A last look at 5771

Five major stories from the past year: Social protests; Naksa violence; Chilean miners; Fogel murders; Carmel fire.

By MELANIE LIDMAN, BEN HARTMAN
Haredi man in front of tents in Jerusalem 521 (photo credit: Reuters)
Haredi man in front of tents in Jerusalem 521
(photo credit: Reuters)
Social protests
When Daphni Leef posted a sarcastic message on Facebook that due to ever-increasing rent for her Tel Aviv apartment she was pitching a tent on Rothschild Boulevard, no one could predict the upheaval of Israeli civil society that gripped the country for the entire summer.
First, tents sprouted up like mushrooms across the country, from major population hubs such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to smaller cities from Eilat to Kiryat Shmona. Then other causes joined the fray, demanding a change in everything from nursery school and the cost of living to public housing, gas prices and public transportation.
Pundits said the Arab spring had caught on in Israel as well, and it certainly felt like the country was finally waking up and demanding something different. The protests started off attracting mostly students but culminated in the March of a Million on September 3, which drew 400,000 Israelis to the streets in a series of protests in one of the largest demonstrations the country has ever seen.
The official response from the government was to create a committee to examine the demands raised by the protesters, led by Manuel Trajtenberg. After a summer of communal living, the students and demonstrators voluntarily dismantled most of the tents on September 4, insisting that the protest needed to evolve into a more sustainable stage. But dozens were arrested in Tel Aviv and Holon when the respective municipalities tried to clean out the tent cities, and hundreds of homeless families with nowhere else to go are still living in their tents.
In Jerusalem, 100 homeless activists waiting for public housing broke into an abandoned dormitory to try to turn the building into public housing, but they were evicted two weeks later and forced to return to their tents.
Though the tents have been folded up as summer turns to fall, the activists are adamant that the civil passion that gripped the country this summer will continue to force the government to take action.
Naksa violence
Every spring around Independence Day, Israel braces itself for possibly violent reactions to Al Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” as Palestinians have named May 15, the anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel.
But this was no ordinary spring. After watching Arab residents across the region in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and even parts of Jordan rise up in revolution, the spirit of protest was in the air.
Tension began on May 13, the Friday before Nakba Day, with rioting in the Silwan neighborhood that left 17-year-old Milad Sayish Ayyash from Ras el-Amud dead. There was also rioting on Saturday, during Ayyash’s funeral.
On the 15th, east Jerusalem was “much quieter” than expected, police said, with 36 arrested in skirmishes in Isawiya, Shuafat, Kalandiya and A Tur.
The real surprise of the season was “Naksa Day,” or “the setback,” which Palestinians observed on June 5, the anniversary of the Six Day War, which had never been a day known for widespread demonstrations. In Jerusalem, 40 people were wounded in clashes in Kalandiya, mostly from tear gas inhalation, as 250 demonstrators tried to march towards the Dome of the Rock for prayers before being stopped by soldiers.
However, attention was mostly focused on the northern border, where more than 30,000 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese tried to illegally cross the border near the Golan Druse town of Majdal Shams.
Syrian TV reported that 20 demonstrators were killed and 225 wounded in the attempted infiltration.
Palestinian activists had said that the Nakba and Naksa Day protests were part of a triple punch of protests. The third protest, on July 8, was the Flightilla protest, when 124 pro-Palestinian activists attempting to disturb the peace were deported after flying into Ben-Gurion Airport.
Chilean miners
The entire world watched with bated breath last October as the most dramatic rescue in recent history was completed: 33 miners, trapped for 68 days 700 meters below ground, were brought back to the surface. As each miner fell into the embrace of his loved ones and more than one billion people tuned in to watch the rescue, the entire world was ecstatic with the celebration of something so purely wonderful and happy.
Immediately, Tourism Minister Stas Meseznikov invited the miners to Israel for a “journey of thanksgiving.”
“Your bravery and strength of spirit, and your great faith that helped you survive so long in the bowels of the earth was an inspiration to us all,” Meseznikov wrote to them.
Twenty-three of the 33 miners took Meseznikov up on his offer, arriving in Israel on February 23 with their wives or girlfriends. Their whirlwind trip started in Jerusalem with a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where many Catholics believe Jesus was crucified and buried in the cave.
“It is a great honor for us to be here because the God who rescued us from the bowels of the earth is the God who brought us here, and we are so grateful,” said miner Jose Enriques inside the church. “It is amazing to be here, in this place, to be able to thank God for what he did for us.”
Though the visit to the church was inundated by the media, which outnumbered the miners by a ratio of 4- to-1, the Tourism Ministry was thrilled that their visit to Jerusalem was covered by dozens of major international news outlets.
A recent article in the UK’s The Guardian, written a year after the initial mine collapse, revealed that most of the miners are taking medication and struggling psychologically with flashbacks, and some are facing severe poverty as the negative side of fame threatens to tear them apart.
Fogel murders
Udi and Ruth Fogel and three of their six children – Yoav (11), Elad (four), and Hadas (three months) – had finished Shabbat dinner only a couple of hours earlier on March 11, when they were stabbed to death in their home in the settlement of Itamar by two Palestinian youths from the nearby village of Hawarta.
The killings instantly joined the pantheon of horrifying terror attacks suffered by Israelis in recent years, and in short shrift became political fodder in Israel’s hasbara campaign.
Days after the killing, Diaspora Affairs and Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein made the controversial decision to release some photos from the crime scene, saying that they show “what Israel is up against.”
Also, The Government Press Office blasted CNN for using quotation marks on the words “terror attack” in the story’s headline, even though at the time it had not been determined who had carried out that attack or why.
The Fogel home also became a sort of pilgrimage spot for Israeli politicians and foreign supporters of Israel, who saw the massacre as emblematic of the dangers facing Israelis and the hatred of Israel’s enemies.
To some, the security failures that allowed the attack to occur indicated that while many Palestinians in the West Bank feel helpless in the face violence from settlers, many in the West Bank settlements feel that the Israel Defense Forces has failed in securing their communities.
Carmel fire
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu looked rattled and distressed at the University of Haifa command center on the night of December 2, hours after the Carmel wildfire began to wreak havoc on the north of the country. By the time Netanyahu addressed the nation from the improvised field command center, the fire, the deadliest in Israel’s history, had already taken the lives of more than 40 Israel Prisons Service cadets and police officers, and no end appeared in sight.
The Carmel blaze quickly put the nation’s fire and rescue services in war mode and exposed to the public of the “start-up nation” how outdated the country’s emergency response infrastructure is.
The fire was eventually put out after raging for four days, mainly due to an outpouring of assistance from dozens of countries including Greece, Turkey, Switzerland, Russia, Bulgaria, the US, the UK, and even the Palestinian Authority, which sent fire trucks and personnel to battle the blaze. The efforts received a great boost after Israel procured the services of the Supertanker, a converted Boeing 747 that took to the skies above the Carmel and dumped water and flame retardant below.
Like the Second Lebanon War, the fire raised a large number of questions about the emergency preparedness of the home front. It led to calls for Netanyahu to sack Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas), whose ministry is in charge of emergency response services. Also, the fire caused Israelis to ponder how a country with a state-of-theart military and hi-tech sector could be caught so unprepared in the face of a national disaster and have to rely on the international community to bail it out.