An almost inconceivable number of workers were waiting outside the entrance gate to the Barkan Industrial Park at 7:30 Tuesday morning. Two days after a brutal shooting in which Palestinian terrorist Ashraf Walid Suleiman Naalwa murdered Ziv Hajbi and Kim Levengrond Yehezkel and wounded Sara Vaturi, thousands of employees were lined up, pushing in an attempt to reach their places of work. Their employers were stranded and forced to wait hours for their workers, who arrived tired after the long hours of waiting outside. A few security guards wearing bulletproof vests were trying to keep order as everyone got used to the new entry process. So much for coexistence - hello to new stringent security checks. All because of the attack.
"Up until two days ago, it took less than five minutes for the workers to get in. Now it takes an hour, at best. I've been here since 5:30 a.m. and only 30 of my 60 employees have gotten in. There are 4,000 workers here," Arie, who owns a factory in the Barkan zone, tells Israel Hayom as he stands by the tiny gate bottlenecked by a crowd of thousands.
"The security guards aren't prepared for this. For 30 years, nothing happened here. Nothing went wrong. It was a one-time event. I live in Kfar Saba [in central Israel, minutes from the Green Line] and there have been six terrorist attacks near my house. Did Kfar Saba fall apart? ... With us, everything went back to the way it was two minutes after the attack. Everything depends on the workers. People higher up handle the wars, but ordinary folks want to keep working and earning a living," Arie says.
Herzl, who also owns a business in the Barkan Park, joins the conversation. He looks at the long lines of workers with frustration.
"Instead of [them] starting work at 6:30 in the morning, they start at 10," he says. Half of Herzl's workforce are Palestinians, and naturally, they're discussing the new difficulties at work, too.
"One crazy guy screwed everything up," Herzl says, bitterly quoting what they've been saying.
'Thank you for saving my life'
The terrorist attack at Barkan came only three weeks after Ari Fuld was murdered in a terrorist stabbing at a commercial plaza at Gush Etzion junction. Despite the fact that the attacks took place 130 kilometers (80 miles) apart, and one was committed using a knife while the other was perpetrated with an automatic rifle, they are linked by much more than coincidence. The contact between Jews and Palestinians at both Barkan and Gush Etzion is described as "coexistence," and sometimes comes under criticism by the Right for precisely that reason. And there are terrorists who have made it a goal to tear apart any chance of such coexistence and drive the area into war.
This week, when I reached the blood-soaked Gush Etzion junction, I saw almost no trace of what happened a few weeks ago between the local branch of the Rami Levy supermarket and the small strip mall. Children were running around fearlessly, Palestinians and Jews were shopping peaceably alongside each other. After the stabbing, IDF soldiers began patrolling the area on foot. Some of them were busy buying themselves shawarma at the same stand where the terrorist bought lunch moments before he carried out the fatal stabbing. Two Palestinians were eating at a table outside a small pizzeria. No fear, no tension. Just another day at the Gush Etzion intersection.
One person is having trouble readjusting - Hila Peretz, who owns the shawarma shop and who was nearly a victim of the stabbing. Fuld saved her when he began pursuing the attacker and, against all odds, shot him with his last remaining strength.
"Thank you for saving my life," Peretz wrote on large posters she hung on the doors of her business, along with Fuld's picture. To the left is a large sign on the floor, exactly where Fuld was stabbed, where people have written messages about the victim. Memorial candles placed in the shape of a Star of David have been there since he was killed. Peretz kept the shop closed for the duration of the shiva to honor the man who saved her.
After she finishes serving the soldiers, she comes out and sits down across from me, a few meters from where the worst moments of her life occurred. She looks sadly at the place where Fuld collapsed.
"The terrorist bought a falafel from me. A guy wearing a hoodie, who didn't arouse any suspicion, like any kid. He was a child, 16 or 17, like thousands of others who come here. He was always looking left and right. He was sitting on the railing, right across from me, for 40 minutes," she says.
Suddenly, she noticed that he was no longer sitting outside, and her gaze was drawn to the left, to the person who turned out to be Ari Fuld, who was talking on his cell phone with his back to the terrorist, who was standing right beside him.
"Then suddenly he pulled out the knife," Peretz says, her face pale.
"I saw it glinting in the sun. I can't stop thinking about it – why didn't I yell earlier? He stabbed Ari. I heard the scream, and then the terrorist looked at me, took out the knife with blood on it, and started to run toward me. If I hadn't run away, he'd have stabbed me in the head. Ari ran after him and took him down, and I ran into the shopping center. I fainted and woke up with some woman hugging me. My first question was what happened to Ari, because he'd been stabbed in the heart. I didn't care about what happened to me. Only a few minutes later I realized he was gone," she says.
Peretz doesn't cry, but her sad face shows her pain. A Palestinian passes her on his way to the supermarket and her eyes trail him. She doesn't trust anyone anymore.
"I've been here for five years and I've been through all the attacks, but it was always outside, never inside the shopping area. People always asked, wasn't I afraid? And I always said I was in the safest place in the world, that I had soldiers, security, cameras. At the moment of truth, there was nothing."
