How Do We Cope? Less and Less Every Day

Until a few weeks ago, this was a city pretending to be normal. We managed our daily routines around sporadic terror attacks, the inevitable price we told ourselves for living in a city blessed and cursed with an excess of history.

But after the recent wave of suicide bombings and shootings, and almost daily attempts by terrorists to strike again, Jerusalemites have finally conceded that we are a city at war.

Daily life has itself become the threat: a crowded street corner, an outing at a pizza shop, a bat mitzvah celebration. It is a war without limits: This month, terrorists broke into a house in the Jordan Valley and killed a woman and her 11-year-old handicapped daughter as the child tried to crawl away.

Until recently, my wife and I attempted to confine our two teenage children to areas we assumed were less likely to become targets. But in the last weeks our children have had so many close calls that we’ve stopped trying to outguess the terrorists. There is nowhere to run.

The other day my family, seeking respite, went to the botanical gardens overlooking the tent-shaped hills of the Judean desert.

Almost as soon as we arrived, we heard an ambulance siren. Instinctively, my wife and I began to silently count. By the third siren, we knew. Afterward we learned that a suicide bomber, stopped by a police roadblock on his way to Jerusalem, had blown himself up and killed a policeman, just up the road from where we were strolling.

How do you cope, ask friends from abroad. The answer is: less and less. Living under sustained terrorism creates an emotional circle from dread to fatalism to numbness, back to dread.

After 18 months of accelerating terrorist attacks, this is a nation in despair.

Until the Oslo peace process, Israelis were sustained by the hope that the Arab world would ultimately accept our existence. But now we increasingly ask ourselves whether the Middle East will ever tolerate the lone non-Arab state in its midst.

Having offered to end the occupation, only to be confronted with the worst wave of terrorism in our terror-saturated history, Israelis no longer believe in a negotiated peace. Even the left now calls for “separation”--unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, an admission that a deal cannot be reached with Yasser Arafat’s regime. Still, separation, however tempting, isn’t a solution but a desperate impulse. Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon nearly two years ago encouraged the Palestinians to mimic the fundamentalist Hezbollah and launch the current intifada. Withdrawal under fire from the territories would only encourage the terrorists to pursue their war against the Jewish “occupation” of the rest of what they call Palestine and we call Israel.

The threats are gathering from every direction. If the United States attacks Iraq, warns Israeli military intelligence, Saddam Hussein will almost certainly retaliate against us. The Israeli army is quietly preparing for a nonconventional missile attack on our cities.

Hezbollah has begun shooting at Israeli planes flying within our airspace along the northern border. And Turkish police have arrested three Al Qaeda operatives, apparently on their way to a planned attack in Tel Aviv.

The army’s chief chaplain, expecting massive casualties in the coming months, plans to train volunteers to assist rabbis in Jewish burial procedures, recalling the weeks before the 1967 Six-Day War, when the army, fearing an Arab invasion, dug trenches in public parks for possible use as mass graves.

If Arafat’s terrorist war does evolve into a wider Arab assault, including attempts to wipe out Israeli cities, that escalation will have its own terrible logic. For the terrorist act is an expression of the genocidal impulse, a small pre-enactment of mass murder.

Ironically, perhaps, the very realization that we face an enemy whose goal isn’t to live beside us but instead of us helps us persevere through yet another day.