United In Grief

"[Three-day-old Amiad Ish-Ran had] managed to unite the nation of Israel [like few others had done before him]."
"You brought so much light. And with all the light that you brought [Amiad Yisrael] we will extinguish their darkness."
Rafael Ish-Ran, grandfather, Jerusalem

A funeral was held in Israel for the child of Amichai and Shira Ish-Ran, who were injured in a drive-by shooting on Sunday. The baby died after being delivered prematurely. (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

"They were normal people standing at a bus stop."
"Brand new, young couple, have their own little place, they're renting -- everything you would think of for a nice, normal, young family to be."
"And then it all got destroyed by this terrorist."
Jordan Charness, Montreal lawyer

Wedding Day

Nothing normal, however. They were Jews. Jews living in Israel. Dual citizens; Canadian-Israeli. Targets. Normalization is not viewed favourably by the Palestinian Authority. Normalization means accepting the presence of a Jewish state in an Islamic geography. Islamic theology has it that land consecrated to Islam must never fall to another religion; it is forbidden by Sharia law. Palestinians who sell land to Jews can receive the death penalty. More likelier extra-judicial penalties of immediate death, bypassing and dispensing with the annoying interference of a trial.

The presence of Jews in territory that Palestinian Arabs claim as their own although they also claim the territory on which Israel has been established as their own -- represents an enormous abnormality. One that must be 'resisted' as a hateful 'occupation' of Palestinian heritage. The ancient biblical presence of Judea and the Israelite thousands of years of residence in a geography whose history is chronicled through many sources, both biblical and chronologically historical of the time becomes meaningless and expendable in Palestinian claims of pre-historically occupying the land.

Palestinians throw rocks as Israeli soldiers conduct a search for suspects of a shooting attack in the West Bank City of Ramallah, Monday, Dec. 10, 2018. (Majdi Mohammed/The Associated Press)

Before the Almighty revealed the final scriptures of sacred instruction to the faithful, antedating Jewish regional history, it was all consecrated to Islam. Jews, according to Arab Palestinian authorities, have always been illegal occupiers, millennia distant to the present. So when 30-week-pregnant Shira Ish-Ran with her hisband Amichai waited at a bus stop outside a the West Bank settlement of Ofra along with a group of other Jews it was only logical that they be ambushed by gunmen opening fire at them from a moving vehicle.

The gathered crowd of Jews scattered immediately; recognition of an impending atrocity comes easily to these people who have experienced so many of these killing sprees either personally or through the personal accounts of friends and family, for everyone has mourned those deaths and the survivors' recoveries have become legendary. When the 23-year-old rabbinical student Amichai looked back to see his wife on the ground, he leaped to shield her from the rain of bullets.

Shot three times in the leg, his wife, 21-year-old teacher-in-waiting, shot in the back. They survived, hospitalized, sedated, undergoing surgeries and a gradual recovery. Their son was delivered by Cesarean section with the hope he would live, and he did, for three days. Their baby, wrapped in a prayer shawl, surrounded by family, was last seen by his parents from their hospital beds, then was buried at Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem.

The baby Amiad Yisrael was murdered by 29-year-old Palestinian Salah Barghouti a member of the terrorist group Hamas. Salah Barghouti was taught from the time he was an infant -- through school curricula, through plays and television, through the 'normal' life of Palestinians incited to hate Jews and to pledge their futures to the 'liberation' of Palestine from the unworthy hands of Jews -- to become a martyr in jihad, to restore Palestine in its entirety, that 'Palestine' that was always associated with Jews called Palestinians. Now he has become one such martyr.

Amichai Ish-Ran's brother, a member of the IDF, watched live via surveillance footage as the shooting occurred, reacting by sending emergency personnel urgently to the scene. "He didn't know it was his brother, because it's not that detailed a camera", explained Montreal lawyer Charness, both young men's Canadian uncle.

Shira and Amichai Ish-Ran (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

"During the three days our baby lived, he united us —secular, religious, ultra-Orthodox, right and left wing, who came to support us. I'm proud to be part of this nation,"