Not very sensational any more, is it? Arab guy gets on bus and kills a bunch of innocent people... Man, those goddamn murderous Arabs are so inhuman, et cetera...
Well, not today. Today the victims were Arab-Israelis and the terrorist was a 19-year-old rogue Jewish soldier who had just recently settled in the West Bank.
As far as the media reveals at this point, ordinary secular boy Nathan Zaada found Orthodox Judaism around 2003, and changed his name to Eden Tzuberi along with that shift in faith. Recently he has shared the strong opposition, common among orthodox Jews, to Sharon's current Gaza pullout plan1, set to be carried out from the 15th of this month after the past two years of intense political struggle.
Two weeks ago, Zaada/Tzuberi - still a soldier, albeit with a history of miscellaneous troublemakings and trouble-havings - left a letter to his commander, stating that he could not bear to serve in an army that would deport2 Jews. He spent the time since then hiding in the Jewish settlement of Tapuach in the West Bank, and according to some testimonies, walking around saying he would do anything to stop the Gaza pullout.
Today he put on his IDF uniform, took his IDF-issued gun, and boarded the bus to Shfar'am - an all-Arab town where Muslim, Christian, and Druze Arabs live together on exceptionally good terms. Around 18:00 he started firing, killing four people (some of them outside the bus), and wounding a few others. Soon afterwards the bus was stormed by passing security personnel who brought Tzuberi under control and took his gun.
Tzuberi met his death by lynching; The mob surrounding the bus beat him to death as soon as the security people left him alone.
Now for some more opinion: We've seen Baruch Goldstein kill innocent Palestinians during prayer in 1994. We've seen Yigal Amir kill Itzhak Rabin for his significant progress towards peace in 1995. We've seen other right wing nuts commit horrible crimes before that; we've seen many others try and fail in between and afterwards. Now we see Tzuberi, the latest Jewish suicidal terrorist, and I think we're too quick to write him off as a singular maniac. Some people need to rethink their value system and tame their propaganda considerably, but like hell they will.
The, uh, funny thing is that I was going to write up Jewish supremacy, but thought I was exaggerating the severity of the situation and shelved it. Then came this attack and reminded me it only takes one maniac with a gun who takes his Judaism far too seriously.
1 This deserves a node of its own; Perhaps under Disengagement plan?
2 Opponents of the pullout plan, mostly the settlers themselves and those who would like to identify with them, are leading a massive campaign rejecting the existing Israeli establishment and its decision-making process; they do so using utterly fallacious arguments and catchy misleading slogans, i.e. they call their peaceful relocation from a wrongly occupied territory into the legitimate borders of Israel "deportation" and other terrible names. Again, this should be under Disengagement plan.