I point out that the shopping plaza is as busy as ever and ask Peretz if she thinks people here still believe in coexistence.
"Maybe people have realized that we need to show the Palestinians that it's ours," she says.
"On the other hand, it can't be that a person gets up in the morning, buys a gun, and goes out to kill. The brain can't process that. Our government can't do nothing every time someone gets killed. We have a defense minister who should remember where he comes from [Avigdor Lieberman lives in the settlement Nokdim], not go soft on them."
'Enormous harm'
At the entrance to the Barkan industrial park, workers are slowly making their way inside. Here a car with a green Palestinian Authority license plate passes by, there a Palestinian is drinking his first cup of coffee between wooden pallets and heavy machinery. Khaled and Assad, two local men, are sitting on the curb outside the factory where they work, waiting for their boss to arrive. This is Khaled's first week at Barkan, and he is clearly in shock at what he has encountered. At 22, it is difficult for him to explain concepts like coexistence, and he is just hoping things stay quiet.
"We just want to work," he says in broken Hebrew.
The photographer and I make our way into the quiet industrial zone and reach the street where the Alon Group's recycling plant – the site of Sunday's shooting – is located. Usually, 350 Jews and Palestinians are busy at work. Today, the site is quiet. Through the fence, factory manager Eran Bodenkin informs us that the business is closed and no one is allowed in.
"We are rethinking things," he says, his face full of regret.
"The business is closed until further notice."
Outside the gate black and white obituaries tell the sad story.
"I arrived just as the terrorist escaped," Bodenkin says.
"I went upstairs right away to see if I could help the wounded and I called the paramedics. It was a very serious attack. Our hearts are bleeding. There's never been a terrorist attack here, and our factory stood for coexistence. Now we're brokenhearted and there's a lack of trust. It should have been the Palestinians' primary interest to protect their living, and a bad weed ruined everything," Bodenkin says.
"You need to understand that the workers here are checked by security and approved for entry, but in this specific case it wasn't enough. Now we're reassessing the situation to see what more we can do to ensure the safety of our workers," he says.
Bodenkin, who lives in Petah Tikva, thinks that Palestinians and Jews shouldn't stop working together.
"We're here, that's a fact, and they're here, that's a fact, and both sides need to make a living, which is also a fact. Someone who is providing for his family has no desire or leisure to go and ruin that. As long as the status quo exists, there is no reason to change anything. We did that in Gaza – we disengaged and left, and without saying whether that was a good thing or not, in the end we wound up with thousands of rockets being fired at Israel."
All sides are lost for answers. On one hand, there is a desire to maintain the existing formula, but on the other hand the fear sown by terrorism is leading to drastic measures. In the past few weeks, the fences that came down after the last major wave of terrorist attacks at Gush Etzion have been put back up, and security at Barkan has been significantly increased after Sunday's shooting. More and more voices are calling to keep Palestinians away from these areas, while others demand that nothing be done to harm the tenuous coexistence and that life alongside each other be allow to go on as much as possible. Peace through economics, some say; deceptive calm and a pressure cooker waiting to blow, others think.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians are trying to understand the new situation, too, and to try and overcome the difficulties and get used to the new routine.
"I've been working for my boss for 15 years, and on [Muslim] holidays I get a permit to enter Israel, go to the beach, and visit him at his home," says Khaled Muamad, who works at a clothing factory next to the building where the terrorist shooting took place.
"This morning was insane. It took me almost two hours to get in. I don't know if things will go back to normal. It will take time. The shooter did enormous harm. Even now I can't believe it happened," Muamad says.
Bodenkin says he's been getting phone calls from Palestinian employees, "weeping over what befell them and the idiot who took their livelihood away."
"They tell me explicitly that they'd catch him and kill him, because he took the food out of their children's mouths. They feel that he harmed them and send their condolences. We've been closed since the attack. Everyone is hurt, everyone loses."
Things will presumably get back to normal at Barkan, but it will never again be possible to say that there has never been a terrorist attack at the complex that once symbolized coexistence. The employees will come back to work, the new security measures will become a habit and more efficient, and friendships will continue. But there will always be Israelis who look over their shoulders and wonder whether their quiet Palestinian colleague on the other side of the floor is a friend or someone who will bring a weapon to work and set out on another terrorism spree.
Back at Gush Etzion junction, people are already accustomed to the painful reality. This is where Yaakov Don was murdered in 2015, Dalia Lemkus was murdered over there in 2006, and this is where Ari Fuld was murdered last month.
"It's really hard for me to come, because it throws me back to the terrorist attack," says Peretz.
"I don't know if it's coexistence when a Jew has been killed every week for years," she says.
"After the attack, everyone who works at Rami Levy came by to offer their support, but it's impossible know what will happen. We and they [Israelis and Palestinians] continue to come here. They [Palestinians] aren't afraid, but I am. In the end, it's impossible to really separate ourselves from them. You can't uproot them like trees. They're here, and so are we. If only it were as simple as some people claim. We need to find a solution to bring an end to this."
