Living with Rockets: The falafel and the bulldozer
Coming to Jerusalem to work for a few days seemed like a welcome break from the Kassam rockets that Arab terrorists fire at Sderot. In Jerusalem, the method Arab terrorists prefer to kill random civilians is suicide-bombing. The Israeli army has largely controlled that kind of murder by building a barrier to prevent Arab terrorists from infiltrating Israel. Whenever I come to Jerusalem, I feel liberated, because I do not automatically look around me for a wall to crouch behind as I walk down the street. People living in Sderot develop skills to use when the alarm announces that a rocket is flying in their general direction and will detonate in about fifteen seconds. We automatically, almost unconsciously, look for potential shelter wherever we go. In Jerusalem I need not do this.
Yesterday, Wednesday, about noon, I decided it was time for a felafel break from the primitive form of SEO my employer naively thinks I know how to do. Some of the best felafels in Jerusalem are in and around Mahaneh Yehuda, the open-air market near where I am staying. I decided to try a particular felafel shop on the other side of this market. I had not eaten in it for some time.
While walking through the market to get to Jaffa Road, I noticed many people standing in little groups talking; they seemed tense to me. Many appeared to have been running seconds earlier. They looked around to see if they might need to run again. Police and soldiers were walking pretty briskly toward Jaffa Road, where I was going for my felafel. Sirens wailed in the distance; ambulances were on their way. Helicopters flew overhead.
Right after a rocket hits us down in Sderot, there is usually a lot of air action as the helicopters and the jets go looking for the bad guys in Gaza; in Jerusalem, the helicopters are more to observe the general area where the attack took place. Attacks on Sderot come from elsewhere, but the terrorists who attack Jerusalem are almost always physically present at the target they attack.
I asked people what had happened. They said that a bulldozer had just driven down Jaffa Road running people over, smashing cars, and that it had attacked a couple of buses. I continued to walk forward to Jaffa Road. I entered the street, which is one of the major roads of Jerusalem. This road was once the link between Jerusalem and the port of Jaffa, along which pilgrims of many religions, camels carrying the goods for the merchants who whipped them, and the armies of the Ottoman and British Empires had marched. The city of Jerusalem had expanded along this road more than a hundred years ago when people first built neighborhoods outside the walled city.
I turned out of the street through Mahaneh Yehuda market and into Jaffa Road. My first reaction was silence; to its early history, the street must add that today it was a mess. Cars sat broken and bleeding gas and water, which dripped onto the pavement. The cars were grotesque. Some were crushed perfectly, so that they looked like piles of spare parts; most of the ruined cars seemed to be flattened on one half, with the other half in good shape.
The dinosaur-looking creature that had wrought this carnage stood with its huge shovel of a mouth, ringed by jagged, steel teeth, pointing defiantly upward. An ambulance crew had covered a corpse on a stretcher next to the yellow dinosaur. I was later to learn that this was the corpse of the murderer.
Women were walking around crying; the medics and ambulance staff, almost all Chassidim, looked into broken cars for broken people. A bus was on its side, medics were delicately placing wounded into stretchers. The huge bulldozer stood silently, threateningly, presiding over the chaos it had created. Police cars and firetrucks were arriving in great numbers, as well as ambulances and medics.
The authorities began to impose order. Police placed tape around the crime scene. A young policewoman told me and some people with whom I was speaking to leave. As she shooed us away, hundreds and hundreds of high school aged Chassidim began collecting on the sidewalks and on the roofs of neighboring buildings to watch. Some had cameras. Professional camera crews began filming people. A terrorist attack in Israel unfortunately produces many people to interview, because such an attack takes place in public and with many witnesses. I chatted with an Italian journalist for a while. I happen to speak Italian.
It took a few moments for the wandering crowds to dissipate into the town, so I walked over to one of the buses the yellow monster had attacked. This bus lay on its side with its front window broken. I later learned that a policewoman had smashed this window to let the passengers out after the bus was already lying on its side. I knelt down to peer at the packages and the bags of food people had bought for their shopping that day. The yellow bulldozer had wrecked the bus's bottom as the Arab terrorist used his front-loading shovel to flip the bus over. The passengers being flipped had landed all in a heap on the wall that had suddenly become a floor. The stains on that wall were made with their blood.
"Now you must GO!", the policewoman ordered. I looked around me. Everybody in the perimeter either had a job to do or was wounded. I walked out and beyond the tape. I stared at the yellow monster, the bulldozer that had killed three people and wounded dozens more, and would have killed everybody in that neighborhood had not an Israeli soldier and an ordinary cop killed its driver. Israel is luckier to have such citizens - luckier than the Arabs are to have so many psychopathic murderers.
I walked back to Mahane Yehuda market. People were already going about their business, buying food and whatever else markets sell. I saw the felafel place that had been my aim in coming to this neighborhood. While eating my felafel, I fell into conversation with the owner. He told me what he had seen during today's attack. We talked about the several suicide attacks he had seen and heard. When I mentioned that I had moved to Sderot, he expressed doubts about my sanity for going to a town where rockets come down at any moment. I replied that I was not sure which of us would take the gold medal in the Crazy Olympics, if he continued to sell felafel in a place where suicide bombers and bulldozer drivers might kill him at any moment. In the end, we decided that the best way to live our lives was for him to make his felafels, and for me to eat them, and for life to proceed, no matter what the terrorists do.
And that felafel was damn good!
