Murder in Jerusalem by Batya Gur Page A

me,” he answered slowly, emphasizing every word, “mismanagement by the police could once again bring about tragic—”
    The Finance Ministry’s director general shifted in his seat and waved his hands. “Ex cuse me, I am terribly sorry,” he insisted, “but when a small group of individuals decides to take the law into its own hands, the police have no choice but to—”
    â€œThey don’t have any choice either!” Danny Benizri shouted.
    In the newsroom, all eyes were on the monitor. “Whoa, has Benizri totally flipped out?” Elmaliah the cameraman asked, his mouth full. He laid the rest of his sandwich on the edge of the table and said, “What’s he arguing like that for?”
    A look of absolute loathing on the face of the director general shone through the television monitor. “Excuse me,” he sputtered angrily at Benizri, “with all due respect, you are the correspondent for labor and social affairs, are you not? Not a spokesman for the workers. It seems to me you are meant to remain neutral, don’t you think?”
    Danny Benizri started to say something but Nehemia, after touching the transmitter once again, laid his hand on the reporter’s arm. “Just a moment, sir,” he said to the director general, and to Danny he said, “Danny, please, I’m asking you…let’s watch for one moment a documentary film you made about Hulit one year ago, for Arye Rubin’s program The Justice of the Sting …”
    But the director general refused to remain silent. He pointed an accusing finger at Danny Benizri and exclaimed, “This is outrageous, sir, simply outrageous the way you are speaking to me here!”
    Salvation came from the control room, where the director cut into the discussion to run the film showing events that had taken place at the Hulit bottle factory one year earlier. Before Nehemia had a chance to say a word or announce the transition, on the screen there appeared a woman on a roof, shouting. Only someone who had been completely attuned to the program would have known that this was not taking place live.
    Utter silence fell on the newsroom, until Hefetz went to the telephone, dialed, and said into the mouthpiece, “Pass me to Dalit.” A moment later his shouts could be heard everywhere: “Why are there no captions? People will think this is happening now! I want him to announce again that this is footage from the archives! Take care of it, you hear me?” He turned to Niva, his face red with anger, and shouted at her. “See? You wanted a woman to be news editor?! Screwup after screwup! Am I the one screwing up here? No! Did you see who’s screwing up? Did you or did you not?!”
    But Niva remained unflappable. She smiled slightly and said, “Oh, yeah? And a man would have pulled it off better?”
    In the meantime, Hannah Cohen could be seen and heard on the factory roof; at the bottom of the screen ran the caption, FROM OUR ARCHIVES, an overlay to an earlier caption: HANNAH COHEN, HULIT BOTTLE FACTORY, SOUTHERN ISRAEL. “Every morning for six months I’ve been coming to his office like a dog, I say, ‘Pay us our wages, this isn’t charity, it’s for the work we’ve done,’ and he, he says, ‘Come back tomorrow, come back tomorrow.’ Well, that’s it, there are no more tomorrows! They sit in their villas, they drive Volvos, and we don’t have food for our kids. No more tomorrows—what am I supposed to give my kids to eat?” People could be seen at the foot of the building, gazing up at the roof. Next, the screen showed policemen knocking at the door to the roof and threatening to break it down if the protesters tried to block it with their bodies, until finally the policemen did break the door down and the protesters were pushed backward. Some were shouting, “Don’t you dare come closer,” and others