Shelly Dadon hy''d
Shelly Dadon hy''dCourtesy of the Dadon Family

A memorial service was held on the one-year anniversary of the murder of 20 year-old Shelly Dadon on Sunday, in her hometown of Afula. 

Police found Dadon's body in an abandoned Migdal Haemek parking lot on May 1, 2014 (the anniversary being marked Sunday is for the Hebrew date - the first date of the month of Iyar - which does not align with the Gregorian calendar on the same date every year - ed.).  

Dadon had no criminal record; she had been on her way to a job interview but but had not made contact with her family for several hours. Family say she tried to make contact, saying she was being strangled. When they found out that she had never shown up for the interview, they contacted police. Her body was found a short time later by patrolmen.

Terrorist Hussein Yousef Khalifa launched a gruesome and premeditated attack on Dadon. The indictment stated that Khalifa "showed no mercy" on the 20-year old, whom he stabbed dozens of times for "nationalistic motivations." Dadon was recognized as a terror victim shortly after the indictment was filed. 

At the memorial ceremony, Jewish Home Chairman Naftali Bennett compared Khalifa to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. 

"There is no difference between the Iranian President wants to kill us - without a common border and without having done anything to him - and a taxi driver and a villain who kills a child who has done nothing to him," Bennett stated Sunday. 

Bennett said there is no point in looking for a reason why the Arabs want our destruction.

"Our job at this point in history is to make sure they will not be able to do it - not in Afula, and not in Natanz," he said.

Bennett then expounded on last week's Torah portion, Shemini, which describes the High Priest Aaron mourning over the untimely death of two of his sons. 

"One of the famous sayings regarding Aaron's response when he was told his two sons had died is that he was silent," he reflected. "The Torah taught us the power to keep quiet for some moments in life and history is very important force. It reflects the awareness that there are things which are too difficult for us to process emotionally, things too enormous for our understanding." 

"When you can speak - this means that you can understand," he added. "But some things, like the death of our sons, words cannot describe, and then you reach the higher degree of silence." 

Regarding Dadon, '' We cannot understand how a girl can be beautiful, sweet, kind, and leave a job interview and be killed." 

"A terrible silence caught me when I heard about Shelly's murder," he said. "A heavy silence. But in the case of Shelly, we must not remain silent when that it was possible to correct the terrible injustice." 

Bennett reminded the public of the storm surrounding Dadon's murder, wherein the police refused for months to declare it a "terror attack" and were heavily accused of covering up the murder for political purposes. 

"Shelly's murder was the turning point in which the State of Israel internalized that you cannot release murderers - ever," Bennett explained. "One thing happened as a result of Shelly's terrible death: we didn't give up. Over the year we upheld the promise we made here to pass a law that would deprive the ability for murderers to be pardoned, a law that would allow the possibility for life sentence without a parole, so that vile killers will know that they die in prison." 

"We are compassionate - sometimes too compassionate," he continued. "We are moral, sometimes risking ourselves for our morality. But the moment of truth, the people of Israel know how to stand up and say: 'No.' Shelley's murder was such a moment, a moment of saying 'no.' The moment when we realized that we have limitless enemies, cowards all of them." 

"The enemy names public squares after killers, pays their salaries in prison," Bennett stated, referring to the Palestinian Authority (PA).  "We have an enemy sanctifies death, and we sanctify life."

"We will continue to live, and Shelly's memory will remain in our hearts forever."