An only-in-Israel bus ride past Jerusalem yeshiva

A friend forwarded the following item by Sharon Millendorf of Jerusalem. She writes about an only-in-Israel bus ride. --- J.M.H.

Every morning I take the 35 bus line to work. It's a quick ride and usually takes no more than 12 minutes. The third stop after I get on by the shuk is directly in front of Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav. This morning I found myself a bit anxious, unsure of what I was going to see as we passed by. As I looked around, I saw death notices pasted all over the street and flowers that had been brought lined the entrance to the Yeshiva.

When the bus pulled up to the stop, the driver shut off the engine and stood. With tears in his eyes he told everyone sitting on the bus that one of the boys killed on Thursday night was his nephew. He asked if everyone on the bus would mind if he spoke for a few minutes in memory of his nephew and the other boys that were killed. After seeing head nods all over the bus he began to speak. With a clear and proud voice, he spoke beautifully about his nephew and said that he was a person who was constantly on the lookout for how to help out anyone in need. He was always searching for a way to make things better. He loved learning, and had a passion for working out the intricacies of the Gemara. He was excited to join the army in a few years, and wanted to eventually work in informal education.

As he continued to speak, I noticed that the elderly woman sitting next to me was crying. I looked into my bag, reached for a tissue and passed it to her. She looked at me and told me that she too had lost someone she knew in the attack. Her neighbor's child was another one of the boys killed. As she held my hand tightly, she stood up and asked if she too could say a few words in memory of her neighbor. She spoke of a young man filled with a zest for life. Every friday he would visit her with a few flowers for shabbat and a short dvar torah that he had learned that week in Yeshiva. This past shabbat, she had no flowers.

When I got to work, one of my colleagues who lives in Efrat told me that her son was friends with two of the boys who had been killed. One of those boys was the stepson of a man who used to teach in Brovenders and comes to my shul in Riverdale every Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to be a chazan for one of the minyanim.

We are all affected by what goes on in Israel . Whether you know someone who was killed or know someone who knows someone or even if you don't know anyone at all, you are affected. The eight boys who were killed will continue to impact us all individually and as a nation. Each one of us has the ability to make a profound impact on our world. This coming Wednesday morning, I will be at Ben Gurion airport at 7 am with Nefesh B'Nefesh welcoming 40 new olim to Israel . We will not deter. We can not give up. We will continue to live our lives and hope and work for change, understanding and peace.

Sharon Millendorf

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Violent death---updating the U.S.-Israel comparison

People continue to ask if it's safe to visit Israel. Here is an update comparing deadly violence in Israel and the United States.

In 2006, Israel's ratio of death from all acts of violence---including murder, suicide bombings and the Second Lebanon War---was lower than the U.S. murder rate.

This is in line with earlier years. Despite being depicted in television shows and U.S. government travel warnings as a dangerous place, Israel customarily experiences a lower rate of deadly violence than the United States.

Here are the rates of violent death for both countries in 2006, the most recent year for which 12-month U.S. data are available:

Israel 2006:
5.4 deaths from crime, terror and war per 100,000 inhabitants

United States 2006:
5.7 deaths from murder and non-negligent manslaughter per 100,000 inhabitants

Various U.S. metropolitan areas report above-average deadly violence. Here are a few examples from among many. The numbers represent murders per 100,000 residents:

New York City, 7.3
Miami metro area, 7.6
Los Angeles metro area, 8.4
Houston metro area, 9.6
Atlantic City metro area, 11.1
Los Angeles, inside city limits, 12.4
Miami, inside city limits, 19.6
Atlanta, inside city limits, 22.6
Detroit-Dearborn metro area, 23.0
Philadelphia (AKA the City of Brotherly Love), 27.7
Washington, D.C., inside city limits, 29.1
Cincinnati, inside city limits, 29.9
New Orleans, inside city limits, 37.6
Baltimore, inside city limits, 43.3

The numbers come from data announced by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in its Uniform Crime Reporting Program. This program compiles data from local law enforcement agencies throughout the United States.

