Have Jews from Around the World Abandoned Israel

Jerusalem
Down the Winding streets of this storied capital city, they sit in cafes and restaurants, talking and sipping coffee and trying to escape the angel of death that is just around the corner. Seething with rage, and stalking the innocent, he has packed a Koran, and underneath an overstuffed jacket there are enough explosives to shatter the lives and spirit of a city of peace.

Such is the existence these days in Jerusalem, when a Saturday evening dinner means pondering what it’s like to be blown to pieces. My Israeli friends had arrived at 9 p.m., and had informed me that our plans for dinner had been canceled. We had thought about going to the trendy Shanty or Moment restaurants. “I have a bad feeling about tonight,” Tzvya said, before driving off into the night.

I ventured out anyway, walking up the Ben Yehudah pedestrian mall which looked like a ghost town at 9 p.m. After my dinner in an empty restaurant, the owner thanked me for being brave enough to come to Israel. I told him he was the brave one, and that it was an honor for me to visit his country.

Our conversation was cut short. His friend drove up to the sidewalk and told us that Israeli radio had announced that there was a suicide bomber on his way to Jerusalem. An odd report, I thought, but still, I started to walk back to my hotel, down Ben Yehudah, looking at the faces of young soldiers, and beggars and teens and con men playing three-card monte. They didn’t look worried, they’d heard this before.

I pushed on down Jaffa Street, across from the Mayor Ehud Olmert’s office, where a suicide bomber sent Bus 18 into the heavens in the ’90s. The stillness of the night lulled me into a state of meditation. I looked at the stars for a few moments, and inexplicably, turned, and entered the bar that I had been leaning against.

As I looked at the menu, I heard an ambulance. A waitress peeked through the window, and cell phones began to ring. And then, from the direction of the Old City came a dozen ambulances, and inside the bar there was that uncomfortable moment that Israelis have long shared publicly.

A man placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder as tears rolled down her cheeks. One by one people began to leave, and I followed them out the door. The ambulances were on their way to the Moment restaurant, which had been one of the restaurants on my agenda just 90 minutes earlier. Five minutes from where I stood, 10 souls lay scattered on the Jerusalem street. They had ended the Sabbath with a renewed hope that their neighbors would not place bombs on their bodies. They guessed wrong.

From our homes in America it seems so awful and horrible and distant, and after we see the pictures of the carnage we drink our coffee and go to work. Here, life stops, and people hold vigil as they watch the live coverage on TV, and anxiously write down the numbers of the hospitals where the injured are brought.

I came to Jerusalem to ask people about life during the latest intifada. It’s a subject they talk about all day long. Everyone seems to know someone here who was killed or injured in a terrorist attack. They talk about world opinion and an inevitable full-scale war against the Palestinians.

They also, quietly, inquire about American Jews. “Why have they deserted us?” they ask. I can’t give them any answers. I can’t tell them that most Americans Jews think I’m crazy to come to the Jewish homeland. I can’t tell them that most young Jews can’t even find Israel on the map.

I could never explain it to them. Steven Rosenberg is a journalist based in Boston.

This article ran in the Boston Globe on March 16, 2002