OPINION: A Pesach to remember, but it’s for all the wrong reasons

Dinner on Friday night at our Tel Aviv hotel, where we were staying for Pesach, was an absolute zoo. There must have been easily 500 – 600 people, all trying to eat at once and catch the eye of the harassed waiters and waitresses.

Languages from everywhere and nowhere could be heard: a group of Sephardim led what sounded like a football chant on one side of the vast dining hall.

The atmosphere was relaxed and jolly: the sound was of the diaspora enjoying itself. Yes, there was renewed tension on the Temple Mount, but that was Jerusalem. Here in Tel Aviv, all was calm.

Within an hour, all that changed. Some people went out to walk off their massive meal. They would have been gently strolling across the Tayelet, the seafront promenade along the city coastline, home to runners, cyclists and dog-walkers from day to night.

From our room, suddenly, we heard what sounded like fireworks. Improbable, I said, though in Tel Aviv it’s always better to expect the unexpected. But soon there was the wail of police and ambulance sirens, as a terrorist incident played itself out in real time across the street from our balcony.

An Israeli Arab drove at a group of people walking on the Tayelet, killing one young Italian man and injuring seven more, some of whom — though this is purely incidental — are British tourists.

Earlier in the day the news had filtered through of the murder of two British-born sisters in a terrorist attack on the West Bank.

Not fireworks, but gunshots. The would-be killer — for let us not mince words, that is what he was trying to do — is said to have taken out a rifle from his car before veering on to the grassed area that skirts the beach.

Though all other traces of the attack have been removed, the tyre tracks which his car gouged into the grass are still visible.

Around 40 separate police cars drew up in and around the petrol station on the main road. Soon the TV cameras and the reporters showed up. It’s become a sadly well-known and practiced scenario, in which everyone knows his or her part. The Israeli Arab was “neutralised”— cop-speak for ‘shot dead’.

Since my daily round more generally figures somewhat pedestrian activities, rather than crazed shooters, there was an element of surrealism about the whole dreadful event. And yet Tel Aviv — like Israel as a whole — took the attack in its stride.

On Saturday night after Shabbat, crowds of thousands gathered in cities all over Israel to make the point, for the third month running, of their anxiety and antipathy to the proposed “reforms” put forward by the Netanyahu government.

For the Tel Aviv protesters there was an extra piquancy to their event. It began with a minute’s silence and a giant poster featuring Netanyahu as Pharaoh, with the appropriately Pesach slogan ‘Let My People Go’.

Many commentators have already laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Netanyahu government, describing its leader as “Crime Minister”.

In this new administration’s short time in office, one thing is true — its achievements are few to recount, while the glories of the “Start-Up Nation” appear to have been lost in a welter of international condemnation over the shambolic extremist coalition.

None of this helps the family of Alessandro Parisi, whose memory should be for a blessing.

Nor does it help the Dee family, bereaved of two daughters and a mother.

This certainly is a Pesach to remember.

• Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist.