Yossi Sarid on Tel Aviv Gay Killings

Not exactly a political issue but in Israel social tensions often are politics: if you missed it, on Saturday a masked, black-clad gunman entered a central Tel Aviv center catering to young gay and lesbian Israelis and opened fire with an automatic weapon, killing two young people and wounding 15 others. The Israeli media coverage has been heavy, but certain things are left unsaid, or rather are revealed in code. Two points to note in most of the reportage: officially it is said the incident was a hate crime and "did not have a terror motive," (translation: it's an Israeli shooter, not an Arab), and the shooter used "an automatic weapon such as an M-16 rifle." (The M-16 uses 5.56mm ammunition. The AK-47 in common use by the Palestinian authority and other Palestinian groups is generally chambered for 7.62mm.) (The M-16 is standard issue for the Israel Defense Forces but is also widely held by reservists, which means most Israelis.) So the unspoken message of these code phrases is this was an Israeli, not an Arab, shooter, and thus probably a fundamentalist Israeli opposed to open gay associations.

Veteran leftist politician Yossi Sarid has an opinion piece in Haaretz on Israel's "hollow tolerance." It's worth a read.

One of Israel's strengths is its willingness to openly confront its own society's contradictions. As Sarid notes, Menahem Begin years ago made jokes in the Knesset about attempts at toleration; Netanyahu, for all his faults, has condemned this apparent hate crime.