Posted on 02/01/2004 6:36:03 AM PST by knighthawk
Hardly anybody I know takes buses in Israel anymore, so I didn't feel a personal stab of fear Thursday morning when my shaken husband phoned me from his car on the way to work: ''A bus was just blown up in Jerusalem.'' But like thousands of others, I made a beeline for my radio, listening once again to the familiar litany: correspondents reporting above the wail of ambulances, interviews with trembling eyewitnesses, statements by spokesmen of one hospital after another on how many injured had arrived and the seriousness of their condition. Emergency phone numbers were broadcast over and over. One person died on the operating table at Hadassah Hospital. The bodies of six women and four men were transported to the forensic institute for identification.
Nobody I knew, I thought, could be on that bus. Then I remembered Leora, the American law student in Israel for a year on a Fulbright grant, who just the day before had come by public transportation all the way to Tel-Aviv University from her apartment in Jerusalem. Leora talked to my Israeli law students about the American experience of studying law, about taking the bar, about career choices and opportunities for international students. The Israelis asked question after question of their poised young contemporary. Until then, they had pieced together the American legal profession from television shows. Smiling, down-to-earth Leora brushed away the mystery, if not the glamor.
Thursday morning, I thought, she might well be on a bus in Jerusalem. But when I telephoned her apartment there was an answer. Leora was shaken, but she was home. She was waiting until it would be almost dawn in the United States so she could tell her parents she was OK before they heard about the bomb from somebody else.
And it turned out, I had been wrong. Leora travels only by private and communal taxis. ''Not to ever take buses -- that's one thing I promised my parents before coming here,'' she said. Since arriving, she has followed security recommendations, keeping away from restaurants, markets and crowded places. ''Things had been so quiet here, that I was thinking maybe I should do more after all -- until today,'' she said.
The attack wove its way into the day's events. At the post office, the radio was turned up so that all the clerks and customers couldn't help but hear. In the waiting room of a doctor's office the television broadcast live. The news split its coverage between the blast and the Israeli/Arab prisoner exchange that had been slated to monopolize the day's events.
Other dark headlines were in the news this morning too: Three Palestinian workers killed and two 14-year-old Palestinian boys and a Palestinian ambulance driver wounded in an Israeli attack against Islamic Jihad activists in Gaza on Wednesday, which left eight dead and seven wounded.
It is hard to remember the days before buses have been exploding in Jerusalem. The details of a few stand out: The spate of lethal Sundays eight years ago when buses were targeted, the bus bomb this summer that killed 22 worshippers riding back from the Western Wall, the 16 bus riders killed and 100 wounded in June, the seven killed and 20 wounded in May, the attack that ironically injured an Arab bus driver, the numerous explosions when children have been felled riding to or from school. On and on. Thursday's attack took place at seven minutes before 9 in the morning -- well past the school rush hour. Hearing that the fatalities were all adults gave a bitter relief -- at least young ones were spared. However, the last word is not in, because a 13-year-old boy remains on the critical list.
A few hours after the blast, the street looked almost normal, the wreckage cleared, the blood washed away. Bus after bus again passed through the busy thoroughfare in the city's heart, packed with passengers. In the evening I tried to call Leora's apartment again. There was no answer. Along with others in the beleaguered city, she had gone out to play at living a normal life, until the next time.
Helen Schary Motro, an American lawyer and writer living in Israel and a graduate of the University of Chicago, teaches at the Tel-Aviv University School of Law.
It's a deal.
My contacts told me that, as a military objective, spreading fear among the Israelis was as important as killing them. Anwar Aziz, an Islamic Jihad member who blew himself up in an ambulance in Gaza, in December, 1993, had often told friends, "Battles for Islam are won not through the gun but by striking fear into the enemy's heart." Another Islamist military leader said, "If our wives and children are not safe from Israeli tanks and rockets, theirs will not be safe from our human bombs." AN ARSENAL OF BELIEVERS by NASRA HASSAN Talking to the "human bombs."
Are we afraid yet?
So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear. . .is fear itself. . . nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address Saturday, March 4, 1933
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