It’s been a tense and tragic few weeks here in Israel, as a wave of Palestinian terrorism — stabbings and shootings, as well as boulders and Molotov cocktails hurled at passing cars — hit Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and on Wednesday, began to spread around the country, making every Jew in Israel a potential target and leaving casualties in its wake.
Here’s something most Americans don’t realize about Israel: It’s usually incredibly safe. In the United States, where I was born, you mostly hear about Israel when there’s a war or when there are terrorist attacks. But according to surveys, Israelis feel safer than Americans walking around at night, and Israel’s murder rate is less than half of America’s.
In Israel, children have the kind of freedom to roam that as a kid growing up in New Jersey in the ’90s I only read about in books about Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins — books that were written in the ’50s.
But things are beginning to change again.
I say again, because last summer, when most of Israel was bombarded with rockets launched by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza for around seven weeks, people thought twice before leaving the house, and especially before letting their kids go out.
With rockets, at least, we had a warning siren, even if Israelis only had 15 to 120 seconds to run for cover. But with the current spate of stabbings, there’s no warning.
As I write, in addition to the countless rock-throwing and firebombing incidents in the West Bank, this week there have been 13 stabbing or shooting attacks, with four killed and dozens injured — though today there seems to be a new attack every hour.
At the same time, Israelis are nothing if not defiant. I’ll be damned if a bunch of anti-Semites keep me from going to work, or to pray at the Western Wall, or to the movies or anywhere else. Allowing my life to be seriously disrupted would be, as the cliché goes, letting the terrorists win.
It’s not always easy, though.
This week, I went to Jerusalem to spend the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah with American friends vacationing there. They asked me if it would be safe for them to pray at the Western Wall, the retaining wall of the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site for Jewish people and the third-holiest for Muslims, who pray there at the Al-Aqsa mosque, but also use the site to riot and to store boulders and firebombs to throw at Jews.
I looked at this young couple and their smiling, 16-month-old baby and thought about what to say. There was just a rash of stabbings, shootings and general rioting in the area, and I wouldn’t want them to be in danger.
But at the same time, the reason they came to Israel is, at its core, because this is the Jewish state, and its heart is Jerusalem and the Western Wall. In the end, I told them to go, but to stay in the Jewish and Armenian Quarters and where there is an Israeli police presence.
We went for a walk in their Jerusalem neighborhood and saw an ambulance go by. Moments later we saw another one. And then another.
“There’s probably a terrorist attack,” I told my friends. We couldn’t check, because it was a holiday, when Orthodox Jews unplug.
Hours later, when the sun set and the holiday ended, I checked my phone. There was rioting.
On Saturday night, Bon Jovi performed in Israel for the first time, and as a Jersey Girl — the title remains, even if I’ve lived in Israel my entire adult life — it was probably the most excited I’d ever been to see a concert.
But then, as I was about to reach the venue, I heard the news. A Palestinian terrorist murdered two Jewish men and wounded a 22-year-old mother and her toddler son in Jerusalem’s Old City.
For a moment, I considered turning around. How could I sing along to rock songs in Tel Aviv while my brothers and sisters in Jerusalem were under attack, simply for being Jews in our holy city?
I stayed, and Bon Jovi seemed to answer the question anyway, dedicating the song “We Don’t Run” to Israel’s fighting spirit. He’s right — we don’t.
That night, I came to the sad realization that this is what my Saturday nights are going to look like for a while: turning on my smartphone after 25 hours of being disconnected, praying that I don’t find that someone had been killed and then spending the rest of the week trying to find a way to live life, vigilant, but defiant.
Lahav Harkov is The Jerusalem Post’s senior Knesset correspondent.