The week that was

November 5, 2009 - 9:27 AM by David · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, War

true crime The pace of news events developing and exploding into headlines is always seemingly propelled by steroids here in Israel. There’s never a minute to rest, and the news addiction that most of the public suffers from isn’t helped any by half hour radio bulletins, that annoying beep beep beep of the hourly news reports and nightly hour-long TV newscasts that are holy in some households.

But even veteran observers are hard pressed to remember a week of news events – aside from wars and intifadas – that rolled in like a tsunami, pushing the previous one off the front page with an ease that is creepy and disconcerting.

First up at the beginning of the week was the disclosure that police had arrested an American immigrant – Yaakov Teitel – a resident of a West Bank outpost on suspicion of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and carrying out a string of previously unsolved hate attacks against other targets, including planting a pipe bomb outside the home of prominent left-wing Israeli professor Zeev Sternhall which injured him, and sending a bomb package to a family of messianic Jews from Ariel, seriously wounding their 15-year-old son.

This was huge news and the media covered it from every angle, from settlements spawning extremism to questioning whether the Law of Return which enables all Jews to immigrate to Israel should be reconsidered, or at least more stringent.

But no sooner had we started to digest this horrific news, Israelis were presented with something even more uncomprehensible the next day. The police announced they had caught the suspect in the brutal murder of six members of a Russian immigrant family in Rishon Lezion last month. It was considered the worst murder case in Israel’s history, with many pundits speculating that it involved the Russian mafia and a hired killer.

However, police said that the suspect, Damian Karlik, 38, who was arrested with his wife, parents and two other female relatives, killed the Oshrenko family because he had been fired as a waiter a couple months earlier from the family’s restaurant.

Dmitry Oshrenko fired Karlik, who was headwaiter at the Oshrenkos’ high-end restaurant Premier, after accusing him of stealing a bottle of vodka. Karlik said he felt humiliated and began to nurture his hatred for his former boss. Expressing no remorse at the murders, which included two young children, Krilik allegedly bragged to the police that he was a “bad motherfu**er.”

Disoriented at the front pages of our newspapers being turned into True Crimes magazine, we felt things returning to ‘normal’ yesterday with the disclosure of a dramatic high seas capture by Israeli naval commandos off the coast of Cyprus of the “Francop”, an Antigua-flagged freighter packed with 3,000 Iranian rockets and shells headed for Hizbullah in Lebanon.
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If it had achieved reaching its destination, the shipment would have provided Hizbullah with almost the entire rocket arsenal they unleashed against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Israeli sources say the shipment violates not only the UN Security Council resolutions from the 2006 war, but also those that forbid Iran from engaging in any arms exports. More importantly, it shows how Iran is attempting to incite the region, coming a day after Hamas in Gaza tested an Iranian-supplied rocket that has a range to reach Tel Aviv.

But hey, these are headlines that we’re familiar with -Iran, rockets, terror. However, by this morning, I found myself yearning for one of those days when the worst thing that could happen was The York Yankees winning the World Series, or narrow-minded citizens from my home state of Maine repealing same sex marriages. Both of those items are indeed reflections of a sorry state of affairs, but I’ll take them over the world gone crazy pace of news events we’ve had to put up with this week here in Israel.

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