Sweating the small stuff too
Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival
While it’s the big news that gets all the headlines, sometimes it’s the small stuff that’s the hardest to sweat. Last week, terrorists attacked along the Israel-Egypt border just north of Eilat. The ensuing days have been filled with IDF strikes and Gazan counterattacks. More people have died.
Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the seminal rap-rock band HaDag Nahash was playing a concert at Sultan’s Pool as part of the annual Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival. Our 17-year-old daughter Merav had a plan to dance up a storm with her friends at the show. She got all dolled up, then received a phone call.
“There’s a terror alert in Mamila (the mall that is adjacent to Sultan’s Pool). Everyone’s been ordered to get off the street and hide in the stores. There are police everywhere. It’s really serious,” her friend on the phone said.
“What should I do?” Merav asked us. “I want to go…”
“…but you don’t want to die,” I finished her sentence.
“Right,” she responded.
We checked the news. There was indeed a “high alert” going on in Jerusalem, but it was mostly along the highways entering the city from the north and west – Highway 443 was reported to have back-ups for up to 10 km coming towards the checkpost from Modi’in. But nothing written about trouble in town.
“If they’re locking down the mall, they must have some good lead,” I speculated.
“Maybe I could get to the concert from the other side,” Merav offered.
“No, they’ll have closed everything,” I said.
“And the other way is kind of dark,” Merav remembered. “Oof, this sucks! I really like HaDag Nahash.”
“And I really like you…alive,” I replied. I wish I were trying to be ironic.
Merav sat in the kitchen, now with two of her friends. While we’d tried to leave the decision up to Merav (with some strongly worded parental advice), one of her friends had much stricter marching orders.
“My mom says I can’t even leave your house,” she said gloomily.
The truth is, this kind of terror lock down has been pretty rare in recent years. During the early 2000s, it was a nearly daily occurrence, but nowadays we take for granted that we can sit at a Café Aroma and sip an iced limon-nana on a warm Jerusalem night with carefree abandon.
But an arts and crafts festival with tens of thousands of nightly attendees makes a pretty good spot for an attack. It’s a reminder that, despite our protestations and blogs to the contrary, Israel is not quite yet that “normal” nation we proffer it to be.
And yet the contrary is just as true: we say (and we mean it) that we won’t let the bad guys stop us from living our lives. If Merav had received a call just then saying the threat had passed, she would have been on the next bus to town, with our blessing.
The girls wound up reluctantly taking a pass on the show. We watched a family movie instead: “The Invention of Lying.” It was an amusing distraction.
Later, Merav talked to a friend of hers who had made it to the show. It was amazing, Merav quoted. “But he said everyone was terrified. They spent the whole concert looking around, trying to spot if there was a terrorist in the crowd.” She added, almost parenthetically, that she was, in fact, glad she hadn’t gone in the end.
There was no terror attack and the threat level was lifted by morning. My wife and I are scheduled to attend the festival and show on Tuesday (Ehud Banai is playing live). And unless the roads are closed, we’ll be there, defiant, proud and enjoying a warm Jerusalem evening.
Terror returns to Jerusalem
Photo from Ynet earlier today
At about 3:10 PM, my daughter Merav called me on my cell phone from school. Someone had said there was a bomb and did I know anything. I quickly checked the Internet. Nothing. But I already could tell that wasn’t the case. All the way from across town, I heard a boom. It could have been a firecracker or a garbage truck but it was followed by more simultaneous sirens than I’ve heard since the murderous days of the Second Intifada.
I kept pressing refresh on Haaretz and Ynet in Hebrew until eventually the story appeared (it was a good ten minutes more before the English language sites picked it up). I began reporting to Merav who, I could hear in the background, was forwarding the news to her classmates.
What’s the first thing you do when the news is bad? Tell your wife? I decided to spare her, at least until there were more details.
The phone rang. It was from the U.S. A friend had already heard the news. Soon Jody was calling to me. She couldn’t reach Merav on her cellphone. All the lines were down. I quickly calmed her: I’d already spoken to Merav, everything was fine.
Of the hundreds of thousands of people in Jerusalem, what are the chances that it would be one of our kids who’d be involved in a terror attack? That’s one reason why Israelis get on with their lives so quickly. But we have another experience. In 2002, our cousin Marla Bennett was killed in the Hebrew University cafeteria bombing. Every attack is personal now.
It’s been nearly 7 years since the last bus bombing in Jerusalem. And this wasn’t a bus attack per se, nor was it a suicide bomber. That doesn’t make it feel any better. Even worse, our son’s bus from Tel Aviv stops every night at that same kiosk near where the bomb was placed. He called and asked if I could pick him up tonight. Merav decided to walk home.
Will this be a return to the early 2000’s? I doubt it. But it’s a painful reminder that we are not at peace, and it may be a long time before the threats around us are gone.
Peace talks or target practice?
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics, War
Security personnel inspect the car containing four Israelis which was bombarded with bullets on Tuesday night near Kiryat Arba. (AP)
It’s horrible, but unfortunately true. I think everyone is starting to remember how previous waves of terror began – a shooting here, a bus bomb there, and before you know it, it’s an everyday thing.
I’m getting on a bus in a few hours, and for the first time in years, I may be looking around and checking out the passengers getting on, doing my own personal profile checking.
