Some friends of mine -- including a couple of Penn alumni -- were invited to a wedding scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 10.
Instead they got a funeral.
On Tuesday night, hours before her wedding, 20-year-old Nava Applebaum and her father David, an American surgeon who had just returned from New York, were murdered.
Rational society does not allow innocent people to be murdered, but Palestinian terrorists and their sympathizers will tell you that Nava and David were guilty of a crime. Their crime, being born Jewish, merited the death penalty, just as it has for 897 others in the last three years (as of Oct. 19) and for millions of others throughout history.
On a Friday night last month, Jews around the world sat down to a Rosh Hashanah dinner. In the Israeli settlement of Negohot, dinner at the Avraham home was interrupted by a knock at the door. When Eyal Yeberbaum answered the door, he was confronted by a Palestinian murderer who promptly shot him and 7-month-old baby Shaked Avraham at point-blank range.
A lot of media discourse in the United States has revolved around what term should be used to describe the perpetrators of attacks like those that killed Nava, David, Eyal and Shaked: terrorists or freedom fighters, suicide or homicide bombers. I refer to them in a way that everyone could agree is accurate: murderers.
Those who target and kill innocent civilians are murderers.
The previous sentence should be unnecessary, because it should be obvious. Unfortunately, in these jaded times, it often is not.
Fortunately, Israel, like all democracies, has a formula for arresting murderers and putting them in prison. It is for that reason that Mahmoud Hamedan and Ramed Abu Salim were in Israeli prisons six months ago.
But this summer, the government of Ariel Sharon decided to release Hamedan and Abu Salim. Though the U.S.-sponsored "road map for peace" said nothing about prisoner release, Sharon went above and beyond his duty and released known murderers in the hope that this might lend strength to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who was struggling with internal political foes.
To educated Americans, Sharon's move seemed foolish. Releasing murderers for political expediency is not a principle of moral democracy. Sharon's prisoner release quickly resulted in world condemnation. The irony, of course, is that the condemnation fell on Israel, not because it was releasing men whose principal goal in life was to murder, but because it wasn't releasing enough of them!
Let us be clear: the men in Israeli jails are not political prisoners that Israel holds as some form of "revenge" for previous terror attacks. Democracies do not throw men in jail for political reasons. Every man that Israel has arrested has been a suspected or confirmed murderer or accomplice to murder.
But this summer, Israel released Mahmoud Hamedan and Ramed Abu Salim, among hundreds of others. Israel did not release all the suspected murderers currently incarcerated, merely the ones it thought were least likely to sustain a threat to Israelis.
But Israel guessed wrong. On the night before Nava Applebaum's wedding, Abu Salim entered Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem and murdered seven people, including Nava and David. On the night of Rosh Hashanah, Hamedan entered Negohot and murdered Eyal Yeberbaum and baby Shaked.
Eleven people died as a result of these two events. Only nine of them should have been on the streets in the first place.
What I write today has nothing to do with politics. Settlements, refugees and borders are all political issues that should be debated in an open forum. This is a legal issue, and a moral one. There is no legal rationale behind allowing criminals to walk free for political purposes. Those who commit murder belong in jail.
The U.S. government pressured Israel to release these men, as well as many others. It continues to press Israel to do so.
Some friends of mine -- including a couple of Penn alumni -- have been invited to a wedding in Israel scheduled for December. Ensure that this wedding takes place. Call your congressmen and senators and have them tell Israel that murderers belong in prison and that Israel must keep them there.
Alexander Chester is a College sophomore from St. Louis Park, Minn.
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