Dr. Orit Galili-Zucker, who headed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s political communication team between 2011 and 2013, has caused an uproar on Facebook by blaming baby Chaya Zisel Braun’s parents for “irrational” decisions that cost their daughter’s life when a terrorist ran her over.
Galili-Zucker also drew a parallel between the Brauns and the trekkers who died in Nepal, and even invoked Operation Protective Edge in her analysis of “extreme” behavior that she thinks is typical of religious Jews.
“Of the five people involved in the tragedy in Nepal: the two who froze to death in the snow, Tamar Ariel and Nadav Shoham, and the third, Eitan Idan… are from the religious Zionist stream,” noted Galili-Zucker Thursday.
She went on: “What attracts the youth of the religious Zionist sector, so soon after Protective Edge, in which they were a non-marginal majority [sic], to take such extreme decisions, in the sense that they are so far geographically from Israel in the and the matters that preoccupy it daily at this time[?] Are their views and involvement only recently in Protective Edge (which is reflected in Ofer Winter’s battle order) not part of the endless loop of cycles of war, death and the lack of a horizon of normal life in the state of Israel?”
She then linked her ruminations to the latest terror attack in Jerusalem: “And yesterday, when a three month old baby found herself involved in a terror attack and paying for this with her life, and her grandfather, who doesn’t even live here, receives too much media time and expresses with messianic pathos her tour of the Kotel and the Temple Mount – the thoughts arise again, about the public discourse that does not enable a different line of thinking, aside from the hysterical religious and nationalist Jewish reports.”
“The thought that is missing from the discourse will not let go: do hareidi parents, like the young people from the religious Zionist stream, the seekers of extreme experiences in Nepal, make irrational decisions that are not connected to the Israeli reality and throw us into an endless loop of infinite death festivals, which the media pounces upon for clear reasons of rating?
“Did the parents who took their baby daughter not take into consideration what every parent in Jerusalem must take into account, and ask himself how to avoid unnecessary friction in routes that are dangerous for his children? Is there not a minimal understanding that it is dangerous to travel in Jerusalem in the places they traveled to with a three month old baby girl?”
Galili-Zucker received over 1,000 comments, most of them very angry and hurt, for the post. She wrote 72 hours later that much of the criticism was “brutal” and “violent” but did not retract any of her statements. She noted with sadness that many of the fiercest attacks on her came from women.
Many of the comments noted that the terror attack in which Chaya-Zisel Braun was murdered took place at Ammunition Hill in north-central Jerusalem.
Galili-Zucker was appointed as a senior adviser to the prime minister although she had accused Jewish leaders in Judea and Samaria of “dealing in blood” following the murder of five members of the Fogel family of Itamar. She accused the Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Council in particular of being “devoid of rational arguments, full of messianic-spiritual rhetoric, and pathetically obsessed with measuring the number of inches and the smear of the pornographic color red in media reporting on the attack.”