I guess the big difference this time, though, is the fact that we have a security barrier which is supposedly preventing potential suicide bombers from arriving at their destination, and the facts that the cooperation we’re getting from the Palestinian security forces are helping to prevent and catch terror acts before they happen. But not always, as the last two nights have tragically shown.
I, like most Israelis who want the peace talks beginning today in Washington to succeed, want to believe Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when he said that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other Palestinian terror rejectionist groups are Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s common enemy.
But if all Israelis, and not just settlers (who for some, incomprehensibly, don’t count as they are bringing it on themselves by living in the West Bank) are now going to be open targets for the guns and bombs of terrorists, it’s clear that the peace attempts in Washington are going to fail miserably. And our Palestinian neighbors will only have themselves to blame when their statehood once again moves beyond their reach.
Movie recreates terror in Jerusalem
As I passed by the wreckage of a fast food restaurant today on Jerusalem’s trendy Emek Refaim Street, I was awash in a familiar and entirely unwanted feeling. Police were everywhere with walkie-talkies surveying the destruction. Across the street, a bus shelter was blown out, glass strewn along the sidewalk. A bus was parked in front, still intact but immobile.
And yet, everyone seemed so calm. The Ne’eman Café and Caffit restaurant across the street were serving patrons as if nothing had happened. Even the police seemed inappropriately jovial.
I popped into the local household supply shop and asked the clerk what the heck was going on.
“A movie,” he replied gruffly. “French. About the days of the terror attacks.”
I wanted to cry out. How could the filmmakers have been so callous? The site of their “set” was only a few blocks from where, in 2003, seven people were killed and over 50 injured in a real life terror attack at Café Hillel.
Nor have my wife Jody and I been immune personally to terror: our cousin Marla Bennett was murdered in the attack on a cafeteria at Hebrew University in 2002. As if to drive the point home: Marla’s mother was in town from San Diego this week and was a guest at our table this past Shabbat.
Still, a movie about the terror years could be helpful, if it portrayed the Israeli position with some understanding. Given the international climate these days (see David’s article on “Caving in to cultural terrorism“), however, I’m not so sure.
To 443 or not to 443?
With Highway 443, the road that runs between Jerusalem and Modi’in through the West Bank, all over the news lately, I was reminded of the events that led to 443 being closed to Palestinian traffic nearly ten years ago.
We had been invited to a barbeque at the house of friends in Modi’in. On the day of the party, the news reported that Highway 1, the main road out of Jerusalem, was jammed and there were hour-long back-ups. The solution seemed easy enough: we’d just take the alternative highway – Highway 443.
Except that nothing is that simple in Israel.
Since the second intifada broke out in 2000, we had avoided traveling on certain roads, specifically those that pass by areas where there had been terror attacks. 443 had been the site of many such tragic incidents, from ambush killings, drive by shootings, to frequent firebombs.
443 was closed to Palestinian traffic in 2002 – the controversial act that led to this month’s Supreme Court decision ordering the army to re-open back the road within six months. Even with the traffic ban, we weren’t comfortable with the drive. But we were already running late for the barbeque. Sitting in traffic would have meant we’d miss all the fun. And definitely the chicken wings.
With no small amount of trepidation, we opted to take the fast track. We were immediately struck by its stark, barren beauty. The rolling hills with their jagged rock formations, the long stone terraces that always look to me to be thousands of years old.
My wife Jody rolled down her window. The road was open, traffic was flowing, the mountain air smelled crisp with just a hint of the salt from the Mediterranean Sea, already visible in the distance.
Then, out of the blue, we came to a stop. I quickly noticed that no cars were coming in the other direction either. Something had happened.
People turned off their car engines, got out and stretched their legs. A man opened his back door and out sprang a scraggly black dog who instantly jumped the fence to go for a run on the empty other side of the road. The sounds of the muezzin from a nearby village echoed through the valley.
We turned on the radio. Galgalatz was reporting that a hefetz hashud – a suspicious object – had blocked the road.
In the midst of our waiting, a totally chutzpadik taxi driver decided he couldn’t wait and started to push his way to the front. Honking ferociously, he yelled to the other cars to start up their engines and move to the right so he could squeeze by on the almost non-existent left-side shoulder.
It was not like he was going to get past the roadblock. What was he looking for? A half a minute’s lead-time over all the rest of us freiers?
And then, after about 40 minutes of frustration, BOOM. Not deafening, but still loud enough to rattle us. The police robot used to zap suspicious objects had apparently taken a bite, and something on the menu had a kick to it.
The traffic started up again. Slowly we snaked down the road, anxiously craning our necks to see what the cause of all the commotion was. I imagined something minor, maybe a small package, a garbage bag or even a suitcase forgotten the side of the road.
It was a car. An old Subaru, left abandoned, and now a smoldering wreck. That was big…had it been blown apart by the robot or was there a bomb inside? I couldn’t stop myself from thinking: what if it had gone off just as we were passing? On the very day – no, the only day – in the many years that we chose to go this way?
Since that incident, the intifada has faded and so have our fears. We travel 443 regularly. But what will happen when the road is reopened to traffic from Ramallah and other points in the PA, we wonder? Will we – and other nervous Israelis – pack back onto Highway 1? Was that, perhaps, the reason a new exit was recently opened entering Modi’in from the south?
Summer is still far away, but the annual barbeque is already calling. I suppose our decision will be made based on if we’re on time or not.
And whether they’re running out of chicken wings.
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