A 23-year-old Israeli Jewish man walked outside the IKEA store in the Haifa suburb of Kiryat Ata Tuesday and was stabbed in the back without provocation by another Jew who mistook the victim for an Arab.
Revenge Stabbing Attack In Haifa Leaves Jewish Man Hospitalized
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
A 23-year-old Israeli Jewish man walked outside the IKEA store in the Haifa suburb of Kiryat Ata Tuesday and was stabbed in the back without provocation.
An onlooker tried to stop the assailant, at first believed to be a Palestinian terrorist, but failed.
A store security guard then fired several shots at the fleeing attacker, missing him but striking an innocent bystander in the arm.
When the guard started shooting the assailant stopped running and police arrested him shortly afterward.
Ha’aretz reported the attacker wasn’t a Palestinian terrorist – he was a 36-year-old Jewish resident of Kiryat Ata with a criminal background who stabbed the 23-year-old because he mistook that 23-year-old Jew for an Arab. Not for a specific Arab who had previously wronged him, not for a known Palestinian terrorist, not for a person known to be dangerous. Instead, in the assailant’s mind, the assailant’s victim didn’t need to be any of those things to be a legitimate target. He just needed to be Arab.
But the attacker was mistaken. His victim wasn’t an Arab. He was just a Jew who went shopping at IKEA along with hundreds of other Israeli Jews and Arabs. And now he’s lying in a hospital bed suffering in pain, classified in moderate condition, all because yet another Israeli Jew tried to stage a revenge attack on any Arab he could find to send a message with the slash of a knife.
Like the right-wing racist mobs that increasingly roam the streets of Jerusalem after terror attacks and beat up (and occasionally try to kill) random Palestinians, an individual victim’s guilt or innocence does not matter.
Instead, all that matters is the person is an Other. Any rough proximation of that Otherness suffices, and sometimes that rough proximation leads to incidents like the one in Kiryat Ata, where the victim stabbed turns out to be your neighbor.