Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
In Israel, a day without an attack "is a miraculous day," and a public eager for escapism turns to soap operas.
Sep 13, 2001 | Suddenly Israel, the scene of religious intolerance and repeated bloody explosions, has become a model country, a showcase for what perhaps awaits Americans as they learn to live in the shadow of terrorism.
Not that there's much here to envy. In Israel, car trunks and handbags are systematically searched by security guards at the mall. People carrying large objects, wearing loose, baggy clothes or an Arab complexion are viewed suspiciously. And "single young woman, traveling alone" is an airport security profile not a personal ad.
Most of all, living in a country plagued by terrorism means sacrificing a degree of personal liberty for a greater sense of security and constantly calculating the risks involved in carrying out ordinary activities such as driving, shopping and eating out.
After a series of bombs blew up buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1996, boarding a bus in Israel has seemed foolhardy. For the past year, since peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians disintegrated, the "Russian roulette" metaphor has extended to driving cars with Israeli license plates on roads in the West Bank (dozens have been ambushed) and strolling down the shopping areas of Israeli towns.
Each person has his own way of managing fear. Take Menashe Tsabag, 35, a lawyer in downtown Jerusalem, who works about 300 yards from Sbarro, the pizza parlor where a suicide bomber killed 15 and wounded 130 others on Aug. 9, and just a few blocks from Mahane Yehuda, the covered market that has also been a magnet for terrorists in the past. Tsabag went to the covered market recently to buy pineapple (much cheaper than if he had gone to a smaller, safer grocer), but stayed clear of the most crowded stalls. On his walks downtown, Tsabag usually avoids Jaffa Street, Jewish Jerusalem's main artery, too crowded for comfort, but yesterday made an exception to his self-imposed rule to visit a friend. "I walked the street from one end to the other with the sensation of the edge of a knife in my back," he said.
Many Israelis like Tsabag attempt to put order in the chaos wreaked by terrorism by taking what appear to be basic precautions, as sensible as respecting a road's speed limit or driving sober. But that order rapidly crumbles in the face of the randomness of terrorist attacks. "Frankly, every day that doesn't have a terrorist attack is a miraculous day," said Tsabag. "If someone really wants to commit terror, he can't be stopped. Jerusalem is a territorially unified city. The distances are so close between where we work and eat and the [predominantly Arab] Old City."
"I'm not going to leave Jerusalem because of terror," said Tsabag. "There are attacks in Tel Aviv and Netanya too. You live wherever you have to. It's not fatalism, it's real. Wherever you go, you could be hit."
Yaron Ezrahi, a political analyst based in Jerusalem, believes terror attacks have different impacts on different sectors of Israeli society. "People who have a certain sense of the inherent fragility of human existence, people generally with a higher education, have more resources to deal with terror. They go to concerts, read books. They cope with resilience, with fatalism or with escapism," he said.
Escapism, in particular, has become a dominant trait of Israeli society. People in Tel Aviv are famous for "partying on," no matter what, and have earned the sprawling Mediterranean city a reputation for defiant debauch that presumably drives fundamentalists mad. Less flamboyantly, Israeli TV viewers have started to tune out the terror. Soap operas are up, news programs are down. On Sunday, when a rash of Palestinian attacks killed five Israelis and two suicide bombers in three separate incidents, Channel 2, a national TV channel, interrupted its normal programming to cover the bloodletting, only to see its ratings dramatically drop.
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