On Sunday evening, when the details of the allegedly Islamic State-inspired truck-ramming attack in Jerusalem that afternoon were beginning to take shape, I received a phone call from a friend in distress.
Unlike so many of our peers that day, neither she nor I had been directly affected by the terrorist atrocity, in which an IDF officer and three officers’ course cadets were murdered and another 15 wounded. And she was not suffering from a common form of anxiety experienced when the loved ones of others are killed or injured.
”I have had it with leftists,” she said.
Since she is not exactly a rabid right-winger herself — and though I was deeply upset by the tragedy I had just spent hours reading and writing about — I laughed. What, I wondered, brought this on?
She told me that she first learned of the attack from a mutual friend whom she encountered while out running errands.
”The blood of the victims wasn’t even dry yet, and the only thing that woman had to say was, ‘It’s so awful; now Bibi will go up in the polls.'”
Again I chuckled, this time at my friend’s naive outrage at something I have come to take for granted: Whenever something bad happens, including a rainstorm at an outdoor wedding, blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and bemoan his electoral popularity.
But it is not only members of the Israeli Left who respond to every ill that befalls the Jewish state by bashing it and its leaders. My compatriots on the Right have a similar tendency, albeit from the opposite point of view.
Sunday’s attack gave expression to the latest example of this phenomenon on both sides of the political spectrum.
To understand the way Israelis — as all human beings — automatically translate every event into the language of their ideology, one has to review the facts of the truck-ramming, as they have unfolded, based on security camera footage, eyewitness accounts and other evidence collected at the scene.
At approximately 1:30 p.m., a large group of cadets on a weekly educational outing that is part of their training to become officers arrived at the Armon Hanatziv promenade and began to disembark from their buses.
