Life in a Gun Sight: Coping With Daily Terror

There was an eerie calm in the Talbiyeh neighborhood of Jerusalem last week. It was like the high holy days: No one was driving through the narrow streets, everyone was on foot, everything was quiet, almost solemn, in this quarter of old Arab houses, orange trees and shaggy date palms. At the tip of the neighborhood, President Bill Clinton was staying at the fortress-like Laromme Hotel, and hundreds of policemen and troops were assuring his security. No traffic was allowed in or out.

Men in uniforms were hunting through people’s gardens with metal detectors, searching the bougainvillea for bombs. Garbage dumpsters in the neighborhood were carted away temporarily, so no one could load them up with explosives. During the hours before Clinton’s motorcade was to hurtle down Jabotinsky Street to the Laromme, an army of tow trucks arrived and dragged away all the BMWs and Hondas and Integras and Volvos whose owners had not realized they had to be moved for the arrival of Israel’s good friend.

It gets you thinking. After all, Clinton is not the only target of terror in this town. These days, every Jerusalem resident feels as if he or she is caught in the cross hairs. And the ratio of security men to terror target is not as good for the average Israeli as it is for Clinton--who will almost definitely get out of the mess alive. For one thing, Clinton doesn’t have to take the buses.

It’s surreal to have a city’s public transportation system turned into a venue for terrorism. From their bus system,

Israelis have come to expect a rather pleasant convenience. Buses are on time, they are comfortable, they have a friendly and official-looking red exterior, they are clean and go quite fast. Seeing one turned into a skeleton filled with blood and body parts is like finding out your local beat policeman is a serial killer.

In an attempt to get tough on terrorism, the Israeli government has posted two soldiers at almost every bus stop in Jerusalem. If you’re not thinking clearly, these two officers, with their machine guns and uniforms, might make you feel a little less scared. But, in fact, they are useless and worse.

First of all, an axiom of those who know anything about terrorism is that you cannot stop a suicide bomber by force. No matter how well-armed you are, he can always strike first--unless you’re allowed to shoot on suspicion. If a security guard stops a suicide bomber because he looks peculiar, the bomber simply blows himself up--along with the security guard and everyone in the immediate vicinity. Second, witnesses say the recent bombers have all been dressed as Israeli soldiers and have carried their explosives in kits or duffel bags. How can you tell the good soldiers from the bad?

The suicide bomber’s only criterion for a target is number of people. Thus, the bus or the crowded shopping center. Only one other ingredient matters: the more soldiers, the merrier. So a bus, or bus stop, with two soldiers present, is even more alluring than the bus or bus stop before the two guards were posted. Soldiers are a magnet for terror, not a deterrent. Suicide bombing, in itself a seemingly illogical concept, turns every usual maxim about security on its head.

You know you’re exposed every time you venture out of your house. In a way, it’s like wartime. (It is wartime, according to Hamas and to Israel’s Prime Minister Shimon Peres.) It’s different from the American--and now Scottish--pastime of waiting for the random attack by a psycho. Here in Jerusalem, you know the killing will happen, and soon, and in your town, and you know what it’s going to look like, and you know that you and the man walking next to you and the soldier at the bus stop and the three children tripping up the stairs of the pharmacy with their mother are all targets.

Suicide bombs alter your perception of daily life. Every daily act is fraught, and everyone is imagining what the peaceful scene around them would look like shattered by 15 kilograms of TNT. I’ve seen what TNT does to glass windows, like the windows of my supermarket. I’ve seen what it does to interiors like the interior of my son’s classroom--which is less than 200 feet from a major bus stop. I’ve heard the sound these bombs make, exploding all the way on the other side of town. Of course, I’ve seen how TNT splatters flesh and blood. And on television, even Israelis who have never been near the site of a bus bombing have seen--over and over--the damage. It makes everyone walk around a bit gingerly.

It changes traffic. If you look, you can see that some drivers are staying back 10 or 20 feet behind buses. I tried this for a while. What I discovered is that if you hang back from the bus in front of you, when you look in your rear-view mirror, you find the nose of another bus almost flat up against the back of your car. (Even though they are transportational time bombs waiting to go off, the aggressive and fearless Israeli buses have no shame.) And if you look left, you’ll see two more zooming down the street in the other direction. Avoiding buses on a Jerusalem street is like avoiding trains in a New York subway station.

I don’t ride the buses. But virtually everyone else does. I look at who’s getting on; I stare at the faces of the people looking out of the windows. Yesterday, I saw a woman with high blond hair and stacked heels get on. Behind her was a grandmother with two shopping bags. A few men with beards and knitted skullcaps were already in the back seats. Three college students got on together, all jeans and lank hair and backpacks. Two women soldiers paid their fare.

Riders seemed to congregate at the front and back of the buses, the middle was usually empty--it’s rumored to be the preferred detonation spot. What haven’t Israelis learned about the bombers’ methods in the past month? In Israel right now, commuters are heroes; it’s odd to do something so normal and be considered a patriot. After all, they’re just going to work.

I was standing at the site of the second No. 18 bus bombing the other day, watching as repair teams descended to tow away the bus remains and to put all the demolished shops back together. A crowd was gathering to express one political view or another, and the television cameras were wandering around, shooting shattered glass and interviewing shopkeepers. The burial societies were there on cranes, picking flesh off the sides of buildings. Traffic was meandering around the scene, directed by officers in yellow rain slickers.

Suddenly, like a mirage, another No. 18 loomed past the site in the other direction. It was about an hour and a half after the attack. Inside the bus, there were not many people but there were some, at least a dozen. And everyone was staring out the windows at the mess on Jaffa Street.