The FBI reported that 17,034 acts of murder and non-negligent manslaughter took place in the United States in 2006. This was at a rate of 5.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

By contrast, Israel's 188 conventional homicide victims plus 30 people killed by suicide bombings and other acts classified as terrorism represented a rate below 3.1 violent deaths per 100,000 residents. The Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006 took the lives of 119 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians. This added 2.3 points to Israel's violent-death rate, raising it to about 5.4 per 100,000 inhabitants.

As a percentage of population, the deaths of 119 Israeli soldiers in a six-week war were more than six times as great as the entire U.S. military death toll in Iraq for all of 2006. Despite this, Israel's rate of deadly violence including the Lebanon war deaths was not only below the 2006 U.S. murder rate but was less than the lowest yearly homicide rate ever recorded in the United States (5.5 per 100,000 inhabitants).

Ami Isseroff has written about the phenomenon of U.S. residents saying it is dangerous to live in Israel yet telling their own stories of danger in the United States. I recall a briefing for editors arriving for a two-week seminar at Columbia University. The briefer told us to look out the windows at Morningside Park. We were pretty sure he was preparing to say that the place was unsafe at night. What he told us was that we should never enter the park during the day. That was quite a few years ago, and it's reported to be better now.

The FBI has taken to urging us not to rank or compare localities' crime rates without more information.

"Until data users examine all the variables that affect crime in a town, city, county, state, region, or college or university, they can make no meaningful comparisons," the FBI stated.

In this connection, it's worth repeating what I wrote in an earlier report on comparative homicide rates:

"[C]omparisons like this can be misleading. The numbers are general and cannot tell us important facts about the violence they reflect. They do not identify the neighborhoods where most violence takes place, nor do they show which elements of the population are most vulnerable. They do not show the relationship, if any, between the victim and killer. They do not show who is likely to commit violence. They do not tell us how many violent attacks the authorities succeeding in thwarting. They do not measure tension and fear among the living. Nor do they tell us what may happen tomorrow."

Even if comparisons are inexact, they can put some things in proportion. Take the accusations of the anti-Zionist teacher Ilan Pappe. He cites Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israel army in 2006 in support of his claim that "Israel is employing genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip." Palestinian sources put the 2006 Gaza death toll at 588. The non-governmental groups Amnesty and Btselem announced lower figures. Whichever number is correct, it reflects a death toll no more genocidal than the murder rate in Baltimore, a city whose tourist promotion bureau assures us that it is "a fun and accessible destination for all to enjoy!"

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

URLs in this article:
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_922.html

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/offenses/violent_crime/murder_homicide.html

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_06.html

http://www.police.gov.il/pdf/douch/douch_2006/Annual_2006.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/22tgb6

http://icasualties.org/oif/DeathsByYear.aspx

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_01.html

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/20351

http://israel-like-this-as-if.blogspot.com/2007/01/nice-place-to-visit-but-we-wouldnt-want.html

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/about/variables_affecting_crime.html

http://www.ilanpappe.org/Articles/Israeli%20Recipe%20for%202008.html

http://www.baltimore.org/

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36 countries which Israelis are warned to stay out of

Our recent post on visiting the Sinai noted that Israel's Counter-Terrorism Bureau warns Israelis against traveling in 20 Arab countries.

That's only part of the don't-visit picture.

In all, 36 countries are on the counter-terrorism bureau's current list of places which it warns Israelis to stay out of. The bureau, an arm of Israel's National Security Council, classifies these no-visit countries according to four levels of threat.

A - Threat is concrete and extremely high. Refrain from visiting. Leave immediately.

B - Threat is concrete and high. Refrain from visiting. Leave as soon as possible.

C - Threat is concrete and basic. Refrain from visiting.

D - Potential continuing threat. Defer non-essential visits.

The bureau warns all Israelis to stay out of parts or all of the following countries. The information is from a pre-holiday travel advisory dated Aug. 5.

I. Arab states
Level A Threat
1) Iraq
2) Egypt
3) Sudan
4) Jordan
5) Syria
6) Lebanon
7) Somalia
8) Yemen

Level B Threat
9) Algeria
10) Djibouti
11) Saudi Arabia

Level C Threat
12) Kuwait
13) United Arab Emirates
14) Tunisia
15) Qatar
16) Morocco
17) Chad
18) Bahrain

Level D Threat
19) Libya
20) Oman

II. Non-Arab states
Level A Threat
1) Iran
2) Afghanistan

Level B Threat
3) Indonesia
4) Malaysia
5) Pakistan

Level C Threat
6) Kenya

Level D Threat
7) Bangladesh
8) Nigeria
9) Tadzhikistan.

