee dies upon burying its stinger into a victim, so too did the Amorites die upon striking the Jews.
And now for a modern suicide killer story.
Knesset Member Aryeh Eldad (Ichud Leumi) recently distributed a story about an Arab woman from Gaza who was hospitalized in Beersheva after her family burned her because she was suspected of misbehavior. At the time he was head of the plastic surgery department at the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem and was asked to supply skin for the recovering patient from the hospital's National Skin Bank. She was successfully treated by an Israeli doctor and was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.
One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt intended for exploding herself in the outpatient clinic where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that they would forgive her for her sin.
Only by communicating to a hostile world that the war between Jews and Muslims in Eretz Yisrael is, in Eldad's words, "a war between civilization and barbarism" can we eliminate foreign pressure which threatens our hopes for Israel forever.
