Israel copes with fear
Published 9:00 pm Friday, August 10, 2001
The Washington Post
JERUSALEM – Israelis Friday buried the victims of a suicide bombing at a pizzeria, including five members of a family of Dutch immigrants, and grasped for ways to carry on the rituals of daily life in an atmosphere of fear.
Funerals took place throughout a stiflingly hot midsummer’s day for the 15 people, six of them children, killed when a Palestinian detonated a bomb packed with nails inside the crowded Sbarro restaurant Thursday.
“I cannot ask why, but I can ask how long, oh God, how long?” said Israel Meir Lau, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, at the funeral of five members of the Schyvanschuurder family – parents and three children, ages 14, 4 and 2. A daughter who was injured attended in a wheelchair, accompanied by medical workers who gave her intravenous treatment during the funeral.
The father of the dead woman, Tzirel Schyvanschuurder, who along with his wife survived Nazi death camps at Tiersenstadt and Auschwitz, said, “At last we came to Israel, we were able to go through all that hell, the hell of the camps … and we thought we had come home.”
He rebuked the Palestinians in words that expressed the feeling among Israelis that the Arabs are to blame for the past 10 months of conflict and killing. “We met murderers who are worse than the Germans,” he said.
Some residents of Jerusalem have abandoned the rituals of city life. “I try not to drive near buses. I try not to go to the center of town. We do a lot of things at home instead of going out,” said Gila Bashan, 43, a secretary and mother of three.
One young mother said her 8-year-old boy asked, “Mom, is it dangerous to go to all pizzerias, or just that one?”
The pain of the funerals overshadowed reaction to the government’s response to the bombing. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took significant political steps to reduce Palestinian influence in Jerusalem. In a predawn raid, Israeli police closed Orient House, a mansion in a central Arab neighborhood that was a nerve center for local Palestinian leaders, and replaced the Palestinian flag atop the building with the blue and white Israeli banner.
Sharon’s government portrayed the takeover as a way to pressure Arafat to arrest suspected militants. “The activity is meant to force the Palestinians to fulfill commitments to fight terror,” said cabinet secretary Gideon Saar.
