What do you say to someone who just tried to murder you?

I felt sorry and sad when I saw the 16-year old Arab girl lying in the road after she was shot. She was someone’s daughter and she could have had a life.

She stabbed a soldier getting off a bus at Mevo Dotan in Samaria and tried to stab another. After she was shot, the soldiers called for medical assistance. Before it arrived, one or two of the soldiers or civilians present cursed her, told her to die and called her a particularly offensive name in Arabic (video here). She received first aid, and was evacuated to a hospital where she later died.

Gideon Levy thinks this incident illustrates our depravity:

There wasn’t even one soldier there with a shred of compassion or humanity. One has to recognize the magnitude of hatred felt by soldiers of the occupying army towards the nation they lord over. One has to see the extent to which they’ve lost their humanity. How can anyone be joyful over a dying schoolgirl? Cursing someone suffering like that is no less evil than shooting her.

The article claims that she was left to bleed to death and not offered medical attention, which is false. The video is less than a minute long. It did not show her being treated at the scene and placed in the ambulance.

But the most important way in which Levy distorts the truth is this. He wrote:

One has to recognize the magnitude of hatred felt by soldiers of the occupying army towards the nation they lord over.

It has nothing to do with “occupying” and the soldiers don’t see themselves as “lord[ing]” over another “nation.” All of that is ideology projected on the inside of Levy’s eyelids.

What the soldiers feel (ask any soldier) is that here is another one of the countless Arabs with knives, or meat cleavers or automobiles, who have taken the lives of 49 and injured 737 in the last two years, in 386 separate attacks. Or perhaps they have longer memories and are thinking of the 1,323 who have been murdered by bombs, guns, knives and vehicles, since we tried to give away Judea, Samaria and Gaza in 2000. And this one has just spilled the blood of one of your friends in an attempt to kill him.

Maybe she thought she wanted to die or maybe – who knows what she thought? But she took a knife and stuck it into a soldier, and changed from a schoolgirl into a terrorist. She changed herself from someone’s daughter who could have had a life into an instrument of death, no less a terrorist than those that butchered four rabbis and a policeman at a Jerusalem synagogue one Tuesday morning, or the ones who murdered five members of the Fogel family (2 adults and 3 children, including Hadas aged 3 months). She was just less competent.

She made an existential decision when she cut into that soldier’s flesh, and there is a price for that action, a price that everyone knows.

The Arabs are responsible for this conflict, and they have been responsible for the countless times they murdered Jews long before the founding of the state, for the wars they started and lost, for the thousands of Jews (and sometimes Arabs) murdered by terrorism, and now for the cynical and astonishingly evil practice of indoctrinating and inciting their children to kill.

This is where the real depravity lies, not with the soldiers who must protect themselves, but with those that orchestrate the Palestinian educational system, praise “martyrdom” for their cause to impressionable young people, provide hero’s welcomes (and funerals) for terrorists, name squares, soccer fields and schools after them, and then send children out to kill.

Yes, she should not have been cursed while lying critically wounded, but what do you say to someone who just tried to murder you? Yes, it is a shame that a young person who could have grown up to have children and grandchildren of her own will now only be a memory. But even a 16-year old can make very permanent choices, and with the help of the society that molded her, she made hers.

Maybe the Palestinian Authority will name a school after her.