III. Specific areas of danger
Level A Threat
1) Kashmir district, India
2) Mindanao islands, southern Philippines
3) Chechen district, Russia

Level B Threat
4) northern Nigeria, above the 10th latitude
5) southern Thailand, from the Krabi-Thammarat line to the Malaysia border

Level C Threat
6) Khao San Road and vicinity in Bangkok
7) southeast Turkey along the Iraq and Iran borders

IV. Special travel warning: Israelis throughout the world face a serious potential threat of kidnapping by the Hezbollah.

V. Four countries where Israelis should be especially alert to dangers of general terror attacks:
1) Philippines
2) Turkey
3) Thailand
4) Uzbekistan

The bureau has issued a special, top-level alert for Colombia. This warning applies to Israelis working for Colombian authorities in security capacities. To avoid kidnapping or assassination, the bureau advises them to conceal their Israeli identity and to travel only in daylight on main roads.

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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Israeli tourists in the South Sinai

Israelis go places in groups. Along with six family members and a friend, I was among the many thousands of Israelis who traveled to the Sinai in the Sukkot holidays.

The hold of the Sinai on its dedicated visitors can mystify people who don't feel the attraction. Accommodations are primitive, and there's not much to do.

The quiet attracts some of us. So does the beauty of the desert. So do the colored fish in the Red Sea, although these and the corals that shelter them seem to be dying off as a result of destructive local fishing practices. The big attraction, I think, is that the Sinai can function for Israelis as an alternate universe where pressure and tension don't exist. The local people are friendly, and there's no news.

Awad, a Bedouin who works at a nearby beach, offered to sell us hashish the first morning we were there. We turned him down. Awad returned every day to offer other services. One day our group hired him and his small truck to drive down the coast for snorkeling. On our final morning, Awad reserved a taxi to the border for us and took a commission from the driver.

Families with young children and some German tourists frequent the resort village where we stayed. Six U.S. dollars per person pays for a night's lodging in a straw hut known as a "hoosha." The price includes the use of communal showers and toilets, and a sumptuous buffet breakfast for which the place is known. The hut has mosquito netting but no bed. Air-conditioned cabins with toilets, showers and beds are available for $35 a night, which includes breakfasts for two or more people.

The food has to be trucked in from Cairo every day. Not much grows in the South Sinai except hashish.

We paid for everything in cash. Egyptian pounds, Israeli shekels and U.S. dollars were all accepted, and credit cards weren't. At one restaurant, we ran up a tab for several days. They repeatedly assured us that we could come back and pay another day. The night before we returned to Israel, we walked over to clear the debt. Mussa, in charge of the accounts, brought out a folio-sized ledger book in which was written every item we had ordered, down to the last falafel and soft drink. We shook hands after he accepted the money.

Our group stayed at Nuweiba, almost an hour's drive south of the Egypt-Israel border. We planned our trip with friends from Tel Aviv who were part of a different group at a nearby beach. One night we organized a dinner on the beach with about 25 Israelis taking part.

Unlike typical Sinai resorts where the workers are local Bedouin and the overseers are Egyptians from Cairo or other big cities, our beach had an all-Egyptian staff. A manager explained that this is because the local Bedouin work according to a different sense of time.

The Egyptian workers joined in soccer, volleyball and ping-pong with guests. These workers are mostly from one village and do not display the nasty anti-Israel attitudes of Egypt's intellectual and media elites, or the surliness of some of the white-uniformed officials who process tourists at the borders.

One guest expressed surprise that the cook who makes omelets and crepes at breakfast was not a Bedouin. Other workers started teasing the cook by calling him "The Bedouin." Later he offered facetiously to prepare his Israeli guest a good cup of Bedouin coffee.

