PERSPECTIVE ON THE ATLANTA BOMBING : Beastly Life Under the Thumb of Terror

I have many words of comfort for Americans who are beginning to understand how the coming years in their country are liable to look. As an Israeli who has lived his whole life in the shadow of terrorism, I can confirm that it makes life miserable.

It forces a “military” way of life on every citizen, one that slowly permeates all areas of life, at great cost. You gradually find yourself surrounded by people and organizations whose job it is to protect you. But they only make you more nervous and insecure: More and more guards are stationed at the entrances to multiplexes and theaters and malls, and to nursery schools as well. All schools have alarm buttons to summon the police. Major thoroughfares are closed dozens of times a day because of calls about suspicious objects. If you forget a bag in a train or at a bus stop, it may well get blown up by police. If your car looks the least bit suspicious, the police will break into it to check it out. Getting onto an airplane becomes as difficult as getting into Yale.

An ever larger chunk of the work force is recruited into security-related industries. A huge amount of creative and inventive energy that could have enriched science and technology is subordinated to the army and police and security apparatus. Individual freedoms and rights are narrowed on the grounds of “security risks.” The situation justifies searches and roadblocks and phone taps and secret investigations and arrests, and they are inevitably more common and more invasive than what is actually needed. But go argue when a bomb is ticking in the background: “I thought he was a terrorist” becomes the accepted excuse for all kinds of violence against citizens. The entire country becomes enmeshed in a dense network whose sole purpose is to protect “normal life,” which there has not been for a long time. But the soul, the soul of every single person, also gets cloaked in harshness and callousness. Large parts of it are staked out and become a “closed military area.” That is the most horrible thing. In one way, terrorism always succeeds because the very act of fighting it and adjusting one’s life to it slowly distorts all that is dear and humane.

During the outbreak of terrorism in Israel in February, I seriously discussed the following question with friends: Should they allow both their children to take the bus to Jerusalem together? How could they explain to the kids that from now on they are to take separate buses, one after the other? And how were they as parents supposed to decide which child to send on the first bus and which on the second?

That is the kind of thing that terrorism teaches us, almost unconsciously. It is the wisdom of the survivor who does not even know how much a prisoner he is to his struggle for survival, and how much he is already a victim of terrorism. Will all this happen in the United States? I fervently hope not. But the Americans are closer than ever before to this reality in every detail. Here are a few more “taxes” life in the shadow of terror collects from you: Despite yourself, you become more and more racist, you sharpen your system of identifying/classifying/selecting people on the basis of ethnic and national traits and quickly put people into categories without even realizing what you are doing. You tend to make stereotypes and generalizations, you learn xenophobia. In Jerusalem, a young woman thought one of the passengers on her bus looked suspicious, so she got off. A few seconds later her suspect blew himself up with the bus and its passengers. She was alert, so she is alive today. But today. painful incidents take place over and over again on buses in Israel, when people get scared of a dark-skinned person and a ring of hysteria and violence closes in. I once witnessed such a scene and it is easy for me to understand how a liberal and humanist view of the world can become a hostage to fear. A few months of life in the shadow of this fear will show even a nation that believes it is enlightened how short and sharp is the process in which anxieties begin to dictate norms. Terror is humiliating. It quickly returns people to a violent, pugnacious, murderous and chaotic “natural state.” It is the beginning of anarchy. I fear that America will soon discover how quickly certain sectors of the population give themselves over to the urge to destroy and dismember the fabric of freedom. Terrorism contains something that acts like a destructive enzyme. It dismantles the private human body and the public body. Terror confronts us with a fact that is frightening in its simplicity: In order to have a democratic, serene and safe way of life, we need a lot of goodwill. We need the goodwill of nearly all our citizens. That is the great secret of democracy, and it is also its weakest point: All of us are, when it comes down to it, each other’s hostages. The terrorists take advantage of this, and so upset that delicate balance to the point that fear is liable to push even the most stable elements into chaos. During the last wave of terrorism in Israel, when almost 100 people were murdered by Hamas suicide bombers, you could sense how swiftly it was that fear dissolved everyone’s sense of security. Israel, as everyone knows, is a strong country with a great army, but the string of terrorist attacks led even the country’s president to declare that Israel was locked in a war for its very existence. In other words, a group of a few hundred fanatics was able to make an entire country feel insecure.

There can be no doubt that when you are exposed to such cruelty, you begin to feel the law of the jungle beating deep inside you, under the thin layer of civilization. The evil that takes concrete form in terrorism makes its victims angry and vengeful. They also feel deep despair. Uncovering all that is evil and beastly in man exacerbates the sense that there is no hope, that humankind has not progressed much since Cain murdered Abel. These are some of the things I think of when I think about life under the thumb of terror. What is really amazing is how much we do not want to know it, how much we do not want to acknowledge the heavy price we pay. Between attacks the heart wants to heal quickly, to forget. But in every person who has experienced it, you feel the ever-repressed leap of fear; for all of us here, the everyday is nothing but a box full of murmurs and echoes of fatality. You think that you’ve gotten used to it, but you never can. The price is too high. Life becomes exhausting. You are a soldier in spite of yourself. Death becomes suddenly closer than what people generally have to accept. There is a kind of “unbearable lightness of death” that in the end cheapens the value of life.

Over the next few days, Israeli experts on terrorism will be all over the American mass media. They will declare over and over again that “you under no circumstances negotiate with terrorists” and “to talk to terrorists is to surrender to them.” In one way, they are right. But it is worth remembering that the only time that Israel “surrendered” in any significant way to terrorism--when it agreed to talk to the PLO’s representatives in Oslo--it made its biggest step toward making itself more secure. It succeeded in bringing an organization that had perpetrated especially murderous and cruel acts of terror onto the track of political negotiations. Was that really surrender?