It is evident that not a lot of love is lost between the Bedouin population of the Sinai and their johnny-come-lately Egyptian rulers. Egypt did not get control of the formerly Turkish-ruled area until after World War One. A recent report by the International Crisis Group criticizes the Cairo government as systematically favoring Egyptian settlers over the native Sinai Bedouin.

The Egyptian government rounded up hundreds of Bedouin after suicide bombings killed more than 30 people at the Taba Hilton hotel and on the Nuweiba coast the night of Oct. 7, 2004. More roundups followed bombings at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005 and at Dahab in 2006. The total of Bedouins arrested has been reported as high as 2,500.

No attacks have occurred in 2007, and Israelis have been returning to the Sinai.

Someone who may be in a position to know told us that the current calm in the South Sinai results from a deal which the government has made with the Bedouin tribes. According to this story, which lacks official confirmation, the Bedouin have committed themselves to inform on anything that smacks of terror activity, in return for which the Egyptian government will refrain from interfering with local drug trafficking.

The Sukkot visits of Israelis to the Sinai took place despite an Israel government warning to stay out of Egypt. Although we have had a peace treaty since 1979, Egypt ranks second only to Iraq among 20 Arab countries which our government's Counter Terrorism Bureau has declared as too dangerous for Israelis to enter.

News reports indicated that 40,000 Israelis visited the Sinai at Sukkot. As a percentage of Israel's population, this tourist traffic in a few days is more than the proportion of U.S. citizens who vacation in Jamaica or the Bahamas in an entire year.

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

URLs in this post:
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4635&l=1
http://www.nsc.gov.il/NSCWeb/TemplatesEnglish/CounterTerrorismActivitiesEN.aspx

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Holocaust memorial sirens = normality

Holocaust Remembrance Day is in progress at the moment. Yom HaShaoah, as it is called in Hebrew, is a unique part of Israeli life.

At mid-morning, sirens sound throughout the country for two minutes. When the sirens begin, people stop what they are doing and stand silently in memory of six million Jews murdered in the Nazi-led Holocaust. When the sirens stop, daily life picks up where it left off.

Today I was on Ben Yehuda Street when the sirens went off at 10 a.m. As usual, pedestrians halted on the sidewalk. Motorists got out of their cars and stood in the street.

While the sirens were still sounding, a big, expensive automobile drove past.

One seldom sees such a disrespectful act on this day in Tel Aviv. I won't try to comment further on it. Instead here is something I wrote in a diary three years ago.

=======
Holocaust remembrance day (Monday, April 19, 2004)


A few minutes after 9 a.m. the screen goes dark and the computer shuts down. The radios are suddenly silent, and the emergency lantern is lit. A power failure.

Going down into the stairwell to check the circuit-breakers, I encounter a downstairs neighbor. His apartment is also without electricity.

I telephone the electric company. A computer voice answers. As of 9 a.m., it says, no power outages are scheduled. The voices advises me to check that the problem isn't in my circuit breaker. Next, the voice asks me to key in my area code and telephone number. The computer does a quick lookup, and the voice tells me the problem is in Tel Aviv, on my street, in my building. It tells me which key to press if other apartments in the building lack power. I do it.

After I hang up, the thought starts occurring to me that something bigger may be wrong. Power outages where I live are rare, and the electric company usually restores service quickly. I listen to the 9:30 news update on a battery-powered radio which I keep in the apartment for emergencies. Nothing unusual on the radio. Just the usual tensions. The radio devotes its main discussion to the Holocaust, which is being remembered today in memorial ceremonies throughout the country.

Ten minutes later I hear a woman's voice, shouting: "Hello! Hello! Down there! Do you have electricity?"

From my kitchen windows, I see the shouting is coming from the penthouse of the building next door. This neighbor has never spoken to me before. I spoke to her husband once, a former city official, when he came in to vote where I was a poll-watcher in the last national elections and I had to verify that he was who he said he was. Apart from that, we have had no other contact. Now she is asking a question, and I hear anxiety in her tone.

"We don't have electricity in this building," I tell her. "I reported it a half-hour ago."

"Has there been an attack?" (We are speaking Hebrew, and she uses the word pih-goo-'ah, which denotes an act of sabotage and has come to connote terrorism.) "Like in the United States?" I understand this as an allusion to 9/11.

"There was nothing on the radio," I tell her.

I go out onto the front balcony. I see that a woman is cleaning the sliding glass doors in a third-floor apartment across the way. I want to believe that all is normal in Tel Aviv. But the thought that something sinister may be behind the power failure won't go away.

Then I hear the sirens.

It is 10 a.m., and the sirens are sounding around the country, as they do every year on Israel's Holocaust memorial day. The sirens reassure me. Everything is okay, I tell myself. If there had been an attack big enough to knock out electricity in Tel Aviv, the sirens wouldn't be working, would they? The reasoning is false, but this doesn't occur to me until later. At the moment, the woman across the way has stopped wiping the glass doors and is standing at semi-attention on a balcony, looking out at the street. I see no other sign of life.

After two minutes, the sirens stop. Immediately, an automobile noisily turns a corner into my street and two men in work clothes stride purposefully into a building entrance. They had been standing out of my line of sight during the sirens.

A few minutes later the electricity comes back on. On this memorial day that has become part of our life, all seems normal.

-- Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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Guest blogger: Eilat (II)

by Ernest Stock

I came back from a long weekend in Eilat the day before the explosive charge went off that killed three of its citizens. All reports emphasized that the tourist sites were a good distance away from the blast and were not affected. But there was a connection. The victims operated the bakery which supplied the fresh bread and rolls to the hotels for their guests' breakfast.

And there's reason to fear that Monday's suicide bomber shattered more than the storefront in a placid neighborhood at Israel's southern resort, and the lives of the men who worked in it.

What had brought me and my wife to Eilat that Friday morning was the Israel Chamber Orchestra's annual classical chamber music festival that took place at the Royal Beach Hotel. The place was fully booked, and its spacious banquet hall reverberated to exquisite sounds three times a day. In between concerts, musicians, soloists and music lovers mingled on the beach or at the poolside; the January sun was warm enough for the hardier ones among us to test the water.

Saturday evening's performance concluded with a dazzling rendition of Johann Strauss waltzes, which the Hungarian guest conductor, Gabor Hollerung, prefaced with some remarks. The waltzes, he said, expressed the composer's nostalgia for the dream that was late 19th century Vienna; he was already full of foreboding that it would not last. Then the conductor told the Israeli audience that for him Eilat was also a dream, a peaceable idyll in a strife-torn part of the world. It was his prayer that it would last for many more years to come. Then he mounted the podium.

Less than two days later, the bomber struck.

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Eilat: No longer the end of the world

Until today, Israel's southernmost city of Eilat seemed like a world apart. To Israelis, it was mainly a holiday getaway, or the last Jewish outpost on a trip to the Sinai. It had a nightclub called "The end of the world" and a street bearing the same name. It was a place separate from the tensions and dangers that can interfere with ordinary life elsewhere in the country.

What changed today is that a suicide bomber killed three people in Eilat. It was the Red Sea resort's first suicide bombing.

More than 99 percent of Israelis don't live in Eilat. Their homes are in the center and north of Israel, beyond the rugged hills and desert that separate Eilat from the rest of the country. To them, the bombing is a message that this remote city is no longer a refuge where you can get away from it all.

The fact that the bombing took place in a neighborhood away from Eilat's hotel district is not much comfort for the local tourist industry. Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog is rushing from one media outlet to another to assure the world that Eilat is a safe place to visit.

Only last week some Israelis received an e-mail alert noting that Rabbi Josef Shalom Eliashiv, a leading anti-Zionist rabbinic authority, has ruled that under Jewish law Eilat is not part of the Land of Israel. This ruling has implications for the observance of holy days and festivals in Eilat. A blogger who noted this offers the opinion today's attack was a divinely directed event, aided by terrorists, to remind us that Eilat "is just as much Israel as Jerusalem, Sderot, Tel Aviv, Haifa and everywhere else."

"Sometimes we need our enemies to remind us of who we are," he wrote.

Whether or not anyone's god was a partner in the murders today, three anti-Israel groups are claiming joint responsibility. One of these three, the Islamic Jihad, is said to have been planning this attack for the past year.

-- Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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